Mamapundit raises objection to a proposed Florida law grading parents as well as the kids. She comments thusly:

Parental involvement in children’s education is important, yes. However, the expectations of parents (read: mothers) in this regard have become increasingly burdensome in recent decades. When I was a third grader, my parents helped me with big projects, and they occasionally attended a school function. Today, however, “good” parents are expected to make involvement with their children’s school and classroom a kind of second job. I see many moms who volunteer at school several days per week. When they aren’t actually AT the school, they are selling candy bars and wrapping paper to raise money for the school. These moms know more about the minutiae of their kids’ classwork than the kids themselves, and they expect to spend hours each night sitting next to their children as they complete their homework. Prep for a school project – like the annual science fair – is a major family undertaking requiring intensive maternal involvement at every turn, as well as expensive and fancy supplies.

Sometimes it really does feel like we live in two countries. As often as I hear complaints about this, I also hear complaints from others (including educators) about how school is viewed as daycare and it’s the lack of parental involvement that is to blame for our education system’s failures. While some of that is passing the buck (educators have an incentive for parents to be blamed) and some of it is smug superiority (parents have an incentive to feel superior to other parents and none of them are going to think that they are the problem, it still rings true. Perhaps by sheer repetition.

Granju, though, is making the other argument. Never has more been expected of parents. And you hear these complaints, too. So-called “helicopter parents.” Ironically, these complaints also come from educators, though more of the upper level variety. Perhaps some of this is coming from parents that are resentful about being “judged” by having a job and therefore not being willing to work for the school district 40 hours a week, there is an element of truth to it.

These two ideas are not mutually exclusive. It’s more than possible to have one set of parents that won’t let go and another set of parents that simply doesn’t have time to care. It does make it, however, difficult to really approach from any sort of policy or public meme perspective. Talk about how parents should be more involved, and it’s those that are already involved that are most likely to listen. Talk about how parents need to be more laid back, and those same parents are not going to want to sacrifice any perceived edge that their involvement gives their kids while others may (to the extent that they’re listening) take it as a pat on the back for doing something right (if only by default and circumstance).

What this gets me thinking about, though, is the degree to which, if this continues, it will further create a disparity (along economic lines) among the youth. Maybe not, if the helicoptering actually doesn’t do any good. In the Sigmoid view of the world, though, it’s that sort of hyperinvolvement that gets kids to do the right things to get into the right college and avoid the abject failure that occurs with regard to anybody that doesn’t go to an Ivy League (or perhaps Public Ivy) institution. As with most things, while dramatically overstated and false in scope, it’s hard to deny there being some truth there. You may not have to go to an Ivy League of Public Ivy, but it sure is helpful to have a degree of direction and if you go to a commoner university to get into the honors college or have a realistic game plan to get into a good field upon graduation.

I am an example of how having on-guard parents can make a real difference. Academically, I was headed absolutely nowhere until my parents put their foot down and my father watched over me to make sure that I was going what I needed to be doing. Had I been raised by another set of parents that didn’t do that, it’s likely I would have ended up a college dropout and in a much worse situation than I ended up in. Mom would later put the foot down when I started making noise about going to trade school instead of college. Well, she wouldn’t have stopped me, but she urged me strongly not to and had the moral authority for me to listen. On the other hand, in an alternative Sigmoidian view, my experience is irrelevant because the entirety of my failure or success is due to my genes.

Anyhow, all of this is the long way around saying that if competition between upper class (and upper middle class) parents has never been greater and more and more is expected of the parents, while it becomes increasingly common among working class families and below to let the school districts (inadequately) raise their children, this portends bad things for the future of equality. I know that this is hardly an original thought, but considering all of the objective factors that make it harder for people from poor families to get ahead, the consideration of the additional layers added by hyperparents who believe that their livelihood exists in the success of their parents and that State College is death, is pretty depressing.

On the other hand, Granju’s kids attend Episcopal schools, which are both private and Episcopalian. It’s not hard to imagine that her experiences are not universal. I went to a very strong public high school, which followed a moderately strong middle school, which followed a pretty strong elementary school. Past grade school, the expectation of parental involvement was pretty slight.

In honor of my knocking around Colosse and Delosa for the past week or so…

I am writing this post from a mostly empty room in a mostly empty house. We still have a lot of cleaning that we need to do, but the truck is finally packed. Clancy and I have collectively decided that this is the last time that we pack ourselves. I think I decided that last time, though the 18 months in between then and now I kinda sorta forgot why it was so important. When we moved out of Estacado, a bit part of the problem was a simple lack of preparation on our part. This time, both to avoid the problems of last time and because we had so much time, we were much more organized.

So by the time the truck rolled around, we were going to be good to go, right? Well, no. It turned into this weird sort of thing where every time we finished half of what need to be done, there was still half to go. We did half of what was needed and there was still half to go. Then we did half of what was left, which should have left only a quarter to go… but there was still half to go. Then we did the next half and instead of their being an eighth or a quarter left… there was still a half to go. For everything we accomplished, something new entered the calculation. Well, it wasn’t actually that because we had a list. Rather, it was that the stuff that we (or at least I) calculated as taking up a bulk of the time went by pretty quickly but that which we thought would be more quick ended up taking a lot longer. Invariably, it was the early stuff that fell into the first category and the late stuff in the second. Getting everything (or most of everything) on to the truck took no time flat. Getting it organized, on the other hand, took forever and a week. Twice as long as it has ever taken in the past, due to a number of factors including a moving truck not nearly as conducive to stacking stuff as the last moving truck and the fatigue that came with having already done so much. Adding 20% to the stuff we had to move ended up adding far more than 20% to the loading time.

The hope was that since we were giving ourselves more time that we could be more relaxed about it. The result was not only that we were not more relaxed, but we were stressed for that much longer.

It’s a funny thing about leaving a place. I was not thrilled about leaving Estacado because I really liked it there and though I was looking forward to Cascadia I could have spent the rest of my life in Santomas or Almeida, Estacado. So I wasn’t in a hurry. Until I was so tired of the moving process that I just wanted to be gone, gone, gone. The same applies doubly this time around. There are so many things that I love about the Zaulem Sound area and that I’m going to miss in Callie and Arapaho. I believe that I will find new treasures and delights in Arapaho, but what’s going to be missing is a little more apparent and I know that it may take me a while to find it. But I am so tired of packing and moving and this whole damn process that I cannot wait to see the “Welcome to Cascadia” sign in the rearview mirror and when I see the “Welcome to Arapaho” sign I will indeed feel welcome.

We put off the leave date for Saturday so that we can do a little recuperating while cleaning. We also want to visit an area attraction that we never got to go to while we were living here. The drive should take two days or so. Since it falls on a weekend, it shouldn’t affect Hit Coffee much except that I will be unplugging the Internet at some point later today and it will take a little bit of time to get it up and running in Callie. I have been relying on Sheila and Web to keep HC flowing and will continue to do so for at least another week.

One of the things that Clancy and I decided we wanted to do while we were here is pick up some furniture for the move. It’s kind of risky and not necessarily cheap because we’re having to get extra moving truck space, but there is a wealth of stuff available here on Craigslist where there is no counterpart in Arapaho. The two big things we wanted were a recliner and a sofa. We’ve been hobbling along on a single recliner throughout our time in Cascadia when we left my old one behind in Estacado (may it rest in peace) as it fell apart.

This was particularly inconvenient because our other piece of living room furniture, the futon, did not survive the trip. I mean, it didn’t break into a million pieces, but the wood panel on the bottom broke and so the futon sagged somethin’ fierce and was not easy to get in and out of with any real ease. Well, I guess gravity assisted with the “in”, but since you land on the injured would, you have to live with the guilt that each time you sit down, you’re making it more difficult to get back up. It’s a tough burden, man.

A couple months ago, a neighbor was getting rid of his loveseat and was asking a woman who lived across the alley if she wanted it. I volunteered to take it on the spot. I shifted the living room around a bit and we had the futon which had been transferred to stuff receptical duty and a coach one step away from the graveyard. Clancy says that there is a minor smell on Not-Futon, though I can’t smell it. There are a couple of minor tears. The idea was that we would take the couch cover from The Futon and put it on Not-Futon. Still, though, it was not something we were going to want to display prominently in our future living room. Still loads better than The Futon.

So we set out on Craigslist for some new furniture and ran across a La-Z-Boy recliner. Now, LZBs are not the most comfortable of chairs, but they’re still not bad. Clancy’s recliner is a La-Z-Boy and we like it fair enough. The big thing, though, for packing purposes is that the top comes off and that makes transfer easy. And what do you know? We’re transferring stuff in a few days. Someday I’m going to want the recliner of my dreams, but it’ll do for a while yet.

Searching for a sofa was a little bit harder. The hangup was that we found the perfect sofa/love-seat early on and couldn’t get our minds off of it. Nothing else came close. It was more than we wanted to spend and it came with a love seat, but the biggest issue is that we would have to pick it up from Western Shores, a rich-person community a couple of hours from here. Setting aside my distinct lack of enthusiasm about driving for five hours a couple days before driving for a dozen, that made the vehicle rental situation much more difficult.

UHaul has those nice signs on their trucks that say $19.99 or somesuch, but in small print is “plus mileage.” In fact, with a 50-mile minimum and required insurance (unless you have a $10k credit line), there’s no way that you can get out of there paying less than $60. However, we were looking at far above and beyond the minimum mileage. And at 60c a mile, it was going to get really expensive, really quick. Budget was the same way except that they charged more for mileage. So we went with Enterprise.

Enterprise, it turns out, has a bizarre definition of the word “reservation” and “confirmation.” Whereas I interpret these words to mean “You are confirmed! You have a reservation for a truck with us!” what they mean is “Oh, we may or may not actually have the truck we confirmed with you. And if we don’t, well, that’s just tough luck” because they feel absolutely no obligation to live up to the reservation. They refused to upgrade us for the same price, which is what businesses typically do. They called around, but when they found one, it was too much trouble to have it transferred to their location. And it was more expensive than our reservation and they would not compensate the difference. So for the honor of using Enterprise (which was, prior to this week, my rental agency of choice) we would have to drive half an hour to pick it up and we would be paying $10 more a day than what we had reserved.

Sadly, this was still better than our alternatives. Enterprise charges a lot more by the day, but gives you unlimited in-state miles. Since we were going to be putting some serious miles on it, they could have charged us a lot more and still been cheaper than UHaul or Budget. That being said, getting an Enterprise through the website is a really bad idea. Apparently, they make reservations without regard to availability. This was a real sore point in the Paulsboro Enterprise, even though in this case they had what we wanted. It would have been a sore point at their Soundview Location, if they’d cared. I’ve noticed this before with Enterprise in that I will reserve one model and end up with another in the same class. As long as they have something, I don’t care about the particulars. This was different.

What Enterprise does not have is CD players in their vehicles. Clancy warned me about this, but it was still odd to see a car – any car – without CD players. I mean, how much could it possibly cost to have one installed and though most people won’t care, for some people it means spending hours in the car in between municipalities with no entertainment. Some people like me.

Last move, I kind of bugged my mother-in-law with my need to burn a bunch of audiobooks for the trip at the last minute. It was actually one of those things that was supposed to take only a few minutes but because of technical difficulties distracted me for a couple hours. This time she wasn’t around while I was scrambling to set up my audio entertainment. I took one of my old Pocket PCs and transferred the audio books to it and I’ll listen on bluetooth on the drive. I managed to mostly do this while resting in between taking boxes out, but man it would have been easier with a CD player.

So yesterday I picked up the recliner, which turned out to be closer than the one that we originally decided on. We had initially decided on one that was nearly the exact same as the one we had, but it was out in Enterprise City (no relation to the rental agency). Then one opened up at the next town over and that was more appealing. It was a different color, but I actually decided that I liked that because it wouldn’t look weird if they were two shades of faded.

Later today I’m driving out to Western Shores to pick up the couch and love seat. I’ll be wishing and hoping and praying that it will all fit into the cargo van. I think it will. I packed up most of my clothes yesterday, so I’m sort of slumming it today. The impression I get from these people and where they live and their wonderful couch that they’re getting rid of that these people have money and lots of it. I’m oddly self-conscious about it. Like I’m not worthy of the couch that they are bestowing upon me. Okay, not really. But sort of. No, not really. A little. I never claimed to be entirely rational.

I’ve mentioned before that we’re a bit unsure about what to do about our moving truck outside. When we moved in, the truck got a warning about “commercial trucks in a residential zone” or something to that effect. Man, I wish I’d kept that warning. Our landlord thinks that our neighbor dropped the dime on us. They apparently have a history. We were warned pretty thoroughly not to park in front of her house. Legally, there’s nothing you can do to prevent people from parking in front of your house, but as a courtesy we avoided it. Unfortunately, she has not been extending us the same courtesy with one of her cars perpetually parked in front of our house. Ordinarily, this isn’t a big deal because we park around back. But it does kind of rankle a bit. And it’ll inconvenience both us and our neighbor if we can’t park in front of our own place.

We’ve been debating how much trouble to go through to find out what kind of liability we face. I’ve asked around and as far as anybody knows, there shouldn’t be a problem. I mean, people have got to be able to move in, right? And it’s possible that the warning before was a mistake. It was a “commercial” vehicle in the strict sense, but not in the sense that you think of commercial vehicles. Further, it didn’t have any exterior markings to let an industrious officer know that it was a moving vehicle. It looks to all the world like a regular truck. So maybe it was a misunderstanding that we could have cleared up if we’d talked to the officer in question (we had the truck moved the day after the citation – we were done packing. We’ve seen a lot of UHauls around.

Anyway, so nobody was of any help in finding out who we would even need to contact because nobody had ever had this particular problem. So I was leaning towards letting it slide and hoping for the best. The main concern is that since it’ll be parked here over the weekend, we won’t be able to “hurry up” and get it out of here. It’s here from Friday to Monday come what may. As I was eating dinner tonight, I scanned over the document from the company we’ll be using and it said to contact local traffic enforcement if we needed a permit. That made perfect sense. It was our first lead.

So tomorrow I am headed down to the local PD office and I’m going to come out and ask them. It’s a bit risky because if they say something like “Oh, we don’t expect people to have to park a truck overnight to be able to move. There is no permit. You’ll just have to find another way to move” well, I will no longer be able to say “gosh, officer, I didn’t know” and they’ll probably know exactly where to look for any illegally parked trucks. Ideally, they’ll say that there is an exemption for moving trucks and I won’t have to get any sort of permit and I can explain to any officer that wants to ticket the vehicle what is going on. Next best is if they can sell me a permit off right there. Middle-case is that I’ll end up having to go down to the county courthouse or DMV or something.

As long as I get the permit, I really don’t care. I was previously going to set out fliers to our neighbors letting them know the truck was going to be coming and to apologize for the inconvenience. Sometimes, if you are just open and straight with people, they’ll be more forgiving. Especially when they know the truck is going to be gone soon. But I’d rather not have to rely on the kindness of neighbors. If need be, I’d like to be able to politely tell our complaining neighbor who parks in front of our house where she can shove it.

Update: No permit required, apparently. I spoke to a volunteer at the substation as well as an officer there. He said that as long as it’s a moving truck, there shouldn’t be a problem. He is with me that the problem before was that it was not clearly marked. There is some concern of people parking trailers and containers on the street and people living out of them (!!) and that was probably why it got some attention before. If I have any problem, he says that I should just contact the substation and explain the situation.

Part of me wishes that I could have gotten a permit. That would have made me bulletproof. Though the people I talked to didn’t know of any ordinance, an industrious neighbor may know something they don’t. So while I’m feeling pretty good about it now (and can tell anyone upset that I have contacted the police), a part of me takes back my previous suggestion that this would be ideal. Now, if nobody complains, then it will turn out to have been ideal all along. I’m probably just being paranoid here because of my tendency to explore worst-case scenarios, which in this case could be pretty bad. But it seems rather unlikely. So we’ll see. At least on the Callie end of things, they’ll be able to park it on the driveway.

I decided earlier this year that I am getting my parents wireless Internet for Christmas. Rather, I am giving them a wireless router and a laptop with which to use it. The laptop is a cheap one that I bought off eBay. I plan to be very clear about that when I give it to them. It’s a “starter laptop” to see if they end up using the wireless. If they do, then Dad can go out and buy a better one. Meanwhile, they’ll have a functional one.

It’s a risky gift because it’s not something that my parents have asked for and it’s not cheap by Truman gift-giving standards. Further, it’s one of those gifts that in order to really be worthwhile may require them spending as much (or more) money than I did. Now, the main reason I am getting the laptop is to sidestep the latter part. I don’t want to give them a wireless router and say “Okay, now go out and spend $500 to see this work!” But I can’t afford to spend $500 on the chance that they will like it. So instead I spent $200 on something that should suffice. Impossible to tell for sure because Mom’s computers have a tendency to slow down to a creeping halt for reasons I have not been able to put my finger on.

Anyway, so Clancy and I both brought our laptops to Shell Beach. The condos come with Internet and it’s good to stay connected. Dad commented, as I unfolded the laptop for the first time, about how he doesn’t like laptops. He doesn’t like the eraserhead or trackpad. He would all-around prefer to be at a desk. Of course, as he says this I get that sinking feeling that I am going to have to go back to the drawing board for Christmas. I hope beyond hope that as he uses my laptop over the week that he will at least get to see some of the convenience of a laptop and WiFi.

He did. A little too well, I’m afraid. It became extremely helpful to have Internet access on the trip to the point of nigh-indispensibility. About midweek he said that maybe he should give laptops a chance. Then, by the end of the week, he said that if Clancy and I ever decline to bring our laptops he may need to buy one just for Shell Beach.

So I’m crossing my fingers and hoping that he was just thinking aloud. Because he and I share in common a trait. Once we decide we’re going to do something, we do it immediately. He’s not likely to put off buying the thing until next summer. If he wants one for next summer, he’ll buy it next month. Sort of like how I bought his Christmas gift in March. So I’ll have to see if there’s anything I can do to talk him out of buying a laptop.

Of course, if he does end up getting a laptop, that must means that I will have another one hanging around the house. It’s a long story, but we have quite a few now. There is the one that Clancy had before we got married. It’s functional, if not useful. There’s the one I had at the time which broke down about a year ago. Each were replaced by laptops that we’re using now. Then when I bought Dad’s, I happened to win two bids at the same time and got two more laptops. Then, by shuffling some parts around, I got the laptop that died a year ago working again.

So between the two of us we have five laptops. Not counting Dad’s. It wouldn’t kill me to have a sixth. Clancy might, though.

There was a planned power outage on the block yesterday. I forgot to turn all the computers off and have apparently paid a pretty hefty price. Namely, it seems that my USB ports have gone all screwy. On all three of my desktops.

On one computer, the simply plugging in of a USB device causes the device to reboot.

On the second computer, USB devices don’t work. It thinks that there are USB devices that are not plugged in. It sends a message every few minutes telling me that a device’s drivers did not install correctly and that I may have difficulty using my device. Further, it registers a third ROM device that is not actually present. I don’t know if that’s a USB problem, but it strikes me as being possibly related (if it thinks that the non-existent USB drive is a CD-ROM).

On the third computer, plugging in a USB device disables the mouse and keyboard.

Which actually brings me to a fourth point. Not all USB is dysfunctional, cause the KVM switch is USB and I’ve not had any problems there (except on the third computer when I plug in an external drive. And a fifth point, a USB device that was plugged into a laptop has stopped working altogether.

I suspect that this would have been avoided if I’d remembered to turn my computers off or if I’d had a better surge protector or a UPS. Taking all of those mistakes as a given, does anyone else know how I can right these wrongs? Are the USB ports permanently damaged on all three computers? Holy cow would that generate a figurative obnoxious odor.

Awake.

On our way to the bus stop.

Arrive at the bus stop and find the parking garage nearly empty. We wish that we had thought of the bus yesterday. The thought had actually crossed my mind after my successful adventure on the bus on the way home from the airport on Tuesday, but I figured that the chances that I could convince Clancy to haul our heavy luggage from one place of transport to another were pretty slim. On my way back from Shaston, I didn’t have the heavy luggage. She would have said that taking the bus would be completely unnecessary and really I couldn’t have disagreed with that. Neither of us saw the parking thing coming. If I had thought about parking I would almost certainly would have thought that maybe the main garage would be full, but it wouldn’t even occur to me that all of the private lots would as well. The bus was completely unnecessary.

We discover that the parking lot I parked in was only for commuters and the private lot next door was by-day only. I know that there is parking around here somewhere, but at this point I figure that the safest place to park is actually the Amtrak lot down the road. There are signs that it’s for Amtrak people only, but my experience on the Shaston trip was that they really didn’t seem to keep track of it. So I set Clancy up at the stop, drove down the road, and walked back. The bus was arriving as I was driving away. We’d catch the next one.

The next bus arrives on schedule. We lug our stuff aboard.

This time we’re three hours early, but that works out because we have a connecting flight in Los Puertos, California, that’s through a different airline. This gives us the opportunity to wait in the Transcontinental Airlines line after getting our bags set up at our primary airline, Northern Airways. Unfortunately, Trancontinental won’t give us our seat numbers. Both the Trancontinental and Northern Airways reps say that there should be someone from Transcontinental waiting at our gate to take care of us. That seemed unlikely, though. At first this is a mild irritation, but as the morning would wear on it would become fear-inducing as the reality of the situation set in: They overbooked.

Airborne.

We arrive in Los Puertos and there is nobody waiting at our gate for us. When we got to the Transcontinental Airlines ticket counter, Clancy is curtly told that they were taking passengers on the late-running 9am flight and not our 12:05 one. They’d be concerning themselves with that at 10:00 or so, they tell us.

Nobody is at the kiosk. We know that there are absolutely no more flights out of Los Puertos today and that if we miss this one, we’re either going to have to connect somewhere else (with more risks) or we’re spending Christmas night in California. Clancy decides that she’s just going to stand at the counter until someone shows up and she takes her book with her.

A woman shows up and Clancy tries to flag her down, but she shrugs it off saying vaguely that the flight is overbooked but that she is sure that it will all work out. At this point, I expect nothing to work out. She’s gone as fast as she arrives. Things are not looking good. If they can’t get us on this flight, I decide that I am going to put my foot down and we are going back to Cascadia.

The curt guy from before makes a reappearance. Perhaps sensing Clancy’s anxiety, he helps her out immediately. We’ve got seats. All is right with the world.

Airborne.

Land. Get our luggage. My father is waiting for us at the airport. That’s one form of transportation that we have no reason whatsoever to doubt. That’s a really nice feeling.

We’re eating Christmas dinner.

The subject of Parental Notification and Parental Consent laws came up on the sadly defunct Bobvis blog. I don’t want to get into the wisdom of such laws in this post, but for context purposes let me just say that I am conflicted on the matter.

As readers of Hit Coffee know, I am morally uncomfortable with the vast majority of abortions performed. It’s not my desire to defend that position here, but it’s important to note that for the sake of this post. This isn’t about what the law should be (either in regards to abortion or more specifically parental notification/consent laws), rather how I approach the issue morally and more importantly how I would respond should I have a daughter that becomes pregnant. If you think I am wrong to be morally uncomfortable with it, please don’t waste your time or mine trying to convince me that I am wrong in this venue just as I will not try to convince you that you are wrong. It’s a value judgment.

In the comment section of the Bobvis post, I said:

As a future parent, I would of course prefer that any daughter (or son, of course) not engage in risky sexual behavior. However, even independent of that I would not want my daughter having an abortion simply to cover up the fact that she had done so. I’m conflicted on parental notification laws, but I don’t think that it’s entirely based on the motives {of wanting to control my daughter’s sexual behavior}.

The thing is, if I had a daughter that was pregnant and intended to have an abortion, I don’t think that I would want to be notified. A part of me thinks that if I could convince her not to, I would want that opportunity. I would want to be able to tell her that we would work with her so that she could go to college and establish herself. We’d (informally or formally) adopt the kid as our own if that would change her mind or help her place the child for adoption with an agency. I would want her to know that while I may be disappointed in what led up to the pregnancy that I understand that things happen and how we respond to the consequences of our mistakes says as much about us as the mistakes themselves.

The other part of me, however, fears that it would tear our family apart if she declined to go along. If the law were notification, it would be excruciating to try to talk her into having the baby and not being able to do so. She would know how vehemently I disapprove of her decision and I would know that she did something that I have strong moral objections to. It gets more difficult with parental consent laws because I would have a lot of difficulty consenting to it. If her mental health were obviously on the line, I would probably not drag her to court over the issue and so would consent. But such things are extremely difficult to judge. She may overestimate the mental health effects of having the baby or I might underestimate it. If I did not provide consent and she got a judicial bypass (most of which are granted, from what I understand), it could cause a permanent cut that’s never entirely sewn up.

In this case, I have to wonder if ignorance is bliss. If I found out five years later that she’d had an abortion five years before, I think that it might be easier for me to handle. This is perhaps a very selfish approach if it relies too much on the notion of how clean or dirty my hands are, though also a factor (I’d like to think a bigger one) would be that five years down the line she would be a different person and it would all be in the past. It’s sort of analogous to the fact that I hate losing in sports and games a lot more than I mind having lost. I can deal with bad things having happened than watching them unfold right before me.

It’s only somewhat likely that I would be a part of this decision anyway. Our daughter would have two parents. She will know what my views are on abortion and though my wife’s views are almost the same, I still suspect that it would be easier for her to talk to her mother than me. I’m tempted to tell Clancy that should the day ever come when our daughter comes to her seeking help with an abortion that she not even tell me about it until it’s all in the past (if then). I’m not sold on the idea because I feel that’s unfairly placing too much burden on her, letting her deal with the muck so that I can steer my conscience clear of the tough decisions that she had to make.

Statistically, our daughter is not likely to get pregnant in any event. We will promote safe sex, for one thing, and she will get the lecture well before its time. We don’t intend to make discussions of sex too taboo, though obviously we will not want any salacious details. It’s also the case that neither Clancy nor I are particularly sexually adventurous. Promiscuity doesn’t run deeply in either of our families. It’s not in our nature. Neither, for that matter, is having access to a lot of sexual partners. The biggest threat would likely be a long-term relationship like the one that I had with Julie wherein contraception is not applied consistently or it fails when applied as it sometimes does. But risks are risks and it’s not at all unforseeable that the above won’t be an issue. If we do have a child that does become pregnant, they are probably more likely to be of the “pro-choice” mindset than the “pro-life” one regardless of the ideals that we profess to. I’m not sure about Clancy, but I was myself pretty strongly pro-choice when I was young. They will likely be college-minded and at least somewhat career-minded (they will have their mother to look up to, after all). So if a pregnancy does occur, we are more likely than the average family to have a lot of conflict over it.

In any event, I really hope that it never does come up. Failing that, at least a part of me hopes that I don’t know about it until it’s old news.

A few days ago Clancy came up and said, “Will, we’ve got to do something about the garage. It smells awful in there.”

To which I replied, with not an ounce of sarcasm, “Hot damn! That’s great!” and rushed down there in excitement.

Clancy did not know that I was running a little experiment and the smell in the garage confirmed a relatively best-case scenario. As I mentioned in the original DAMN That Odor post:

Oddly enough, my car has begun to start smelling, too. Clancy noticed it first, but I noticed it almost immediately after. It’s something recent. She thinks it smells like a pee bottle. She really hates that I ever do that and is kind of paranoid about it. Just to be sure I cleaned out the car and there really wasn’t much of anything in the way of likely culprits inside of it. Doesn’t seem to be tied to the air conditioner, though.

With time, that smell only got worse and worse and I was sort of able to pinpoint the smell to somewhere in the trunk. There was a jug of fake fuel or anti-freeze or fertilizer or something (the label came off) and I had hoped that was it. Taking it out seemed to do no good, though. The rest of the contents of the trunk seemed pretty straightforward: Some CDs, a few comic books, roadmaps and atlases, some dominoes, and some gift that was directed to Clancy’s mother that somehow ended up in my car trunk. I thought maybe it was the gift, but it was from a place that didn’t do anything food or perishable. So my fear was that it was the Mystery Bottle and that some had spilled into the trunk and that it was going to smell this way for the rest of the car’s natural life.

So I decided to take the contents of the trunk and put it all in the garage. After a day or two, either the car would still smell and the garage would be fine or the other way around. Whatever the case, the odor was something that I was going to have to take care of before I swapped out cars with my father.

So the garage stunk and that meant that my car was not terminally stinky. Unfortunately, as with the trunk, it was really difficult to isolate the smell. I could tell that it was coming from the trunk, but I could not smell any particular item and notice that it smelled stronger than the other items. That’s what made me think that maybe something had spilled. And so it was in the garage. By process of elimination, I determined that it had to be either the domino can or the mother-in-law’s gift. The domino can contained… dominoes. So we said “screw it” and opened the gift addressed to Clancy’s Mom, which contained… gravy.

Extremely pungent gravy. Noxious gravy. Gravy that, as near as we can figure, has probably been in there since last Thanksgiving. The smell was hard to pin-point because it was leaking out of the sealed box. Even when I held the thing in my hands and sniffed through the cracks I wasn’t sure. It was only when it was opened and the garage exploded with foul that it was settled. The sealed box was likely something that the mother-in-law had simply re-purposed and was strangely thorough about repackaging tightly.

So the car is fixed. Now… if only I could figure out what to do about the damn smelly garage.