Sometime last year my sister sent us a link to Dar La Teta Es Dar Vida - roughly translated as "Breasts are Life" - a public service announcement for breastfeeding from Puerto Rico. My daughter loves (loves, LOVES) the video and we love the song Duerme Negrito used in the video, which got me finding out who sang the song, a woman named Mercedes Sosa who has an amazing history. Mercedes Sosa passed away today, she'll be missed.

On the one hand, this article is an examination of a teaching method...on the other, it's an argument for live-roleplaying games for learning:

Can the Right Kinds of Play Teach Self-Control?

iPhones don't do video recording, unless you hack them. Having a one year old who is getting into walking and talking, I want, no, I •need• that feature to satisfy far-flung family, or at least satisfy my obsessive need to document each new moment (and then have backups, both on and off-site).

So, last night I ran QuickPwn and installed Cycorder and now my needs are satisfied. At one point I had a terminal window up on my laptop while running SSH into the phone, and was struck by some weird irony of passing time:

Twenty years ago I was using a VT-100 dumb terminal to connect to a vastly more powerful DEC-20 miniframe, last night I was using a terminal emulator on my laptop that is thousands of times more powerful than that DEC-20, to run software on my •phone•, itself probably dozens of times more powerful than that DEC-20.

What will I be doing 20 years from now that has seeds in something I'm doing today?

Antara & Delilah wrote this song seven years ago now.

There's first nursing, first pee, first turning over, first crawl, first solid food, and now first (organic wheat-free) Cheerios strewn all over the back seat of the car. The best part is that I did the spilling, not the girl, while trying to clean up said car.

Lilyana was digging through some old boardgames and managed to open up the box for Boggle. Deliliah and I both thought "Look, the letters spell CHOKE HAZARD!"

I know I would've had waay too much fun with this:

Plastic welder toy for kids

testing

I've got a new toy/personal productivity device/fetish object - an iPhone. My brother-in-law James decided to celebrate his new job by getting the iPhone 3G, so Friday morning we got in line at 5:30am at the local AT&T store. 15 minutes after the store opened, James walked out with his new fetish object and gave me his old one. I have the best brother-in-law in the world! My other BIL Jon got up and brought us breakfast in line, so he's right up there as well.

It's a good thing Delilah and Lilyana were away because for the next 36 hours or so I was just playing with my new toy - I mean, configuring this very useful device to meet the needs of my business, right?

I got interviewed last week for an article on "staycations" that appeared in today's Portland Press Herald. I'm excited to get the publicity and maybe some new clients!

For the last several days I've been hitting the reload button on fire news in California. Between 2003 and 2005 I lived for a year at Esalen Institute in Big Sur, and then after that lived in Santa Barbara for almost two years, and visited both most recently back in April, so Lilyana could meet her west coast extended family.

Here we are, getting off the plane in Santa Barbara - the hillside on the left of the picture is burning now:

The Gap Fire in Santa Barbara has burned almost 10 square miles and nobody knows when it's going to be contained.

And in Big Sur, the hillside behind us in this picture is burning now, and firefighters are working to prevent the fire jumping Highway 1 and burning the spot where we're standing:

The Basin Complex Fire in Big Sur has burned over 100 square miles, and the firefighters don't think they'll have that one contained until July 30th.

I've got friends in both places under evacuation orders who have had to leave their homes, friends who are staying to fight the fires if they do come close, and friends who are actively fighting fire now. My prayers are with them.

In the last couple of weeks, the three major electronic devices in my life have all developed problems - my camera is in the shop, my laptop mysteriously loses knowledge of the external speakers after watching Quicktime movies, and yesterday my cellphone's keypad stopped working. I checked, and yes, Mercury is currently in retrograde, which according to some folks is a likely explanation for all that...

I'm teaching kinesiology & myology (muscles & the movements they make) these days and in Lilyana I have this incredible little being who is developing muscle mass and learning how to use muscles right before my eyes. Through her, I'm developing more and more appreciation for the miracle that we are able to do so much in the world (stand up, sit down, crawl, walk, run, pick up dust bunnies, pick our noses, fling food across the table, etc.) without even thinking about it, and for how *much* we had to grow and learn to get to that point.

My students sometimes get frustrated when they are palpating and can't find a given bony landmark or muscle their first or second time trying, and when they do I have these images in my head of Lilyana trying to pull herself up for the Nth time, or practicing her pincer grasp, or whatever new move she's currently mastering, and I want to take those images out of my head and display them on the wall in front of the student and say, "Look at that, you had to do all that, and see how far you've come since then! You learned how to *walk*, after that, anything else is peanuts!"

My brother-in-law (he of the 9 waffle irons) once again wowed out taste buds and bellies with awesome waffles this morning. Some quotes from my clients today: "That was the best massage I've ever had," "Oh, I should've married a massage therapist," and "You were born to do this." My daughter has decided crawling isn't enough and has gone vertical and started cruising for real, the change from yesterday to today is astounding. Watched Lilyana's 73 yro Granny get down and crawl around on the floor with her, laughing delightedly. Ate a fresh rhubarb cobbler with meringue top that Granny made. Ate more cobbler. And Delilah had a gig tonight, I did the sound, provided support, and fell in love with her all over again. If things ever do start going badly between us, all she'll have to do is pull out her guitar and start singing and whatever problems I'm creating will just vanish. I've had a bit of a headache and occasional bits of wooziness all day, I'm blaming that on the lymphatic drainage session I volunteered for at school on Thursday, I've felt off-kilter ever since. I still spent too much time reading political & tech blogs. I still worry about getting all the bills paid. And the smell of the just-blooming lilacs on my walk to and from the office is still in my nose.

A full day, a long day, and a very good day.

Something that I didn't know I'd enjoy so much about having a family bed is waking up next to my daughter. Usually I'm awake before she is, and I get a few minutes or more to just stare at her small, still form and breathe her presence in. We get to greet each other when she wakes, and most every morning she wakes with a big grin on her face, one that wipes away whatever worries I've managed to accumulate about the coming day.

As each morning comes and we have that bit of time together, we get more and more bonded with each other. Lilyana has become very attached to her mother, and yesterday morning we passed a milestone in her attachment to me. I had to leave for a long day of work and as I did Lilyana started crying for me, the same way she's been doing for mommy the last month and a bit. My own heart was already breaking from leaving her, and breaking for her pain, and one little part was cheering "YES!" and grinning at being so wanted and desired by her.

My nephew Wyatt has just started losing his teeth, and is making up stories and wanting stories about what happens to all those teeth that all the Tooth Fairies collect (Wyatt "...has decided that there are eight Tooth Fairies in all. One just wouldn't be able to keep up with the demand. So there are four for the United States and they're all female, and four males for the rest of the world.").

Here's what I wrote:

When our teeth fall out, wherever they go, they are the seeds of dreams for our lives. They might be really big dreams like creating a world where everyone gets all the love they need and gets to give as much love as they can give, or smaller dreams like getting a hug when we need one or ice cream for dessert tonight. They might be fragile dreams that need a lot of watering and care, or big loud dreams that come in and grab everyone's attention so much that we can't think of anything else. Or these teeth that are seeds of dreams might become dreams within dreams within dreams, that lead to whole lifetimes of exploration, discovery, and adventure. What kiknds of dreams have your teeth become?

Lilyana's baby superpower seems to involve waste management. She can unerringly find vacuum cleaners and recycling bins no matter where we go.