A Month in Puerto Rico – Part 2 – The First Day

We flew from Dal­las to San Juan, which clocked in at around 5 hours. The kids were great on the plane and Pey­ton slept part of the way there, which made it eas­ier on us, and because of that we also got to relax just a lit­tle bit before we hit the ground running.

Our plane left at 1 pm and with the time change to EST we landed at 7 pm. Got our bags (one brand new roller bag now with a bro­ken wheel – thanks AA union thugs for the del­i­cate treat­ment of our lug­gage!) and waited for Enter­prise to “pick us up”.

We had to wait about 20 min­utes, and with the humid­ity in San Juan it felt as if we waited for about 3 years (I started plan­ning Noah’s 9^th and 10^th birth­day par­ties dur­ing the interim). Enter­prise finally showed up, got us to our car and then we pulled out Mag­gie to get us to the Caribe Hilton.

Mag­gie is the nick­name we gave our GPS when we were in Italy last year. Of the many lan­guages that Mag­gie could speak we just thought that she sounded bet­ter speak­ing British Eng­lish (very Helen Mir­ren) rather than Mid­west­ern Amer­i­can. After we returned from Italy I set it to the Amer­i­can accent but it never sounded as cool.  So Mag­gie has remained British ever since, and, as usual, she got us where we needed to get.

The Caribe Hilton was lovely and the staff was help­ful, but by the time we arrived at the hotel it was pretty late and the kids were starv­ing, so we left the Hilton and Mag­gie guided us to the place we always seem to end up when we go on a trip – McDonald’s.

A note on order­ing at McDonald’s – we hadn’t real­ized how lit­tle Eng­lish would be spo­ken in Puerto Rico. We had fig­ured that since they are an Amer­i­can pro­tec­torate and our mil­i­tary has a pres­ence there that Eng­lish would be a lit­tle more preva­lent than we found it. As we soon learned most peo­ple at restau­rants or ser­vice indus­tries didn’t speak Eng­lish, but hotel peo­ple did. Great if you’re stay­ing at a hotel your entire stay, not great if you want a Happy Meal.

So Kim worked her way through order­ing at McDonald’s and the kids ate and every­one was happy and slept good that night. The next day was our sched­uled day to leave San Juan and get to Vieques, but first we had to go through the town of Fajardo and get to the ferry boat and then take that to Vieques.

The hell that is the Fajardo ferry boat ride next time.

A Month in Puerto Rico – Part 1 – Getting There

Kim and I had wanted to take the boys some­where else pretty cool, much like we did last sum­mer when we vaca­tioned in Italy for a month, and that was an amaz­ing vaca­tion, but this year we were a lit­tle more strapped for cash than last year, and trans-Atlantic tick­ets don’t come cheap. Brain­storm­ing ensued, and we even­tu­ally set­tled on Puerto Rico, and specif­i­cally the Puerto Rican islands of Vieques and Cule­bra. Puerto Rico has a very rich and in some cases, very sad, his­tory, but Christo­pher Colum­bus “dis­cov­ered” it in 1493 and its had its ups and downs ever since. The peo­ple are friendly and they use the dol­lar, which was also a plus.

Vieques and Cule­bra are both known for their beaches, and since Kim has been pin­ing for a beach-centric vaca­tion for years these places were per­fect. Plus the kids could play in the sand and swim in the rel­a­tively shal­low bays that made up many of the beaches of both islands.

After plan­ning, the vaca­tion broke down, time-wise, like this -

Week 1 – rent house in Vieques
Week 2 – condo on the main island of Puerto Rico, specif­i­cally the Loiza area
Week 3 – rent house in Culebra

Upon being told about this trip our par­ents, remem­ber­ing how much fun they had with us on our first Ital­ian trip, imme­di­ately vol­un­teered to go with us, for the first week of our trip.

I’ll get into that more later on.

We got our air­line tick­ets and started look­ing for lodg­ing while we were going to stay there. Hotels were pretty much out of the ques­tion, mainly because of the price point, but rent­ing a house/condominium was much more attrac­tive, and there were many to choose from. We set­tled on a nice house that would be able to sleep every­one the first week, a condo our sec­ond week and then a house for the four of us our last week. There are a cou­ple of options for trav­el­ling to Vieques and Cule­bra from the main island, but we set­tled on the cheap­est mode of trans­port – the ferry. $2 per adult and $1 per child for a 1½ hour trip one way. How couldn’t that be great, right?

We got every­thing packed into 2 duf­fel bags. All four of us had 5 changes of clothes, except Pey­ton, who’s been hav­ing a lot of pee­ing acci­dents lately. Every­thing else (scuba gear, books, Legos, etc.) plus the cloth­ing stuffed the bags full, but we were under the 50 lb. limit for each.

Fly­ing out was a breeze. Arriv­ing on Vieques was the hard part. More on that next time.

The Blue’s Clues Ability to Skidoo Could Have Astounding Military Applications

On almost every sin­gle episode of Blue’s Clues the human char­ac­ter (either Joe or Steve, or in the UK, Kevin) and the dog Blue “ski­doo” some­where, which is an amaz­ingly sim­ple form of tele­port­ing (trans­port­ing one­self from one place to another instantly), whether onto the sur­face of a globe or into the image on a pic­ture or a com­puter game or into a dio­rama, but it always involves our human pro­tag­o­nist and Blue being trans­ported to some­where else that moments ago they weren’t. It seems that other char­ac­ters on the show can also ski­doo, like Mr. Salt when he needs to go to the gro­cery store.

And ski­doo­ing is an impor­tant plot point to the show, because while on their ski­doo adven­tures the char­ac­ters have learn things and get to play and also may find a Blue’s Clue, whichis  great and all, but you wanna know who else could really use ski­doo­ing, espe­cially in these try­ing eco­nomic times?

The mil­i­tary. Could totally help them out.

One top of all of the bud­get cut­ting that could be done, get­ting rid of trans­port planes/ships that are no longer required, there’s the instan­ta­neous ben­e­fits of such a power. Does the pres­i­dent need to insert a highly skilled team of Navy SEALs into Tehran RIGHT NOW to take out Mah­moud Ahmadine­jad before he does some­thing else crazy? Done! Does South Korea want to finally fin­ish the Korean War once and for all and ski­doo into Pyongyang and take on the entire pop­u­lace of North Korea before they can com­pletely mobi­lize? It’s doable. Any­thing could be doable, as long as we have a pic­ture of where we need to put our mil­i­tary and our boys could remem­ber those easy to recite words — “Blue ski­doo, we can to.” Maybe end it with a “Sir, yes sir,” too.

If Robert Oppen­heimer had been work­ing on a secret ski­doo project instead of the Man­hat­tan Project our boys could have ended WWII early and got­ten to Berlin even before the Russ­ian army was think­ing about mov­ing west­ward from Stal­in­grad and we never would have had to invade North Africa or Italy or oblit­er­ate the Atlantic Wall. And LBJ could have won the Viet­nam War, prob­a­bly, if we’d been able to ski­doo into Hanoi and con­vince Ho Chi Minh that we really did want him to be in favor of democ­racy. He might even have decided to run for reelec­tion and change the course of history.

The major draw­back is that our peo­ple need a pic­ture on the other end of the ski­doo to return the same way. If they lose that picture…well, Mr. Sec­re­tary of Defense, order a new trans­port, since we got rid of them after the bud­get cuts allowed through ski­doo­ing. Enjoy hitch­hik­ing home, soldiers!

But we could get rid of Air Force One, also, just keep that lit­tle blue dog with the Pres­i­dent when­ever he goes on the road.

I think Blue would have to remain non-partisan though. Can’t be favor­ing one polit­i­cal party over another. He’d also have to have a code name.

Any­way, just an idea. A com­pletely cool idea, but just an idea.

“George is a Monkey, and He Can Do Things That You Can’t Do.”

My old­est son loves the Curi­ous George show on PBS. He laughs along with it and after­wards will tell me the intri­cate plot points that moved the show from point A to Z. He has his favorites and his not-so-favorites, but gen­er­ally he enjoys all of them, some­what, even if he doesn’t love all of them.

I think Noah likes the show because it reminds him of him­self. George is curi­ous, fairly bright, and always get­ting into sit­u­a­tions that he’d be bet­ter off not get­ting into. He’s smart and funny and cute, just like George, and he prob­a­bly smells bet­ter than George, even though TMWTYH bathes George regularly.

But the show does one thing that, the first time I heard it, I knew imme­di­ately what it meant when I heard it.

In between the two CG seg­ments of the show they will cut to kids tak­ing some les­son that George learned and put it to prac­ti­cal real-world use. Kids will make tele­scopes out of paper towel tubes or trace their shad­ows and watch the sun move and stuff like that, but they always say the same thing after each car­toon seg­ment: “George is a mon­key, and he can do things that you can’t do.”

Really? It’s really come to that? Telling kids that a mon­key might be able to climb up tele­phone poles and swing from power lines with­out being fried to a crisp? Or that he can knock down an entire dinosaur exhibit and put it back together before some sci­en­tists return? What is the mean­ing of this?

If you’re like me you already know what this is — the legal dis­claimer. Yes, George is a mon­key, and he can do things that you can’t do, like get kid­napped from his home­land in Africa and be brought to New York City (wait — some peo­ple a long time ago did do that), or go up in a rocket and repair a satel­lite (that’s been done too), or go ski­ing and res­cue a pig (I’m sure some­one has done those exact same things on a ski trip before).

Get real, PBS. Kids are just as smart and brave and crafty and mis­chie­vous as Curi­ous George, and while the dis­claimer could read “George is a mon­key, and he can do things that you shouldn’t do with­out ask­ing your par­ents first,” all of the things he does are in fact doable, but some lit­tle kid might get hurt or die doing what George does on your show.

When I was a kid there was a park near my house and it had great things to play with there. My favorite thing to do there was swing as high as I could on the swings and then jump off the swing at its high­est point, fly­ing prob­a­bly ten feet or so from a height of about nine to ten feet in the air. It was pretty thrilling to do, and I never broke my arm or ankle, and I could have, but it was fun. And Curi­ous George has fun too, but PBS, don’t tell kids they shouldn’t be adven­tur­ous. That some­times takes all the fun out of being a kid, and if that’s the case you might as well just call him Dullard George.

Elijah McCoy, Lewis Latimer and Granville Woods: African-American Inventors of the 19th Century — A Postscript

I got my paper back from Dr. Sul­li­van the other night. For some rea­son, as with every­thing in this class the past semes­ter, I’ve been a tad ner­vous when receiv­ing some­thing back that has been graded; it’s just a thing with me, I don’t know why I’m appre­hen­sive about it. And when I got my paper back I saw at the top the grade — a 75. Wow. C+. Awesome…for real.

No, it wasn’t awe­some. It was kinda sucky.

But then I remem­bered that Dr. Sul­li­van has kind of a screwy grad­ing scheme, 100 isn’t always the top score that you can get, so I asked some­one, “What was the top score you could get on this paper?” And they replied, “Seventy-five.”

So I got an A+, a 100%, or as I said, “a per­fect,” and it only took about two weeks and some furi­ous editing.

And he said -

Excel­lent paper. I like the way you pre­sented the three inven­tors in the con­text of a broader pic­ture of inven­tion — and its influ­ence within the African-American experience.

And I feel good about the paper. Very good.

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At last night's Meet the Teacher we learned that our children will be celebrating "Early American Celebration Day" on Nov. 23. # 2010/08/30

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