Scrabble

Tonight goes down in our history book - we scored 1,095 in Scrabble. That beats our previous high of 1,061 set in 2007. Lois laid all her letters down in one turn 3 times (waterer, boasted and louting) and I did it twice (ignores and echoing). We only cheated a little. The word te on the right hand side is not in the Scrabble dictionary but it is in the chromatic scale: do, ti, te, la, le etc. We use those "words" fairly frequently. Obviously, Merriam-Webster, the publisher of the Official Scrabble dictionary, doesn't know the English language as well as we do :)
We also play with the rule that allows us to pick up the blank if we have the letter it stands for so we use the blanks multiple times in a game which greatly increases the odds of being able to lay them all down at once. In all 5 of the times we laid them all down at once, we used a blank. The 8 letter word quintals across the top was done in 4 turns: quint, quinta, quintal and quintals. All of those are in the official Scrabble dictionary. With the triple word score going across and the double letter score going down, it allowed us to score the q nine times.
I called Grammy with the news tonight which allowed me to credit her and Pappy for the way we play. Although Pappy would not have had the patience for the time we take to maximize our scores. Grammy and Pappy also didn't play quite as cooperatively as we do. I reminisced with her about the expression Pappy would get on his face when he had one or two tiles left in his hand. As I remember, it was the one time in the game when they got a bit competitive to see if they could stick the other person with a few points.

Movie reviews

Sometimes in the summer we go a month without watching a movie but we watched three in the last week. Each one was in a completely different genre. Starting last Sunday we watched Wit. It's a story of a 48 year old woman fighting a losing battle with ovarian cancer. It didn't put a syrupy coating on what it's like to live the last days of one's life in chemo treatment. I loved the honesty of the movie and would highly recommend it if you don't have to have every story turn out right. It might also help you think about writing advance directives.

Last night we watched City Island. A movie about a New York family where each member is holding some secret from the others and the total mess it's making of their lives. It's comedy. Don't look for any transcendent truths - just some good laughs and a feel good redemptive ending. Totally the other end of the spectrum from Wit.

Tonight we watched No Impact Man. A documentary about a couple in New York who along with their 1.5 year old(?) daughter, decide to live a year attempting to make no impact on the environment. They progress into parts of it but at points are without electricity, toilet paper, garbage production, any kind of fossil fuel burning transportation and a host of other "necessities". All food they eat has to be grown within 250 miles of New York. At the end of it they've lived so much better that they decide to only go part way back to their old ways.

So there you go. The first movie reviews you've ever gotten on this blog and probably the last.

Yesterday I decided it was time to clean up the cupboard where my stereo from 1971 is stored. As I recall I paid in the range of $500 for the system. Taking inflation into account that's like spending $2250 for a stereo system now which seems extravagant and unreasonable to me. The amplifier, tuner and turntable are still intact but what's left of the speakers are above the garage. The woofers have long since gone the way of all flesh.

Some years afterward I bought an 8-track player/recorder to go with it and then when 8-track tapes went extinct, I bought a nice cassette player but it quit and they too have pretty much disappeared. So the question is, should be buy a CD player to play music through this system or
shall we forgo hardware based music media entirely and skip directly to some kind of mp3 player?

Back to the system, I knew the amplifier was working because Jonathan uses it to play his music over the built-in speakers this house has. I tried getting the tuner to work but without success. However I got the turntable to work reasonably well and yesterday I listened to the Mitzelfelt Chorale album titled "Anthems of Praise and Rejoicing"* that I haven't heard for probably 30 years. For you sibs, it's the one with "O Divine Redeemer", "God So Loved the World" and other classics. I've loved this set for a long time. I wondered why Mom and Dad might have bought this album because none of the hymns are ones we would have known from church. I asked Mom this morning not expecting her to remember but she thought maybe it came with that set of used records Dad bought at the neighbor's sale in Cochranville.

Now I'm listening to the Mennonite Hour doing such numbers as "To Love someone more dearly everyday..." and songs by a men's quartet that includes Earl Maust who was Dennis Maust's father.

Eldon, I have one of your albums in my possession by New Creation called "The Folk Sound of Freedom".

*If you click on this link you'll see a picture of the album cover that I just uploaded. I joined Discog just so I could upload that picture.

Abby

A Glimpse of Abby’s First Two Years on This Good Earth

For those of you that don't read Abby's blog, here's the guest post I did for her. Next week I plan to do a similar post about Tim.

I don’t think any of you regular readers of this blog met Abby until we moved to Indiana when Abby was 10 and most of you didn’t meet her until years later. So when Abby invited me to do a “guest” blog I couldn’t think of a better thing to do than to give you a small window into the first 2 years of her life.

First a caveat. On this blog you are used to seeing high quality photos taken by Abby’s fine digital camera. These pictures were taken by a $24.95 Kodak 110 pocket camera. We were not impoverished but chose to spend our money on other things. At least it was convenient in that it fit nicely in Mom’s purse. So don’t try to enlarge the pictures – they only get worse.

This first picture is unfortunately undated but I’m guessing late September 1983. You can tell Abby is going to arrive a fully developed infant. It’s a profile of her mother taken from the dining room looking out the back door at our house on Blue Rock road.

Abby was born a few days later with a fine crop of reddish-copper hair. At her birth the obstetrician said “just because she arrived at 9lb 15oz doesn’t mean she’s going to be a 300 lb linebacker.” To which the attending nurse said “only if she wants to be”.

Here’s some of Grandma Hess’s diary the day of your birth.

“John called about 4 o’clock. I went over and they left for the hospital about 5 o’clock. Timothy woke very happy and was an excellent little boy. We went to Sewing Circle. I took casseroles. John called at church when we were getting ready to leave. Abigail Marie arrived about 12:18 noon. She weighed 9 lb. 15 oz. She has reddish hair.”

Then this entry the next day:

“Papa and I went in to see Lois and Abigail. She surely is a nice bright baby.”

At 6 months pulling Daddy’s beard. Look at those curls!

Two year old Abby found her calling to be a librarian early.

Timothy

Having had the fun of featuring Abby and Jonathan's arrival on planet earth, now it's time to feature Tim.

Here's Lois and Sandi Harnish comparing their sizes on April 13, 1981.

Three weeks later Saturday May 2 we went to the hospital with a lot of anticipation and trepidation. Things didn't move very fast so we got to play several games of Scrabble and even watched the Kentucky Derby before things finally started making more progress with the help of pitocin. Finally after an utterly exhausting night (for Lois) on Monday May 4, 1981 Timothy John Nafziger arrived a healthy 9 lb 3 oz. It was a long delivery and I remember checking the sizes of all the other babies in the maternity ward and finding just one heavier than him but none with as big a head. Here he is arriving home.

There's just these short entries from Grandma Hess's diary:
May 4 Timothy John Nafziger arrived this morning at 4:13 AM.... Papa and I went in to see John and Lois and Timothy.

Here's a professional picture at 3 months all bright-eyed with the determined look of a future activist-peacemaker.

And lastly, here's with Pappy and Grammy at 4 months. Unfortunately Grammy has her eyes closed but remember this was before the days you could snap 10 pictures and pick the one where everyone looks their best.

Jonathan

This week Abby invited me to do a guest blog in her second annual joining of National Blog Posting Month. So I did one for her to post sometime this month about her arrival here on this good earth. I thought her regular readers would be more interested in that than some random musing or political rant of mine. I'm not going to upstage her by posting what I wrote here but I had so much fun with it I decided to do one for Jonathan. It's also appropriate given that he just celebrated his 25th birthday.

So here he is at 2 days old. Lots of people rave about how cute babies are but I remember Pappy saying something like "they all look the same to me." I'd have to say that although cute for a baby, I'm glad Jonathan didn't keep this face into adult hood.

I'm pretty sure that at about one month when this photo was taken he was in deep thought. Perhaps it was about Schrödinger's cat or maybe General Relativity.

Here's some snippets from Grandma Hess's diary around the time of Jonathan's birth.

October 29: Jonathan Ryan arrived by way of C section at 12:39. Lois needed 2 pt. of blood. She was able to be in the same room as Esther Rausch who also had a C section. In the evening I went with John and we took the children in to see mommy. Lois is not very strong. We could see the baby through the window.

Nov 2: ...We then visited Lois and I was able to hold Jonathan.

Sunday Nov 3: We brought Timothy and Abigail along home while John went in to the hospital and took Lois and Jonathan home.

An accomplishment

This week I did something I that has been on my to do list for a long time - probably 12 years or so. I learned something called drown proofing.
First a bit of background:
Most times in the late fall and early winter I'm trying hard to rack up miles on my bike to meet my goal of always beating my prior year's bike mileage. This year with Eldon and my ride to PA, I'm going to pretty easily beat last year's 4000 miles and I don't want to get too much more than 4000 or I'll make it really hard for myself in 2011. Still I wanted to do some exercising so I decided to try to learn so swim. I used part of a $25 Border gift certificate to buy a book called Total Immersion.
I have two problems that make it hard for me to swim. The first is that I don't have a lot of fat which makes me float low in the water. Then the second and more significant problem is that when I flutter kick, I go backwards. Not being interested in adjusting my stroke to also go backwards so we're at least working together, I thought the kick would be the first thing to work on. Now you have to understand that the Rec Fitness Center where I'm trying to learn early in the early morning is populated by people doing laps at about 20 mph and a life guard that probably is 40 years younger than me and looks fascinated by this old codger thrashing around. I'd much rather do this in private somewhere.

Then in addition there's the unfixable problem of being 58 and having Nafziger-Kennel genes which I must have some kind of mutation that prevents being good at any sport. (Remember that broken nose resulting from sprinting toward an easy line drive coming straight at me at a Hess family ball game and my brain miscalculating the trajectory by about an inch so the ball came over the top of my glove?)

So after a couple frustrating attempts and not making much progress, I remembered this ancient goal I had to just learn to stay afloat for 20 minutes. It's also called a dead man's float. The proper technique is supposedly to lay face down in the water and every 10 seconds or so get upright enough to gasp for some air and go back to floating. From the drown proofing website, I learned to just stay upright and every 10 seconds or so push my arms down to my side and while my mouth is out of the water to a quick exhale, and fresh gulp of new air and relax back into the water for the next one. It worked! I stayed afloat for about 25 minutes in about 5 feet of water. Next I want to try it in the deep end.