Ante Penny

In which our Hero is in for a pound as the bringer of doom

To the notes on the previous entry, the Mouse and Moonbeam are daughters in my heart. Willow and a few others too. I don’t need an alternate universe for that to be true. And I like to think I’ve contributed to them growing up feeling loved and accepted. Sadly it leaves me no credit for how amazing they’ve turned out, which I respectfully and rightfully cede to the hard work of their parents.

I wish I knew the secret. Trying to imagine raising them as my own makes me very aware that our relationship would be very different. Not that I’d love them an iota less, but I know that the need to discipline and parent would enforce a sort of distance, however small. Which makes me wish that any kids I have could have a me-like figure in their lives to be more fun and carefree and silly while still being someone I could trust them with. I’m stumped for who that could be.

I’m sure that whoever it was would emerge though. I think it’s a fairly common pattern. I had a friend of my parents as a virtual grandmother, and a few of my parent’s siblings to worship. (Or, in the Mouse’s mom’s case, to also lovingly annoy. heh)

My good fortune is just in them choosing me to be their person. In a family the size of ours, they have not lacked for selection.

Still. Knowing they love me and *seeing* it are two different things.

Speaking of love, I got two emails from Willow, after I sent her instructions to help her with a technical problem that was blocking her from doing a school assignment. The first started as thank you before going a little off topic. The second one, immediately afterward (therefore showing up first in my mailbox) said this: “Did I call you the bringer of Doom in the last email?”

Why yes. I checked. Yes you did.

Apparently now that she’s not stuck on her homework, she actually has to do it, and the first email that started as a thank you ended as more of a rant. Starring me as the Bringer of Doom.

She apologized in the second email, but heck, I think it’s hilarious. Poor kid, I’m going to teasing her about this one for years!

Random aside, while checking out Audacity for how to correct the sample rate of a PCM audio file, I was certain I remembered a second way to do it, and that lead me to a dialog box that had a slider, for how much faster or slower you wanted things to play. But also, there’s a quick-setting option to allow you to select between record speeds. Convert from 45 to 33, or from 33 to 78rpm.

And for a moment I thought of explaining that piece to Willow and then I just laughed at the idea of it. Kids conceptually understand record players, even if their media doesn’t really spin anymore. But try to explain a 78 to a kid with an iPod.

I wonder what age it was that stopped experiencing record players. I wonder what age I stop smiling about knowing the secrets of the pyramids and realize that I don’t know how to program my holographic brain recorder.

My father looked up from my mom’s iPad that he’s more or less hijacked and told me about a technology he was reading about and said, “That’s cool.”

It totally was. And I know that it’s a cliche for a child to disdain a parent for using anachronous language, and I also know that I’m a long way from being mistaken for a child, and I know that it’s not like I have any claim on the word given the age of it’s usage, but… Did my dad just use the adjective, “Cool?”

Here’s the thing. It’s been a few weeks since he actually said the word, but it still rankles. I think it maybe the first time in my life that I’ve heard him use the word and not reference the temperature sense.

And last (and least) in this scattershot entry… In high school, I’d fallen in with a rough crowd. By rough, of course, I mean geeky, and we went to absurd lengths for birthday presents, legendarily culminating in “The Five Minute Rule” where no present was allowed to take more than 5 minutes to open. And yes, there was a reason we felt the need to put a cap on things, to deal with some really annoying pranks.

Before the hammer came down, I’d been prepping a particularly devious plan for a seventeenth birthday present, and while I remember almost nothing of the details, I do remember that the ploy included 17 dollars in pennies. Stated another way, that’s about 9 pounds of the stuff. It’s not small. It’s not subtle. And it’s exceptionally hard on coat pockets, so if you’re planning anything like this, I suggest you get some strong canvas bags with straps that wrap under.

In any case, the rules change made the pennies not fit into the program, and that left me with a bag of 1700 pennies. Which is kind of an interesting artifact, and something that my young cousins over the years have found oddly enjoyable. For a child you trust not to eat any of it, it’s a miraculous wealth, coins far in abundance of any they’ve seen. For teenagers, it’s an instant supply of gambling chips to play black-jack or poker or whatever. For construction it’s a handy ballast, for visitors an imposing mass when they try to pick it up to see how full it is.

One of the girls, as a three-year-old, attempted to go home with it. I didn’t stop her, fascinated as I was by this little girl dragging a bag of pennies that was nearly her own weight, laboriously down stair by stair. (Under my supervision, don’t worry) She made it most of the length of the house before getting distracted. Subsequently, I loaded it all into a aluminum tin, and there it’s sat for the last many years. Last year, the distractable thief, now on a break from university, asked about the pennies, and laughed when I handed her the tub.

But last week, my soon-to-be-former manager was asking for pennies for his son’s school fundraiser. And I occasionally think of my now legal-to-drink-everywhere tub of pennies. So I came to work with my tub in a canvas sack, and wandered to his desk. The expression on his face was wonderful: “You’re kidding!”

Nope. Not kidding. I know that bulk pennies are a pain, so I told him that I was happy to donate the whole kaboodle but he should feel free to take as much as he wanted if he didn’t need the whole batch. I’m excited for his son, who I hope will be amused.

When I got home, gleeful about getting rid of a long-standing lump of sentiment, I told my dad what I’d done. And he frowned: “Which tub of pennies?”

So it turns out that he’s had his own stash of pennies. Not the now 19+ dollar stash I just unloaded but definitely at least a few dollars. I can keep the kids nostalgia satisfied for a few dollars more.