Skip to main content

Of fishing line and bogs and owning problems (or not)

Two things happened today that could have been bummers, but weren't: one in the morning, and the other in the afternoon. In both cases, as a parent, I could've thrown a fit. One of the things was way easier to deal with than the other though, and because of that, I got to learn something about myself, and that was also kinda nice in addition to getting to have a pretty cool day.

In the morning, we got to fish for a bit. The nine year old got the second fishing rod out of the car, and started making his way around the lake. The fish were biting, the dogs were staying generally out of the way, and things were fun. Then, the nine year old wound up with a twisted up, near to knotting line. 

My heart rate went up, adrenaline started to pump, I really did not want to mess with the knots. I breathed deeply, I kept my mouth shut, and soon the situation was reolved, and we were both catching fish. In the end, I'd tamped down my reaction, bit my tongue, survived, and we'd wound up having a blast!

In the afternoon, the nine year old and seven year old turned up, grinning sheepishly, covered to varying degrees—mid-thigh for the nine year old, ankle deep for the seven year old—in slimy, silty mud. They'd been running through the forest—I truly envy how they do that; they're sure footed in ways I've never been—but didn't realize there were bogs sprinkled throughout the forest around the nearby spring. They careened out of tree cover and into a bog before they knew what was happening, and that was that: covered in mud.

I giggled. I told the two of them to just go rinse off the mud in the stream—making sure there shoes were secure enough not to come off in stream’s brisk rain-swollen current of course—then head back and put on clean clothes, leaving their wet clothes to dry overnight on a tree branch. They toodled back to the stream after which I was treated to ten minutes of giggles and screams of delight as they got to dip into the stream, getting to experience how cold it was and how fast the water was moving, and the whole thing was sanctioned by an adult: me.

Why the difference in my feelings on the two different occasions? For the twisted fishing line, I felt like I was obligated to deal with it. Afterall, I'm a dad right? That's what dads are supposed to do right? They're supposed to enable kids to fish.

For the bog mud, I had no such preconceptions. The kids'd gotten themselves muddy. They'd had a great time doing it. They got themselves clean. They had a great time doing that as well. I was only very peripherally involved. It wasn't my problem.

Frankly, the fishing thing wasn't my problem either. How did I get so good at untwisting tangles? Practice as a kid time after time after time. So next time? I'll help with the line, but also, maybe I won't, or at least it won't be the number one priority of my day.

I'm hoping reflecting on all this will make for fishing trips that are as calm as mud baths.


Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Please leave your comments on this topic:

Popular posts from this blog

The Valentine's Day Magnetic Monopole

There's an assymetry to the form of the two Maxwell's equations shown in picture 1.  While the divergence of the electric field is proportional to the electric charge density at a given point, the divergence of the magnetic field is equal to zero.  This is typically explained in the following way.  While we know that electrons, the fundamental electric charge carriers exist, evidence seems to indicate that magnetic monopoles, the particles that would carry magnetic 'charge', either don't exist, or, the energies required to create them are so high that they are exceedingly rare.  That doesn't stop us from looking for them though! Keeping with the theme of Fairbank[1] and his academic progeny over the semester break, today's post is about the discovery of a magnetic monopole candidate event by one of the Fairbank's graduate students, Blas Cabrera[2].  Cabrera was utilizing a loop type of magnetic monopole detector.  Its operation is in concept very sim
1 comment
Read more

Cool Math Tricks: Deriving the Divergence, (Del or Nabla) into New (Cylindrical) Coordinate Systems

Now available as a Kindle ebook for 99 cents ! Get a spiffy ebook, and fund more physics The following is a pretty lengthy procedure, but converting the divergence, (nabla, del) operator between coordinate systems comes up pretty often. While there are tables for converting between common coordinate systems , there seem to be fewer explanations of the procedure for deriving the conversion, so here goes! What do we actually want? To convert the Cartesian nabla to the nabla for another coordinate system, say… cylindrical coordinates. What we’ll need: 1. The Cartesian Nabla: 2. A set of equations relating the Cartesian coordinates to cylindrical coordinates: 3. A set of equations relating the Cartesian basis vectors to the basis vectors of the new coordinate system: How to do it: Use the chain rule for differentiation to convert the derivatives with respect to the Cartesian variables to derivatives with respect to the cylindrical variables. The chain
11 comments
Read more

More Cowbell! Record Production using Google Forms and Charts

First, the what : This article shows how to embed a new Google Form into any web page. To demonstrate ths, a chart and form that allow blog readers to control the recording levels of each instrument in Blue Oyster Cult's "(Don't Fear) The Reaper" is used. HTML code from the Google version of the form included on this page is shown and the parts that need to be modified are highlighted. Next, the why : Google recently released an e-mail form feature that allows users of Google Documents to create an e-mail a form that automatically places each user's input into an associated spreadsheet. As it turns out, with a little bit of work, the forms that are created by Google Docs can be embedded into any web page. Now, The Goods: Click on the instrument you want turned up, click the submit button and then refresh the page. Through the magic of Google Forms as soon as you click on submit and refresh this web page, the data chart will update immediately. Turn up the:
Post a Comment
Read more