Copasetic Flow

 I bought a (for me) fancy pair of hiking boots this year. And, as usual, the first thing I trashed out was the laces. I don't know how I manage to do this? The kids? Sure, I figure they trash out their laces free-climging buildings, and in their other activities around town, I mean, uh, never mind. But me? Anyway, the laces are decaying quickly, and since these are (for me) fancy boots, I though it might be fun to spring for the $10 for the replacement shoe laces from the manufacturer. You know, original equipment and all that. But??? They're out of shoe laces! We now have shoe lace shortages... Oh well.

One of the safest things for us to do, pandemic-wise, is stay outside, but you gotta get places right? For many of us that involves taking MUNI across town.  For many of us that involves taking MUNI across town. Thankfully, with the windows and the roof-top emergency door all open, a bit of breeze blows through the bus, but is there an even safer way? If you’re traveling east to west downtown, there is: the California cable car line! You can sit on the outside benches of this—usually—uncrowded resource, enjoy the fresh air, and reach your destination in style. For adults with MUNI passes, it’s free. And! MUNI is free for all youth in town under the age of 18 ! But, for cable cars, there’s a catch you need to be aware of… Cable cars aren’t automatically included in the free MUNI for all youth program. To ride cable cars for free, you’ll need a youth clipper card that says it’s OK. You can’t buy these at Clipper Card offices like the one at Embarcadero Station, (the kids and I tried...

 Fatherhood is hard! Wait, no it isn’t: I’m literally drafting this missive while quaffing a beer in downtown San Francisco (the Mission actually), waiting for the kid to finish up a class. *Thinks back* Wait. maybe fatherhood is hard? So, “What the hell am I even talking about,” you ask? Here’s an example. It starts with car seats. Car seats are a nightmare! They especially were for one of the kids. I’d plop her in the car seat and she’d start to scream. She hated it! She’d continue to scream until we reached our destination. So, ok, that was hard. Here’s the thing though. In the middle of that we moved to a city with phenomenal public transit, and I quit driving. After that, I just had to hop on the bus with the kid in a wrap. She loved it! I loved it! Except… Some bus rides are forty-five minutes long. And, sometimes? Sometimes the kid wanted to be bounced through the entire ride. That was hard. But other times? On the same ride. The kid abided. The kid snuggled into her wrap up...

 Daize and Tawnse made apple pie! It was delicious! But wait! When they started, they didn’t have flour or sugar. Did they come to me to ask if they had the requisite materials, and could I get them? Nope.  The first I caught any wind of this pie business at all was this morning when Tawnse appeared in the doorway to ask where one might find shortening. I replied that rather than looking for shortening one should simply use butter. As she walked away, I heard Tawnse holler to Daise—across the house—”Daize! Can you use butter?” Later, as my partner and I were planning what to do about various things in jobs, with kids, and for dinner, Daize, Tawnse, and Mota appeared again stating that they’d planned their day. I commented that kids-plan-adventure-day was actually scheduled for Thursday mornings.  They stared at me blankly—I haven’t told them about that part of our new schedule yet, but the blank stare gave me the moment I needed to collect my thoughts, realize that my par...

In her most recent blog post Evelyn Krieger asked if readers were trying new things, and it reminded me, that yeah, the kids and I are in the midst of that! We've taken up an unfamiliar sport—Bay swimming in San Francisco—wrapped in a familiar one from when I wa a kid—competitive lap swimming in a pool. It was one of the kids here, the seven year-old aka Tawnse who got me back into the water. On a trip to a beach at one of our coves, she fell into the water. She did what we’d talked about a dozen or so times before, and she’d practiced once or twice before—she stood back up—and all was well. Right after that though, she declared that she wanted to learn to swim at that beach. And, since we unschool, that’s exactly what we’ve been doing! It’s been kinda cold—the water temperature this month has hovered around 65 degrees —but it’s been a lot of fun! The learning’s been small on some days, and immense on others. In general, everything is moving along rather swimmingly, ( yeah … I wen...

Watching the behavior towards COVID and monkeypox of some of the folks that live in my home town of San Francisco, as well as our federally appointed health officials, I’m left swimming in the deep end of the pool searching for explanations. I’d rather come up with a reason that’s compassionate, something that doesn’t make my fellow American a bigotted, uncaring murderer, and frankly, lately, it’s been kind of tough to do that. We lost all our COVID mitigations months ago, masking is gone; indoor everything is back regardless of case counts, hospitalizations, deaths, or any other metric that might be tracked; institutions paid lip service to ventilation, and then mostly did nothing; and finally, they’re playing the AIDs game with Monkepox, asking us to believe that it’s only a problem for men who have sex with other men, never mind that kids and women are catching it as well. With all this input, in trying to come up with a compassionate solution regarding my peers’ complete and utter ...

Telling kids what they ‘can do' is way more freeing than asking them what they’d ‘like to do’. tldr; if you’re not comfortable with the kids in your house running off’t, don’t read this. A few days ago, at home, my partner mentioned to the kids that in 20 minutes or so they should meet up because they needed to go to the market at the bottom of the hill. 40 minutes later, she got a text from them, "Where are you?" "In the house, where are you?" "At the market!" — antigrav_kids (@thord_ee_r) July 22, 2022 Just thought of this: is 'running off’t' a contraction for “running off withouT me/us”? This is a brief, brief post, and frankly maybe I should do more of these, but anyway. We have insanely yummy dumpling bakeries down the hill from us in three directions here in San Francisco. They are firggin’ delightful! They’re locally owned. Some of them only take cash. (Fuck the Man.) And—excuse the religious platitude—God they sell crazy good, ch...

What it is A number of campsites sprinkled along Pass Creek as it winds through Blue Jay Canyon paralleled by National Forest Road 122 off of US 93, with an occasional pit toilet restroom. Pass Creek is accessible from each of the campsites. Tall canyon walls shatter the ground, rising above the creek on either side of the road. Last Visited:   June of 2022. Last Reviewed: June of 2022 Getting there: As you travel along US 93, turn north onto National Forest Road 122 aka Pass Creek Rd. Drive about six and a half miles to reach the canyon itself, although you’ll find campsites dispersed along the road beginning as soon as you enter Salmon Challis National Forest . Review: The campsites sit along Pass Creek as it winds through the canyon. One of the campsites we passed was across the road from a pit toilet. The other six or so campsites which were a few tenths of a mile away from each other would require a walk back along the graveled road to reach the facilities, (or you coul...

 I got a reminder from Debra Eckerling via twitter about how much fun it is to correspond via mail and what a valuable way it is to network: Here’s your #Networking #GoaloftheDay #Write a #letter . On paper. With pen. And mail it! #goalchat @MangoPublishing pic.twitter.com/2GV2CTn0Ga — Debra Eckerling ⭐ Event Outcome Optimization (@TheDEBMethod) June 10, 2022 Think back to the last time you checked your mail. There were probably a few fliers from a chain grocery store, an inocuous white evenelope labeled 'Important!' offering you a new car warranty, and maybe a bill from the place you forgot to switch over to e-billing. Right?  If you're like me, that's what your mail has been like for the last 30 days or so in a row. Now, imagine you look at your stack of mail, and your handwritten name pops out at you from the front of an envelope. You check the postmark, (more on that below), and it's from a place you've never been, or maybe it's from in town, both e...

 Happy June! I got to hang out in a new place with the gang and my parnter yesterday: a beautiful place full of flowers, a place with access to a mountain stream that ultimately cascades into a reservoir, and a place I had absolutely nothing to do with discovering. A few days back, while headed out to fish at a reservoir we've been to dozens of times, my partner suggested that the 11, 9, and 7 year old gang of kids should take our two dogs on a hike back into the forest above the lake. The gang heartily agreed. We dropped them off at the inlet to the lake with the understanding they'd explore upstream before meeting me back at the spot in an hour and a half. I dropped my partner off in a meadow next to the stream that flows away from the lake. I went to fish on the lake (and I didn't catch a thing.) An hour and a half later, I went to pick up the gang. Then, lots of things happened: As I pulled down the road to travel the two miles to the inlet of the lake, I ran into the g...

The gang and I are getting ready to go camping across the Western United States. Just recently,  the bigger kids graduated to larger backpacks, so they can haul a bit more stuff, (they’ve been hauling their own tent and sleeping bags for years, but now they can take more food, water, the collected works of Elf Quest Vol. 1, and whathevs.) There was a bit of a conundrum though. Even though the gang has larger packs, it behooves one to practice with the heavier weight for a bit to get used to it, but there’s a pandemic, and therein lied the rub.  The pandemic has—perhaps paradoxically—actually thinned out the number of camping trips we take each year. You’d think out in a forest would be better during a pandemic right? I agree, but our camping route, no matter how we’ve tried it so far always involves a bus ride for the last leg. Even if we walk to the ferry terminal in downtown San Francisco, even if we take the ferry—where we sit outside—across the bay rather than the bus over...

We’ve been playing at the idea of psychogeography for a few years. The gist of the study is to wander about an area of town—the same idea could of course be applied to the wilderness, but I don’t see it mentioned as often—paying attention to what you see, hear, smell, and how that makes you feel.The idea, broadly, the way I understand it, is to search for the transitions on your walk, paying attention to how you identified them. It works out great for getting the gang out into the world. They get to go explore for themselves, and as if their every sense wasn’t already peeled on exploring a new place just because it’s new, they’re also focused on measuring the world around them as they experience it and relating those measurements to how they feel. The whole thing is also very useful for getting neighborhoods used to the kids. I can anchor  myself somewhere I want to be, then the kids can explore out in every widening radii that we both feel comfortable with, bringing back their exp...

I received the Tish Murtha book, “Elswick Kids” a few days ago. In the book is an introduction by Mark Richards, and further along, a picture of several kids climbing up the scaffolding of a building. The scaffolding picture is ebullient. The kids are having a blast; a group of six or so of them are at various stages in their climb up the side of the building having levered boards down in a few places to more easily scale the thing.  Meanwhile, the book’s introduction laments, To those of us who lived through this time the images will look strangely familiar - like a mirror of our own existence for we children who were lucky enough to be born free. and I’ve got to say, in some ways I think kids are still born free, can still play like the kids in this book, but in other ways.. Well, it made me think of our own scaffolding experience a few weeks ago. Plugging away at my standing desk in front of the Old Fed Reserve, I noticed the kid’s feet were no longer on the ground. She’d launc...

Fire hydrants! What are they really for anyway? Are they to put out burning buildings? Firemen speeding to the scene, pivoting a hose into place to extinguish the blaze? Yeah, certainly, they’re good for that.  Are they for opening up to create sprays and puddles for kids to cool down in the summer? Maybe. I mean, I’ve sen pictures of kids doing these sorts of things with fire hydrants. We all have right? All the pictures I’ve seen were old though. Do kids really do that anymore? I dunno. And besides we’re in San Francisco where it rarely gets hot enough for that sort of thing, and when it does—you know, those three days of the year—we’re more of a bus to the beach sort of crowd. What about hydrants as an integral part of a citywide playscape? Oh! Yeah! That’s what I see hydrants used for the most. They’re used to balance on; they’re used as quasi-barstools while kids wait for the bus; and they’re used as platforms to launch onto other makeshift play equipment like... I dunno... Ye...

 Part of our unschooling plan has always been for the gang, 10 year-old Daize, 9 year-old Mota, and 6 year-old Tawnse to get themselves from place to place. The fact that we live in San Franicsco where a major metropolitan transit system exists that doubles as a school bus system has made this easier. Still, practie makes perfect, so we entered into a new phase of our tranist-readiness program today: preparing to ride BART trains solo. The kids have gone a few cars ahead of me before with no issues, so it seemed like a good idea today for the gang to try heading out one whole train ahead of me. On top of that we found ourselves in the perfect scenario with two trains leaving to the same destination, one just a minute behind the other. And so we tried, but I gotta warn you, our results were interesting but mixed in my opinion, and yes, it was my fault. Finding ourselves with the perfect temporal spacing, I decided we could just 'go for it' even though we were headed to a station...

 The kids just headed out in the 39 degree F weather, in the dark to walk the dog. It’s there thing. The do it every night. They have for years. My dad watched them go. It’s killing him. He tried to stop the whole thing.  It’s killing him. I value their independence above just about anything else. I love watching them do things. Not the things I chose, but the things they picked for themselves. I’ll do what I can to keep them doing those things even if it means other folks might have to sit with their  discomfort.Even—especially—when I have to sit with my own discomfort.   And, I wonder if that’s always it? Do people try to shut the kids down ala   “Do your parents know where you are?’ Or by charging a child balanced on a bike rack with exhortations of  “Are you al right?!” Yeah, they sure were alright before somebody started anxiously coming at them. I wonder, how much of ‘keeping kids safe’ is just about not being able to tolerate personal disco...

We used to love inviting other people on our adventures pre-pandemic! Right now though, we're still just trying to relearn the ropes for what's safe and what's not. We're trying to head back out to our old haunts, but just with ourselves until we get a feel for what's going on out in the world. Still, I thought it might be handy to share our expeiences as we went so other people could know what to expect.  If anyone else would like to share the places they're going in the outside world, I'd be delighted to get their perspective!  On Wednesday, we headed to the DeYoung! D estination:  The DeYoung Museum Starting point : The Excelsior Route:  44 from Excelsior to Golden Gate Concourse across from the DeYoung Time of day:  around noon on a Wednesday Transit:  If you’re headed towards Mission, either going North or South, the 44 is more crowded than it will be after you get across Mission. When I say crowded, I mean it was impossible to stay six feet away from ...

 Here’s another look at what happens with unschooling.  You set out to spend some time in nature. The eight year-old is starting an animal tracking class, so maybe you’ll commune with nature a bit while you’re out there. Then, on the way, you see windmill blades, but not on a windmill. They’re. On. A. Train! In the middle of nowhere. Lots of them! They stretch off into the distance. Soooo many windmill blades! And they’re on a siding! And there’s a little pull off to get over there!!! Woohoo! So, now, you and the gang—9, 8, and 6 years-old—are going to explore windmill blades! That’ll be fun! You’ve never seen a blade up close before. This’ll be so much fun! You and the kids head for the blades. They’re walking along the tracks, perusing them. You stop to admire the first blade. It’s gorgeous, framed up just so on the flatcar. There’s a couple of blocks of concrete on the other end of the car acting as a counterweight. Visible between the blade and flatcar, a snow capped mount...

 Towser, the eight year-old here started a new class yesterday. Unlike other things he’s tried where the thing was a thing a sib had expressed an interest in, or a thing that is supposed to be generally interesting to ‘kids’ doing ‘school’ sort of things—you know, math, grammar, reading—this thing is all Towser. Towser is taking an animal tracking class delivered in several audio lessons. Each lesson takes between fifteen and thirty minutes of listening. Then, Towser and I and whoever else is around talk about his lesson, and here’s where things are kinda different. Towser talks—in depth—about what he heard. He looks at me with his ‘important eyes’ and tells me what he thinks the lesson was about. Every kid is different, and every learning experience is different, but Towser talks about these lessons so soulfully It makes me happy and warm inside to see that he’s doing a thing he’s truly, truly interested in. While Towser explains his lessons to us, my partner asks big open ‘meanin...

I have now seen posts about ‘home education’ for three to seven year-olds. And, I’m guessing that people are now calling ‘kids are home during a pandemic and the school system has mandated that learning will happen remotely via the internet’ home education instead of homeschooling and maybe that’s going to help with the confusion, but in case it’s not, indulge me in describing what homeschooling looked like for the kids here between 0 and 3. First, it felt really weird, calling what we were doing homeschooling and even stranger still calling it unschooling, because, well, the kids were just living life. It wasn’t really ‘schooling’ at all. I constantly felt like a poser saying we were doing any kind of schooling. I mean, were we really schooling? The kids were just doing their thing while I was around. But looking back from here, it seems to me that what we were doing was the epitome of unschooling The kids were just doing their thing. As infants, they were hanging out in the baby wrap...