"Natalie Portman Makes Any Movie Better"

(Please forgive the lack of pictures. I'll embed some when they get uploaded to my troop's website)

This was the conclusion we reached within the first two miles of our trip. It doesn't matter if the role is beneath her, or if the movie is absolutely awful. The mere presence of Natalie makes the movie better. We would recall this conclusion several times throughout the week, though I don't think any of us could give any explanation for why. In fact, the following exchange is an important part of the trip:

Boys [okay, and me (on Sunday)]: "Natalie Portman makes any movie better."
...
Steve (on Friday): "You guys have been talking about Natalie Portman all week. But can any of you name her filmography?"
Boys [okay, and me]: "Uhhhhh....."

It was a little after 2:00 PM on Sunday when we drove past Pine Creek Outfitters. I knew we'd missed it when Steve said, "Shit! Er, dammit! Er...sorry boys!" A quick course correction and we pulled into the outfitters parking lot and started to unload the vans. We hadn't had the chance to inspect the boys packs yet, and so we spent some time repacking so that we could make room to distribute the food. Not a small task--at two pounds of food per person per day, we had roughly 120 pounds of food to distribute over nine people. Food distribution was further complicated by the fact that only one of the five boys in our crew had any significant backpacking experience. Four the other four, this would be a first time event.

Our biggest challenge was getting Austin's pack to the right weight. Ideally, a pack weighs no more than a quarter to a third of the person's body weight. Austin (the youngest in our group) tips the scales at a robust 80 pounds. If you look at the Pack Weights table, you'll see we had a hard time getting his pack weight down the first day.

We left from the outfitter at about 4:00 PM and arrived at the campsite around 5:30 PM. The start was kind of slow as we got accustomed to the packs, the heat, and pacing each other. The start of the trail is also primarily uphill. Naturally, that's a little more difficult. It didn't take long for the adults to set up their tents. They boys had a little more trouble though. We eventually figured out that their problems were a product of Danny attempting to set up the two man tent with the poles from the three man tent. The tent looked more like a hammock. We also found that, under that much tension, we had to be careful when removing the poles. When it was done haphazardly, the pole whipped back and nearly took John¹'s head off. Well, okay. It hit him in the chest and he sputtered and mumbled something. But we decided to be careful anyway.

One of the great challenges of wilderness backpacking is food planning. You need to plan enough food to provide enough calories for the trip, but without many leftovers. There are no garbage cans in the wilderness, you see, and so any uneaten food gets put in a bag and carried out in your pack. As you can imagine, we don't like to keep uneaten, rotting food festering in our packs for a week. "Why not just dump it in the woods?" you ask. Quite simply, doing so encourages animals to develop a dependency on human trash, which isn't good for the animals. Thus, any left over food gets passed around the group until it is completely eaten.

Having a person like John¹ is really handy on such a trip. John¹ weighs about light 240 pounds and we've never had enough food for him on any camping trip. Between him, myself, and Will, we managed to eat all of dinner and finish off the chocolate and butterscotch puddings. Don't fool yourself. Eating pudding is difficult work--the palate begins to resist after a while.

Distance hiked: 1.97 miles
Change in Elevation (from lowest to highest): 350 ft
Steps: 9,350

"Danny won't make the banana cream pudding. It's like he's afraid it's made of Satan or something"

Monday starts at 7:00 AM. Danny wakes up the boys and the adults wander out of their tents packing their gear. All of the meals on this trip require that water be boiled. For dinners, the boiling water is added to pouches of freeze dried food. For breakfast, the boys add it to packets of oatmeal, and the adults add it to bowls of Kashi. Hot chocolate and coffee (for adults) are available as desired.

After breakfast, the bags are packed again. Having dropped some weight from the meals we've eaten, we redistribute the weight in hopes of getting closer to the target pack weights. We're a lot closer this time.

Before leaving, we take a trip to a "50 foot waterfall" that lies "200 yards downstream." First, I'm certain it was more than 200 yards. Second, the waterfall sure looked like more than 50 feet tall. It was quite impressive. After a few pictures, we head back to camp where Molly, David, and Steve are waiting. As I come into camp, I tell Molly that we had an accident with her camera. "The boys were throwing rocks over the edge, and we thought it'd be fun to document the path of a rock. So we tied the camera to a rock, and I went to the bottom of the waterfall. Will threw the rock over, and I was supposed to catch it. Unfortunately, it was an incomplete pass." She didn't believe the story for some reason.

Very early in today's walk, we had our first encounter with mountain laurel. Mountain laurel is a pretty, small white flower and it grows in abundance at Pine Creek. In abundance. There were places on the trail where it was mountain laurel as far as you could see. We happened to be hiking during the peak of the bloom. As we entered this first gathering of the flower, the sun shone down on it and the forest shone in a heavenly shade of white. Very beautiful.

For the boys, the highlight of the day was John and Will getting into an enormous discussion of the Twilight series. Seeing it in print won't do the moment justice, but this is John's summary of the Twilight movie:

"Bella, I love you, I'll never leave you"
Two scenes later, "I have to leave you again". Then he comes back,
"Bella, I love you, I'll never leave you."
Two scenes later, "I have to leave you for some reason."
Why does she keep taking this loser back?

We walked into camp at the bottom of Four Mile Run, Right Branch. The campsite was small, and it was difficult to fit all of the tents into the space there, but we managed to squeeze them in with enough clearance to start a small fire to clear the bugs. The boys enjoyed the the small waterfall at the stream, which also provided very clear water for pumping. On a trip like this, we carry our own water filtration pumps because clean water isn't available along the trail. The filters take out sediments and bacteria, then push the water through charcoal. In some places, after all of this is done, the water has a yellowish tint caused by absorption of tannin from the plants in the stream bed. The beautiful thing about running water in small streams is that it hasn't had time to absorb the tannin and comes out very clear and tastes oh-so-good. That water from this campsite may have been the best we had all week.

The boys were quick to make dinner (for which we were proud) but soon had an argument about what to make for dinner. Their options were cheese cake or banana cream pudding. Danny was particularly opposed to the banana cream pudding which inspired a quotable moment when John¹ told us, "Danny is so against the idea of making the pudding. It's like he's afraid that it's made of Satan or something!" Part of me wishes they hadn't made dessert at all, however, as they had a hard time finishing all the food they made. Eventually, not even John¹ refused to eat any more. We were so shocked we have named a new state of being after him. This state of being is called Tonon and is the state obtained when one cannot physically consume any more food.

I Had It So Much Easier

I didn't get around to blogging days three and four. But I guess that's part of the experience of single fatherhood. I could take the time to do it, but I figured I'd jot down my thoughts on the week as a whole and get to packing for my trip. Enjoy!

This is the second time I've done the week on my own, and it's been a good experience. These four day forays are (hopefully) the closest I'll ever get to experiencing single parenthood, and the best chance for me to understand what the single parent's life is like.

Let's be honest, though. What I went through in these four days is nothing like what a single parent experiences. Here's a very short list of why:

• Four days is hardly enough to have the full experience.
• Janelle planned the meals and did the grocery shopping before she left. I just had to cook them. That means 60% of the effort of the meals was taken care of for me.
• I would be surprised if the majority of single parents didn't make less money than me. I could be wrong about that. But I work at the Cleveland Clinic, have flexible hours, good pay, great health benefits--I don't worry about a lot of things I would worry about if I was still fighting to get more than 36 hours a week a Pizza Hut just so I could qualify for a health plan that doesn't even compare.
• Also work related, sitting in front of a computer all day is a lot less stressful than standing next to a 400 degree oven and pushing pizzas through as fast I can, or inhaling steam from opening and closing the dishwasher.
• I had cheap daycare.
• Most significantly, Joules doesn't consider herself a child of a single parent. She knows Janelle is coming back, and she's looking forward to it. My single parenthood is, to her, the anomaly, not the rule.

But a few things have happened that I think have given me a little bit of insight into what single parents face. Some of the things that never really occurred to me until I had to try it:

1. Stay-at-home-moms have it easy compared to single moms. Yes, I understand that's probably a loaded and potentially offensive statement, but I really believe it.
2. Everything crisis is amplified as a single parent. When you realize at 8:15 at night that you're out of milk, the stay-at-home parent can either go to the store or send the spouse. There's still someone to put the kid to bed. The single parent either loads the kid in the car and goes to the store in the middle of bedtime, or goes without milk until the next day.
3. Striking the balance of financial prudence and convenience gets harder. Using the milk example again, I could have picked up milk at the CVS next to the hardware store and paid more money for it, or I could have made an additional stop at the grocery store. Sure, all parents face this kind of dilemma, but the single parent rarely has the option of procrastinating until a trip can be made without the kid.
4. I'm very lucky to be married to a woman who will let me nap or decompress after work if I feel I need to. In turn, if she's had a rough day at home with Joules, I'm more than happy to take over and let her decompress. The single parent doesn't get to decompress. Ever.

So, to modify the sage words of the time traveling great ones, "Be excellent to single parents." They don't need pity, or constant charity, but a chance to decompress every now and again.

A little milk wouldn't hurt either.

Single Fatherhood: Day 2

6:50 AM

"Joules, it's time to wake up."

"NEAEAEAEAEAEH!"

So I laid down with her to try to help the transition out of sleep. I woke up again at 7:30. Wasn't that just a brilliant idea.

Once she was up, she was up though. Eggs for breakfast and out the door by a little after 8:00. Not a bad start. We make the drive to Nara's house, and I realize that I've parked in the driveway of the house next door. Oops! Rather than fixing that, I just hopped out, grabbed her, and tried to rush her in.

I walk out the door and all I hear is screaming. Hopefully it only lasts a minute. I'll never know, because Cindy wouldn't tell me if the day was pure hell anyway.

My day starts with another trip to Hillcrest. I had an ingenius idea over night about how to get data that only prints in pdf form to have consistent delimiters so I can convert it into a csv. Just for the sake of ranting--if you ever, ever, ever build a database, please consult a statistician. Anyone who ever works with the data will thank you for it.

Enough with the self praise. It's an uneventful day at work. I'm mostly ignoring things I don't really want to do. I'm sure I'll pay for that later. Unlike the day before, I manage to get out of work in time to pick Julie up at 5:00. Just like the day before, she's asleep. Unlike the day before, she just barely fell asleep and has no intention of waking up.

Cindy heads back to the other room and gets Joules's clothes. Yeah, that's right--Julie found some of Nara's clothes and decided she wanted to wear those. Maybe that's a sign that Joules wants new things to wear. She must be exhausted, however, because she hardly flinches when we changer her clothes. When I ask her if she wants to go to the hardware store I get a half-hearted no.

We go to the hardware store anyway. I unstrap her car seat, and ask her if she wants to go inside. Again, a half-hearted no. So I pick her up and carry her. She instantly falls asleep on my shoulder. Normally she loves the hardware store because I always buy one of the 25 cent Tootsie Roll pops. It's 25 cents I don't have to spend today.

When we get back to the car, I'm strapping her into her seat and ask her if she wants to go home and finish her nap. "nnnnn...." She never does get to the o. So at home, I carry her up to bed and let her sleep. I change my clothes and go out to weed the planters in front of the house. At about 7:15 I go in to make dinner, and at about 7:45, Joules finally comes downstairs.

After she eats, she demands to go outside again. Two of the older neighborhood kids are out, but no one her age. So she chases after them as they ride their scooters. Eventually she gets her hands on the Hello Kitty scooter and tries it out. Mixed results, but no major contusions. While she tries to figure out how the scooter thing works, I talk to a neighbor woman I've not met before. We finally go back in at 9:30 with surprisingly little protest.

Bedtime is harder tonight. She didn't protest coming into the house, but she's screaming bloody murder at the suggestion of pajamas. I give in and let her get into bed in her t-shirt. After we read, I promise I'll come back after I start a load of laundry. More screaming. I start the load of laundry anyway, and when I come out of the laundry room, there's Joules with her pajamas in hand. I put her shirt in the load I just started and put her pajamas on her. Back up to bed, two seconds of screaming, and she's out. What did Nara do to her that has her so tired?

Back downstairs to watch TV until the load in the wash finishes. I never do make it off the couch again. Two loads to fold on Thursday. Didn't clean the kitchen counters tonight either. One more thing to do on Thursday. Sleep.

Single Fatherhood: Day 1

6:50 AM, shaking Julie's legs

"Joules, it's time to wake up." Her first response is to barely open her eyes. When she recognizes it's me, she closes them again.

"Joules, you get to go play with Chumby today! Do you want to go play with Chumby?"

No response.

So I shaker her a little again. "Julie, do you want to get out of bed?"

In her sing songy voice, "No."

"You just want to go back to sleep?"

That same lyrical voice, "Yeah."

Ten minutes later she was awake and wanting to be held. She got cereal for breakfast before we changed her and grabbed her things. She was mostly ignored, though, while Janelle and I gathered up the last things for camp and loaded them into a friend's van. Shortly after they left, Joules and I went to Chumby's house. She marched in without hesitation and without so much as a good-bye.

My work day started at Hillcrest. Somehow I've become the Clinic's expert on accessing information from the obstetric database there, which is a little frightening, seeing as my approach to data extraction is a slightly enhanced version of guess and check. I like to call it barely-educated guess and check. After a couple of hour of fighting the database and getting about half of what I wanted, I went back to the main campus.

I felt good about my afternoon's work as I finished up a project that I should have finished at the end of last week. The mood was fouled by a trio of factors, though. 1) whereas my computer failed Monday morning, the hard drive had to be wiped. Not everything got installed the same way, which means a couple of vital programs aren't working as they should. The end result--no reports. 2) An e-mail from an investigator complaining about 'problems' in my analysis that he wants me to fix. The problems reflect imperfections in the data, which can't possibly be fixed. This is the fourth or fifth time we've had this discussion. 3) the Systems people showed up at 4:25 to reinstall printer drivers. I needed to pick up Julie at 5:00, and finally left work at 4:55.

At last, I picked up Julie. She was asleep when I arrived, but not for long. She stumbled down the stairs at Chumby's house, wearing one of Chumby's shirts, with an enormous contusion under her left eye. Carrie apologized profusely, but I brushed it off. Kids happen after all. But I'll be perfectly honest--I wasn't prepared for how bad it was. It doesn't look like a bruise though, more like she got pinched. She was pretty cuddly for a while, and I can tell it still bothers her a little.

Pizza for dinner. Nice and simple. Someone correct me if I'm wrong, but it's cold water to remove stains from a white shirt before washing it? Yeah, that's right Carrie...she got pizza sauce all over Chumby's sparkling white shirt. Payback's a...lot more work for me.

We did manage to weed the garden today though. Well, I did anyway. Joules snuck back inside, climbed to the top of the pantry, and pulled down the giant jar of jolly ranchers. Now she's watching Harry Potter and waiting for the sugar high to tail off so we can go to bed. Hopefully I can get some laundry folded.

Many thanks to Carrie for watching Joules today. And especially for the bread. It turns out I'm out of bread...I'm almost out of milk too. Just not enough time left today to go to the store.

Things left to do today:

Dishes
fold laundry
wash another load of laundry
clean Chumby's shirt
put away toys in the basement

Single Fatherhood: Day 0

I committed myself to it after dinner tonight. Seeing as I'm not truly a single father, I felt it was okay for me to cheat a little and let Janelle make dinner. But after dinner, Joules put on play clothes and grabbed her shoes, so we made our way outside.

I had high hopes for getting some things done. As soon as we got outside I pulled out the trampoline, which was almost entirely ignored so that Joules could climb all over the car. I did manage to fold a couple tents that were in my garage from past camping trips. I was about to move to weeding the garden when it happened--the dreaded sound of neighborhood children.

That sound is the biggest productivity killer in the world. As soon as she hears it, she's bolts for the front of the house and I have to race her to the street. She always stops at the sidewalk, but I still yell at her to stop every time; some kind of compulsive distrust.

So I sat in Cool Matt's yard and talked with him about his summer camp job while the neighborhood kids fought over toys. Matt writes hip hop with morals for kids, and he gave me a good history hip hop because, "No offense, but you don't look like the hip hop type." If I had a smart phone, I would have pulled it out to Google "hip hop" just to show that I wasn't offended.

Now we're home, a load of laundry started, and Joules is winding down for bed. If I don't fall asleep when we do story time I might get a second load started. If I'm lucky, I won't get too annoyed that I never did get to weeding the garden. Maybe tomorrow.

Packing List

I'm heading to Pine Creek Canyon in just 9 days for a 7 day backpacking trip.



Part of the fun of this kind of trip is the minimalism required to carry your life on your back for that long. My packing list:

2 shirts
2 pants
1 long sleeve shirt
1 light fleece
3 pairs of socks
2 pairs of underwear
1 mess kit
1 fork, knife, spoon
1 pair of boots
1 medium weight sleeping bag
1 ground pad
1 two man tent
1 stove
1 fuel bottle
1 flashlight
3 extra batteries
1 roll of toilet paper
1 bottle of soap
1 hat
1 first aid kit
2 water bottles
1 water filtration pump
7 days of food

Total weight: 30 lbs