Day with DAAAAAAAAD!

Over a month now since I’ve posted. Well, it’s been an incredibly busy month. But I’m at the beach for the next few days, so perhaps I’ll get to catch up.

First off, two weeks ago I had my Day with Dad with my daughter Kate. Day with Dad is a tradition that I have with my kids – something that we’ve been doing for fifteen years now. Once a year, usually in the summer, I spend one day with each kid, individually, doing something appropriate to that child. It’s a great way for me to spend quality one-on-one time with each of my children (something that can be a challenge when you have three), and we’ve generated some great memories over the years. I strongly recommend it to any parents, especially if you have more than one child.

There’s definitely been trends with the different kids. I’ve spent many Days-with-Andy traipsing over Civil War battlefields, including that notable wade across Antietam Creek. (We wanted to see if the Union troops could have just forded near Burnside Bridge instead of charging across into deadly fire. I don’t know if the troops could have done it, but Andy and I had no trouble.) Diana has often meant the Pet Farm and climbing the rocks at Great Falls. Kate’s day has often included the Baltimore Aquarium.

This year with Kate, we did something special. We tried Skydiving.

We went to Skydive Virginia in Louisa, about 1.5 hours south of the beltway. It’s a sleepy little airfield where they spend each weekend shuttling people up into the sky and dumping them out.

First timers do a tandem dive, which means that you are tethered to an instructor. You spend an hour in classroom training (which mostly consists of the instructor telling you all the ways that you might die) and then squeeze into a small plane with ten other skydivers and no seats. You jump out at 12,000 feet (two miles straight up!), spend a minute free-falling down to 6,000 feet, pull the ripcord, and then spend the next ten minutes floating to the ground.

I’m not sure what to say, except wow.

Here’s me:

And here’s Kate:

If you ever get the chance, and you don’t have fear of heights, and you don’t have claustrophobia (because the plane gets really crowded), then give it a try. The minute of freefall goes faster than you can possibly imagine, but it’s incredible.

A very geeky family moment

My daughter, home from college, plays Dungeons and Dragons.  She is playing in a campaign over this summer with some college friends who happen to live in the area.

My son, who is now living in Charlottesville, used to play with these same people.  But he’s two hours away now, too far to stop by for a nice little game of D&D on the weekend.

Enter technology.  My son got himself a webcam yesterday.  He’s going to play remotely – at his computer in Charlottesville while the group here in NoVa play near a webcam.

We did the test of this last night.  The connection worked great.  (Video over AIM has some problems in my house, for some reason.  But Skype worked just fine.)

At around this time, I got an IM from my wife, who is in New York this week at an art seminar.  She has a Macbook with her, with a built-in webcam.  I IM’d her through installing Skype, and video IM’d with her from my Powerbook.

So, at one time, we had my son vid-conferencing from Charlottesville to my PC, while my wife was vid-conferencing from New York to my Powerbook.  And here I was in the middle, seeing and talking to them both real-time.

What a wonderful world we live in!

Curse you, entropy gods!

The gods of entropy have been having much play with the Dzikiewicz family of late. Within the last month, we’ve had breakdowns of a washing machine, car, and AC unit. Today I’m dealing with the biggest issue yet.

Julie got a call last night from one of the neighbors at the beach. Apparently water was streaming out of our house. That could be something relatively minor, or something relatively major. So we got her father to stop by the house to report further.

Alas, it was something relatively minor that has relatively major consequences. The toilets here have a habit of clogging up. The last time we were here, apparently we left the upstairs toilet clogged, and the flapper not completely closed. Had someone been here, the result would have been that we would have heard the toilet running in an annoying manner, someone would have noticed it, and we would have fixed things. But we were not here, not for the past two weeks. So the toilet overflowed and water continually dripped out, onto the floor, into the floor, onto the floor below, into the floor below, and onto the carport below that.

So, a relatively minor issue, but we’ve now got sopping carpets on two floors, water stains on a ceiling, and buckled hardwood floors in one section of the house. Which is particularly annoying because those hardwoods were just replaced about a month ago.

And here I am, sitting here in the beach house, having come down to meet the plumber and now waiting for the water-clean-up people. And cursing the gods of entropy – let them hover over someone else’s house for a while!

Launching my baby bird

This has been a season of great changes. But this weekend was probably the greatest. Julie and I packed the van and drove one bed, four chairs, seven cartons of miscellaneous items, and our son Andy to Charlottesville, where he is working this summer.

This is not Andy’s first summer working in Charlottesville. He has, in fact, worked there for the past three. But this time, he is doing it as a college graduate, and he is not planning on returning to our home as a resident. Our little bird has left the nest.

I have mixed feelings about this. There’s the obvious fact that I’ll miss Andy a great deal. He has grown to be a fine young man, with a lovely dry wit and a wide range of interests and talents, and I always enjoy his company. His absence certainly makes our home a poorer place.

But I have always viewed this as the end goal of parenting: to bring a new adult to the point where he is ready to face the world on his own, capable enough to take care of himself and others, and decent enough to make the world a better place by his presence. In this, Julie and I have succeeded, and I feel a great deal of pride.

After a long day of heavy lifting, Andy took Julie and me out to dinner. It’s an old tradition amongst our circle: when your friends help you move, you treat them to a meal afterwards. Andy’s been on enough moves to know the drill. And it was a fine moment to see him step up into that responsibility, to treat us to this last meal together before he goes off to make his place in the world. A little funny, to be the one treated. But a joy to be the guest of such a good guy.

Andy is graduated!

I’m actually fairly remiss here. Last weekend, Andy, my oldest son, graduated from U.Va. And somehow, I never posted. Congratulations Andy! Needless to say, we’re very proud. Also needless to say, it seems a bit strange to have my oldest no longer in college.

We had arranged for Andy and Kate (both of whom were students at UVA this past semester) to extend their stays in their dorm rooms through the graduation. As a result, Kate and Diana stayed in her dorm room, while Julie and I stayed with Andy in his. Andy’s room was not as cramped as you might think, as he had one bedroom in a suite of two rooms. Julie slept on the couch in the living room of the suite, while I slept in the other bedroom.

In order to show that though graduated he can still worry his parents, on Friday night Andy told us that he was heading over to the psychology department to work on some things that he’s going to be doing there over the summer. (Andy’s lined up a summer job at the university, one that shows promise of being extended into a full-time job past the summer.) He told us not to wait up for him.

At around five AM, I woke up. Andy was not in his room. Julie and I conferred, and around 6:00 AM I wandered over to Gilmer Hall, home of the psych department. The doors were locked, but I must have looked suspicious, trying to get into Gilmer, as the university police soon showed up. I explained that I was looking for my soon-to-graduate son, and that he was working all night before graduating in Gilmer Hall. (Yeah, right, I could see them thinking.) So the three of us wandered through Gilmer’s halls, looking for Andy. And all the while, I entertained a series of questions that left me with the realization of how little Andy tells us.

“Who is he working for?”"Someone in the psych department.”

“Who?”

“I don’t know.”

“What office?”

“I don’t know.”

“Does he drink?”

“I don’t think so.”

“Does he have a girlfriend?”

“I don’t know.”

We never did find Andy. (Later, he claimed that he had been behind a locked door working in an office. I suppose I’ll have to trust him on this.)

Anyway, he’s graduated now, with a BS double-majoring in Computer Science and Psychology. Go enjoy some pictures of the occasion, on the web at: http://www.flickr.com/photos/jdzik/

You can recognize Andy easily. He’s the graduate wearing jeans and a t-shirt under his gown.