The Best Birthday Party Ever!

It's hard to believe, dear readers (if, indeed, I have any readers), that FBS has been with us for three years. It seems like just yesterday that we were trying to figure out how to not break this tiny little thing that had come home with us from the hospital. (Actually, we tried our best - I got into a minor car accident on the way home from the hospital with Mrs. Packman and three-day-old FBS. That was fun.) At the same time, it is hard to imagine life without him, or even remember what is was like before his arrival.

So what's a dad to do when his oldest son has a birthday? Easy. He tries to put on the Best Birthday Party Ever. Easier said than done!

However, when your three year old son is as obsessed with firetrucks as mine is, and you volunteer with the local ambulance, the solution becomes obvious:

You have a firetruck birthday party!


As is the fashion these days, we sent off invitations to all of FBS' classmates at his preschool, and about a half dozen of them came over to our house on Sunday morning. (This was, of course, preceeded by much gnashing of teeth as as Mrs. Packman and I cleaned up for the guests).

After playing in the house for about a half and hour, flashing lights could be seen through the front windows, and we lined the kids up outside.



It's at this poit that one mother showed up with her daughter and got very concerned that perhaps the birthday candles had gotten out of control:

Friend's Mom: Is everything OK?
Packman: Yes, the firetruck is here for the party.
Friend's Mom: No way! My husband is going to be so mad that he's not here!

It was a big hit with the kids, too!

Waiting their turn

Riding in the truck

Mini-man got in on the action, too!

FBS comes to visit me at the ambulance service all the time, and he's obviously very comfortable in our ambulance!

The firefighters seemed to have a great time playing with the squeeling kids, and the kids were really pumped up to get to play on the truck. I was beginning to worry about how we'd get them all back inside for the rest of the party, but mother nature helped out and it started to rain. This was actually a good thing, as we told the kids the truck had to go before it got too wet, and they believed us.

So we all went back inside for pizza, followed by the traditional (for FBS) Doald Duck cake:


So, I want to give a big shout out and thank you to the Long Beach, NY, volunteer fire department for helping to make FBS' third birthday party a great success.

He sure thougth it was the Best Birthday Party Ever!

Fire Chief

Feed Me! (Fresh, Healthy Food!)

So a few years back I read the book Omnivore's Dilemma by Michael Pollan. It really struck a chord with me, and I decided to try and take more responsibility for the food that I feed my family.


Living in Brooklyn at the time, this was not an easy thing to do. We considered joining a CSA, but most of the folks we knew who did so were overrun with esoteric veggies they had no idea how to cook (kohlrabi, anyone?). While not a bad thing, per se, with an infant around it did not seem like a good idea for us. I also had friends who were raising laying hens in the backyard of their brownstone in Park Slope, but Mrs. Packman nixed that idea pretty quick - she liked having what little backyard she had free of chicken poop.


Now that we have moved out of the city, however, my options have grown. First things first, I now have room to try my hand at some gardening. I have learned that there is much more to it than just putting some plants in the ground and picking veggies!


I found some plans online to build a "salad table" for growing salad greens. It turned out pretty well:



From left to right there is spinach, romaine lettuce, and red cabbage. This was fun, but it provided us with salad for all of one week. Obviously I'll have to do better next time around. I also planted tomatoes, which I've had great luck with in the past in pots, but we've had no sun this year and lots of rain, so while the plants are growing well, not so much fruit.


As for protein, since I live on the water, fish seemed like the obvious answer. I loved fishing as a kid, and I've discovered that I still love it, though I have a great deal to learn!



That's a fluke, which is what they call summer flounder here on Long Island. Sadly, it's not a keeper. They have to be 21.5 inches long to keep(!) so this guy got thrown back. I was pretty happy to have caught anything, however. My goal for the summer is to pull at least one keeper striped bass out of the local waters. I may have missed my chance last weekend when I saw birds dive bombing the shore, but I didn't have my gear with me. Two guys each got a fish within a few minutes of starting to cast!


I also cooked up a pheasant last weekend that was shot by a colleague of mine. All I can say is, WOW. It was described by a friend who is somewhat of a gourmand as an "uber chicken." I just called it good eating. I'm going to have to give this hunting thing some serious consideration this fall. Being able to eat venison, ducks, pheasants, and goose all year that I shot myself seems like a very cool idea.


I'm open to any ideas for taking more responsibility for my food that any of you may have. Please take a moment to share!

Where is Packman?

Been a while since I've posted here. but now that the weather has taken a turn for the warmer, it's time for the adventures to begin again, so say tuned.


It's hard to sit down in front of the computer and bang out blog posts, however, when this awaits you outside:




Mrs. Packman and I have started a new - and very relaxing - tradition of taking the boys for a walk along the boardwalk in the evening after dinner and before they go to bed. FBS loves to see the sun setting:




He considers himself to be very lucky when he sees airplanes overhead (which, since we live right on the Kennedy Airport flightpath is really most of the time). And he is always keeping a lookout for pirate ships on the horizon.

Life, in general, is very good.

RESCUE!

Back when I was in college, I spent four years volunteering as an Emergency Medical Technician on a squad we ran on our campus. It was actually quite a lot of fun, especially for someone who thought he was pre-med. While the idea of going to medical school was quickly abandoned, being an EMT gave me just enough knowledge to be dangerous, and allowed me to walk around campus with a radio and occasionally drive with lights and sirens blaring. In truth, most of our calls consisted of cleaning up the mistakes that fellow students made after drinking too much.

Now that I have moved out of the big city, I decided that getting back into EMS would be fun. My town is covered by a volunteer squad, and when I went down to introduce myself, they were happy to have the help. While I'm not currently certified as an EMT (I'll need to take a course two nights a week for six months starting in June), I do get to drive the trucks and help out when needed.

Our squad is quite well equipped:

369, our ambulance

366, our rescue truck

We also handle water rescue during the summer (we're a beach community with a large vacationing population on summer weekends), so we've got a few boats at our disposal too:

This is a Zodiac RIB with a water canon for marine fire fighting. It's in the water from April to October.

This smaller Zodiac is the surf rescue boat, and is towed to the beach by the 366 truck when needed.

We're also warehousing a firetruck for a neighboring department while they renovate their firehouse.

FBS likes this firetruck the best, but it's not ours.

We've also got a pair of Kawasaki jetskis for surf rescue. My plan is to qualify as a rescue swimmer this summer, so that I can help out with water rescue calls, and continue to work on my EMT training so I can be more useful than just as a gopher and driver on medical calls.

There is a big difference between this and my college squad: These calls tend to be people who've called 911 for a real reason. In the month that I've been on the squad I've helped out with a cardiac arrest, a drink driver hitting a tree, and a diabetic coma, as well as a bunch of less stressful situations.

I certainly like the adrenaline rush of responding to calls as much as anyone, but I also really enjoy the feeling of helping to make my community a safer place. It's also been a great way to meet people, since my family and I are still new to town.

If you get the opportunity to become involved in volunteer emergency response - perhaps your volunteer fire department, ambulance corps, police auxiliary, or even CERT team, I think you'll find it to be a very rewarding experience!

Without giving information that would violate anyone's privacy, I'll post a note about any particularly interesting calls I go out on going forward.

Domestic Adventures

I knelt down and felt the cold of the snow sucking heat away from my body through the uncomfortably thin material of my pant legs. Adjusting my down jacket for added warmth against the 18-degree night air, I asked my wife to aim her flashlight in front of me to I could get started on the job ahead.

Was Packman preparing to field dress a large beast to feed his family through the winter? Perhaps he was going to splint the broken limb of a friend so they could make it back to civilization and medical care? Or maybe he was about to provide mouth-to-mouth rescue breathing to the beautiful young maiden who had choked on a powerbar during a winter hike? (What was she doing wearing a bikini in the freezing cold anyway?)

Nope. None of these exciting sounding scenarios happened last night. Rather, I was kneeling in the freezing cold trying to relight the pilot light of our home’s furnace so it would heat our house.

I headed up for bed at around 11pm and when I tried to wash my face I discovered that there was no hot water. No big deal, I thought. I had lived in large apartment buildings for years where losing hot water for a few hours at night was a regular occurrence when maintenance was being performed.

Then I remembered that I do not live in a large apartment building anymore. I live in a single-family house. With hot-water baseboard heating. In other words, no hot water, no heat. I recalled the radio telling me it was 18-degrees outside. Crap. I checked the thermometer in the bedroom and it read 62 degrees. Not dangerously cold, but significantly below the 68 degrees the thermostat was set for.

Plan “A” for keeping the family warm was quickly established. I woke Mrs. Packman and told her of our predicament. We procured an electric space-heater from storage and put it in Mini-man’s room to keep him warm, and decided that if it got really cold we’d bring FBS into bed with us under the down comforters. We’d all be reasonably warm until the plumber could get to us in the morning and figure out what went wrong.

By the time we figured this out and repositioned the electric heater the temperature had dropped an additional two degrees to 60 and I began to worry. Our furnace is located in a shed on the outside of the house. With the temperature dropping as fast as it was, how long would it be before pipes started to freeze and real damage was done?

Plan “B” was quickly put into place. This plan involved Packman attempting to make repairs on potentially dangerous appliances when he has absolutely no training or experience doing so.

Mrs. Packman and I dutifully bundled ourselves up and headed out to the furnace. I removed the front cover and carefully read the warnings about fire and explosion should I do anything wrong with this natural gas-fired device. Great. Then I read the instructions for re-lighting the pilot light. I’ve had pilot lights go out on stoves before and was able to re-light them with no troubles, and it certainly would explain why out furnace was nothing more than a very cold chunk of steel and aluminum. I sniffed around the bottom of the furnace where the instructions said the pilot was located and smelled a faint smell of gas, which was consistent with the pilot being out, so I decided to proceed.

Following the instructions I shut off the electricity, dissected the burner and turned off the gas valve to the pilot light. We stood in the doorway letting the cold wind blow any accumulated gas out of the shed to (hopefully) prevent an explosion when I tried to re-light the pilot. Did I mention it was very cold?

Then things got really interesting. The instructions said to turn the gas control to “pilot” and press and hold a red button before lighting the pilot light with a match. The only problem was that the gas valve had only two positions, “on” and “off,” and there was no read button to be found.

Getting desperate, I went for the brute force method. I held a long-handled lighter to the pilot light and turned the gas back on. Not much happened, but I didn’t get blown up, which I guess was a good thing. I kept the lighter on the pilot light for a while and noticed the flame change color a bit. Maybe this actually worked? I let the lighter burn out and saw no flame remaining and my heart fell. It was going to be a cold night.

With a heavy heart and cold fingers, I re-assembled the furnace and prepared to head inside. I was sure I had failed. However, when I turned the power back on I was rewarded with the unmistakable sound of the furnace cycling on with the burners firing right up. Success!

Mrs. Packman and I headed back to bed to snuggle until the heat came up.

What did Packman learn?

- Being unable to keep your house and family warm in sub-freezing weather is an extremely uncomfortable position to be in.
- Keeping detailed instructions on or near critical appliances can be a real lifesaver.
- Wives are very impressed when you fix important big things, even if you’re not sure you did it correctly.
- Not blowing up your family or burning down your house when working with gas appliances is key.
- Adventure can be found where you least expect it.

Stay warm everybody!

I'm Back

Things have been crazy in the life of Packman. Since my last post:

• We unexpectedly moved (is that possible?) out of Brooklyn to a beach town on the south shore of Long Island.
• We had an au pair from Finland move in with us.
• The au pair's father got very sick and she decided to go back to Finland to be with him. (Just for the record, I fully supported her decision and feel it was the right thing to do.)
• I got a new job.
• My mother in law moved in with us to help with childcare.
• I got a promotion at my new job. (I'm just that good.)

Things should settle down soon, as a new au pair is arriving from Brazil in a week and a half (is my wife great, or what? We have a 21-year old girl from Brazil moving in with us!). I hope then to pick up with some more regular posting about adventures in and around New York, perhaps with more of an emphasis on the around part, now that we no longer live in "The City."

As a preview there's:

Apple Picking

Costumes

Rocket Ships

Seashell Gathering

Cute Kids Getting Messy

So please stay tuned. The blog is not dead. Packman has just been very busy!

Voting

This is not a political post.

So Monday night as I was putting FBS to bed I told him I was going to take him to vote with me on election day. His response was highly amusing. Our conversation went something like thus:

Me: I'm going to take you to vote with me tomorrow morning.
FBS: Ohh, my like to vote! (FBS has not figured out the personal pronoun "I" yet)
Me: You do?
FBS: Yes, we go on water!
Me: ????
FBS: Mommy come on water too?
Me: Water?
FBS: Yes, we go vote on water.
Me: Oh, no, we're going to VOTE, not on a BOAT.
FBS: We not go on water?
Me: No.

Somehow, he did not seem dissappointed. It was very cute. Later, Mrs. Packman had a similarly amusing conversation:

Mrs Packman: FBS, are you going to vote for Obama?
FBS: No!
Mrs P: Are you going to vote for McCain?
FBS: No!
Mrs P: Well, who are you going to vote for?
FBS: My gonna vote for Daddy!

I love that kid! He also told his teacher that he voted for daddy. I guess in about 16 years I'll have to run for something so that he can vote for me for real.