Sure. Given, but then what does it mean for me when the dog starts resembling the mannerisms of The Girl? I guess I’m moving down the doggy hierarchy, huh?

http://feeds.newscientist.com/c/749/f/10897/s/c6ff8f0/l/0L0Snewscientist0N0Carticle0Cmg20A7277140B50A0A0Ewhy0Edogs0Eand0Etheir0Eowners0Eare0Eso0Ealike0Bhtml0DDCMP0FOTC0Erss0Gnsref0Fonline0Enews/story01.htm

The Short Story? I’ve given up the brew for a couple months, though I’m not yet a week in, for a very good reason.

Now… before you call me out on some sort of un-skeptical method behind such madness let me add that it has nothing to do with a wacky, magical detox formula I bought off ebay, as a result of some unprovable evil plot by coffee importers to destroy third world nations, or because I’m rebounding from some skewed evidence railing against caffeine I discovered published in the local news rag. None of the above. I can’t say much about any of those kooky theories (all of which I just made up, even though my imagination is probably plagiarizing from real misinformation.) I’ve merely given up coffee — temporarily — because of some timing issues.

Huh?

Let me back up a few steps and explain via The Long(er) Story: And I’ll start by just explaining that I run. I run distance. I lace up one of my four pairs of shoes, strap on a GPS-enabled watch, and plod along through the streets and trails as I train for half-marathons, a distance of just over twenty-one kilometers (or thirteen miles for our friends down south) that is officially about an hour of training longer than when most people would just stop and declare running a very stupid endeavor. Two-hours on a very good day, and add a bit more for those lazy Sunday mornings. It really should be declared self-torture and outlawed by some humanitarian government somewhere, but no. It’s… well… difficult to explain other than to just say: I run.

The problem is, and this has as much to do with scheduling around fatherhood responsibilities as anything else, I mostly get to run in the mornings. (‘Get to…’ being the operative phrase here.) And after a couple years of training I’ve discovered that (a) I can’t usually stand to drink coffee before I run, and (b) I have little appetite for much of anything (even coffee) for about an hour after I run. Gather all that together with the uncomfortable reality that at around ten in the morning, without my cup-o-joe the caffeine withdrawal headache starts to set in. I mean, wham! The steel spike of a nail of it starts to drive slowly into my frontal cortex, and while that alone would all add up to an uncomfortable kind of day, you might imagine, there’s more; There is another nasty factor about long distance running: no matter the preparation, it tends to lead me down the road of mild dehydration. And I’m not sure how your biology works, but with mine dehydration always equals headache.

Yup. Double headache. (Is that even possible?) Let’s call it a double-pain headache.

So, you might see my issue. Timing. I don’t tend to get to drink coffee on running mornings until about noon ( accounting for my summer training) which usually means by about eleven in the morning I’ve been stuck with a double-whammy of a headache. Not fun.

And thus, coffee sabbatical, or at least until after my race; The theory? No withdrawal and half the pain… but for now, less than a week into the experiment, it just leaves me a little grumpy without my morning brew.

Of course, my current state of self-employ means I’ve needed to be a little more frugal on new acquisitions.  But just recently, I was particularly excited: an otherwise sad trip to the Apple store in the mall (where I had to drop my Macbook for some significant brain surgery) found me scoring a cheap copy of Zombie Fluxx from one of those little kiosks I usually ignore.

Zombies and Fluxx, together at last!

Podblack (though she likely doesn’t recall) prompted me via a blog comment a few years back to try the original deck and it has become a top five fave around our circles. I’ve even got the extended family hooked, and that’s saying something. Though, I never did properly thank Podblack for the introduction.

Alas, the Zombie version, though brimming with awesomeness for yours truly, probably pushes the buy-in date back a few years for The Girl. I showed her a few of the cards and she was not impressed. She sneered a little, then nearly smushed the card batting it away. I guess we’ll be doing a few more laps on the Candyland trail first.

http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/scienceblogs/pharyngula/~3/0591D5o0Y5I/hey_uk_how_do_you_reconcile_th.php

Ritualism, and in that order.

Lately, and this evening being no exception, we’ve been adding the list. I’ve been hearing the faint voice summoning me from down the hall, a tired little cry beckoning and calling: “Daddy. You forgot to spray for monsters.”

Ah, imagination. How cruel a mistress you be. So many wonders to share, yet the taint of ill-begotten fears hangs upon you. Around what corners, and in what shadows, do your plots hide. A rich jungle of ideas strung together with creativity and ingenuity, in the daylight hours an explorers paradise yet when night falls… oh, right.

There is little rationality to be had at bedtime when monsters may lurk behind the door. I ask. I hope. I prod the rational mind hiding behind the near-sleep eyes of The Girl, fostering the unreality a little deeper in hopes that logic prevails. Alas, but there is nothing to be had of such ploys. Monsters are seemingly beyond logic, fearless of inconsistencies in their very existence, but subject to fatality at the slightest whiff of Dad’s Famous Monster Spray.

Perhaps tomorrow night logic will prevail. Or perhaps not.

(Or, at least I haven’t posted here yet.)

But it is coming. Really.

If your here, say hi…

1100 AM - Twyla of www.stopjenny.com is presenting on the anti-anti-vaccination movement, the science of immunity and vaccines, and vaccine fallacies.

1130 AM – Panel on civility and skepticism, staring @skepticsean, Brent, Marc-Julien and Ryan. How not to be a skeptic jerk. Avoiding negative skeptical confrontation. The value of finding common ground. The side-effects of ‘accomidationism’ by those with evidence? Reasonable timelines for changing minds?

1200 AM – Brian on social sciences and skepticism. Research on how we think and reason. Metacognition = thinking about thinking. Arguing outside your field of confidence linked to metacognition?

1330 PM – Brent (of the Greater Edmonton Skeptics) on the importance of skepticism. Examples of failures where skepticism was lacking. Examples of skepticism yielding positive outcomes. What has skepticism done for us and why do we need it?<

1400 PM – Me on raising critical thinking kids – what else? I’ll post details of my presentation later.

1430 PM – Desiree (skepticallyspeaking.com) and Trevor on skeptical activism. Beyond being right: Out of the blogs and onto the streets. Action for a pro-science society.

And that’s a wrap! Congrats everyone on great talks and a great camp!

How I Spent My Summer Vacation, and What it Taught Me About Critical Thinking

It was sometime around eleven pm on our last evening in the RV-cluttered, government-operated, lakeside campground when The Girl (who we thought was sleeping) summoned us to the tent and as humbly, as a nearly-three year old can manage, told us that she needed some help with brushing her teeth. Um, really? Yup. She had painted her doll, herself, and half of the contents of the tent with the minty-fresh slime of warm toothpaste from her mother’s bag. We suppressed our nagging mix of annoyance and bewilderment, stifled our laughter, and started dragging sticky items from our rain-dampened dark tent and into the fully-serviced warmth and running water relative cleanliness of grandma and grandpa’s trailer one site over. And something in my head clicked. Epiphany. You know how those work, right? Something that had been processing away in my skull for many months regarding the trials and tribulations of my life found a weird little pattern-based metaphor in the whole little adventure in the woods and it all started to make an odd bit of sense.

Now I must retreat once more to some additional background information to continue bringing meaning to this anecdote: earlier that day we had had something of a heated arguement on the definition of ‘camping’ in the context of what counted as true camping-camping, and what didn’t. My assertion, boy scout that I once was, stood firmly grounded in some quasi-idealistic notion of shivering in the deep woods, wrapped in a blanket eating a poorly cooked meal from a tin plate around a low fire and nursing a collection of bug bites and sore muscles acquired on the day-long trek from where we left the car and where we eventually pitched our tent. This, of course, was contrasted with current so-called camping experience of playing card games in a heated trailer, drinking microwaved beverages, and occasionally updating our Facebook status on our cell phone while one trailer and about ten feet over our neighbors watched movies on their 37 inch LCD over the never-ending drone of their air conditioner. True enough, we were all out in the bushes… but camping? Not by my definition. Not really.

Maybe I wasn’t enjoying the moment. Fair enough, my check in with the wired world was sending me updates from TAM8 via Twitter bits and Facebook pics of my skeptical bros downing pints with Richard Dawkins et al. All that while I swatted mosquitoes and nursed a warm beer cringing every time some kid shouted to his friends, or some big diesel truck grumbled by either one shaking The Girl once again from her nearly sleeping state. I’d rather have been in Vegas, of course. But I wasn’t. And my father quotient sucked because roasting marshmallows with my daughter and niece was second in my mind to not only that skeptical conference but that nagging regret that accompanies one’s thoughts any time life altering events blister with the seeping could-have-been moments of some other alternate timeline.

Are you getting a sense for my state of mind yet? Adrift in what-ifs, idealizing against my reality, and stuck in one of those parenting moments where the reality I had chosen to pursue had created a problem (toothpaste chaos) that had an ideal solution (kitchen sink) that required me to surrender those ideals (what IS camping?) for simple practicality (a clean child.)

Here’s where you ask about the whole promised metaphor thing: “Tell us then… why is skepticism like a camping trip?”

And here’s where I extrapolate the perceptions of different realities between those two (apparently abstract) concepts and explain that it’s very much like camping in at least three ways: (1) everyone camps for different reasons, (2) everyone has a different definition, and thus expectation, from camping, and (3) camping is an uncomfortable sidestep from the day-to-day reality in which we all exist, but a sidestep we usually choose to take for reasons contingent on the aforementioned two previous points.

Now… wait for it… here is where you ask about the relevance: “Epiphany, schmiphany. What’s your point? ”

Alright, then. If you’ve thus far come up short on my subtle bit of roasted-marshmallow-induced quasi-enlightenment, here’s the abbreviated primer: I’ve been holding inside my head this idealized notion of the perfect camping trip for so long, pining for the long lost days of hard-core backpacking and survivalist trekking, that the moments in which I get to do something that roughly approximates camping — events that are oh so much different from that snobbish definition I tout — are lost on what it isn’t, rather than finding purchase in what it is. My moment of insight about my role as a skeptic struck me in tandem with my moment of insight about my role as a camper: ideals seldom exist anywhere but in our minds. And like camping, trying to be something beyond what I could simply offer as a schmuck of a dad trying to foster an atmosphere of critical thought in my house was an ideal that was ruining the day-to-day, moment-by-moment reality of how much I actually do enjoy just pontificating on skeptical topics, pursuing critical parenthood, and being part of the effort to bring a bit more rationality to an irrational world… and that — regardless of the consequences beyond my four walls, of which there have been multiple this year — the imperfect, non-ideal state of this effort is still an effort worth pursuing, and much better than dreaming of something less flawed that may never happen.

Obvious? Perhaps. But sometimes the evidence for our own flaws lies fixed in places quite unexpected… like a quiet lake in the middle of the prairies filled with squat, white recreational vehicles each stuffed with people who may not be camping as per the definitions of some, but are out enjoying something nearly as good.

But… well, maybe someday… a dad can still dream, right?

I returned home from The Amazing Meeting 2009 a year ago today with a new perspective on why I was doing this, on why I was hanging out my thoughts as the skepdad blogger. I had clarity, purpose, and a new, motivation to not only do this right, but to do it as right as I could. I was brimming with all sorts of fancy ideas about what that meant, and how to pursue it with a higher ideal. But in the wings, therein lurking and waiting to pounce, life was swirling into a chaos around me that wasn’t going to let that happen. Complexities, confusions, doubts… meta-skepticism. It happens. I was downsized. I was marginalized. I was trounced for having an opinion, my virtual self reduced to a pale, transluscent shell of its glory days. And I was left to lick my fatherly wounds and re-evaluate every bit of that existence and my role therein.

The funny thing is that now, today, after the confluence of a dozen threads of the tangled story I merely allude to here, I come back to this humble blog with the exact same conclusion with which I started it three years ago: and I’m still a skepdad who needs to write about that.

So, here is the reboot. I’ll be remodeling a bit, soon. Tweaking. Trimming and slimming. I’ll be writing about the events, thoughts, and trials that have brought me back to this domain. And — as soon as I find a real computer and don’t need to write blog posts from my phone — I will be reprising this role.

I hope you all didn’t go too far.