number one with a bullet

well the night before last we saw a highly condensed version of "the music man", staged by the fifth grade class of the nearby school where cicadashell junior (the younger) attends. brief, and charming, especially the opening scene which came off the best, we thought. there is a smattering of talent in that class, along with the usual mixture of strangled incomprehension and fear you get with 10-11 year olds. the younger son was comfortable in his small speaking parts.

what was striking, however, was afterward when the afterglow-go-out-for-iced-cream plans were unfolding (at that time, both ms. cicadashell and the older son retreated to our house to watch "24"). the younger son convinced his good friend (a budding thespian who played the role of professor hill) to come along, and there was another kid who got in on it as well. but then a fourth boy, who could be described as "unpopular", invited himself along as well, which prompted the younger son to make furtive gestures to me to the effect of "no don't let him", which i of course ignored. so then the younger son decides to ride with his friend, and there i am taking two boys whom i do not know especially well down to washtenaw dairy, ostensibly to have iced cream with my son, who is coming along a little later, with another family. of course these boys have no problem with this, so why should i? really the problem i had was the 11-year-old boys' concept of a social pecking order, and who is cool, and who is not. the one boy, who does have a well-earned reputation as a discipline problem, was actually quite interesting to listen to in the car, and to shepherd through the iced-cream-cone-buying process. it seemed clear enough that he has a million things racing through his mind constantly, and that sorting them all out in a way that affords smooth interaction with his peers, or adults for that matter, is something of a challenge. there were no issues or incidents, at washtenaw dairy or on the way home with this boy and the younger son, whom i was able to convince to ride with me because, after all, it waasn't out of my way to take him home; we live together. but there was something touching about dropping this other boy off at his house and watching him just run like the dickens through the carport and around to some back door, just a bundle of energy and not having any apparent problem with the world, despite the world's excess of attitude. the only real downside was that the younger son popped his fall out buy cd into the player, and now i've "sugar we're goin' down" stuck in my head. sub-optimal...


everything has looked up today, however, since i finally got that pesky FEQ model of the lower river des peres to behave. i had made numerous adjustments to the number of nodes, to slopes (to do away with transitions), to cross section approximations, and was still left with the model crashing right at the beginning of the big january 12 rain event. i was ready to attribute it all to the extreme nature of the rainfall, and the whopping volumes of water just pouring from the forest park tubes (see picture) into the almost empty channel, this wall of water that simply makes the shallow-water approximation hopelessly invalid, when i discovered an error in the definition of one of the cross sections. as it turns out, that was the cross section where i was having inexplicable problems, where from upstream there was this dam-break wave coming from the tubes but from downstream the goddammit model was insisting on going supercritical in the upstream direction (which makes no sense), the depth dropping to nearly zero and the velocity skyrocketing and the froude number acheiving unknown magnitudes. but it was all the goofy cross section, which was acting as an unrealistic constriction. fixed that, the model runs, it's all good. now on to WASP/EUTRO5...