what goes around comes around

I let some fellow university employees suck up my air conditioning on Monday, and they've repaid me by delivering me ice cream. Not only that, but it's Crumbs Along the Mohawk, which sounds meh but is actually one of my favorites. Mmmm.

or on the bottom

(xkcd.com, of course)

very much a soccer mom

C always wants to play center in soccer. And he often gets to because he’s proactive about asking the coaches for it and he’s wily enough to have learned that if he volunteers to play goalie for a quarter (which none of the kids really like) he’s given first pick as to what he plays next. It’s not fair to say he’s no good at it- he’s about average- but he naturally plays defensively. He positions himself between the ball and his team’s goal, he hangs back to see how things are playing out before jumping in, and he’s more likely to make heroic efforts to get control of the ball if the other team is about to score. If he gave up the glory of playing offense he’d go from being a passable forward to become a sensational fullback. But he doesn’t buy it. *sigh*

bits

June 1st, the annual date when we commit to only buying local produce, crept up without our notice. Perhaps this is a good thing, since my first thought when I realized was “damn, I should have bought more grapes and stocked up on some canned tomatoes.” Now I can’t cheat. Dan’s birthday celebration on Saturday led to multiple transgressions anyway (lemons and limes for drinks, which we agreed last year to make exceptions for; a bottle of rum, though I suppose we allow molasses anyway; and potato chips, the status of which remains uncertain- I say they’re against the rules, Dan says they’re not).

Our first CSA pickup provided us with radishes (which C suddenly likes), lettuce, spinach, bok choy, cilantro, and a mystery green (smells like broccoli, has a bit of a radish-like bite when raw that it loses when cooked). The first sugar snap peas are ripening in the garden, and we’ve harvested all of six tiny strawberries so far. We’re finishing up the last of our frozen black raspberries while eagerly tracking the status of this year’s crop (currently blossoming, as are the blackberries).

I’ve put tomatoes, scarlet runner beans, and pumpkins in the garden; basil and zucchini will go in tonight or tomorrow. Dan sacrificed the pale ale from the mixed case he was given for his birthday so our slugs can drown in organic beer.

A wanted her hair in braids on Saturday and was incredibly cute. One of these days I’ll invest in a comb so I can actually part her hair, rather than tie it into random clumps.

C used string to set up a spiderweb in his room. He hung matchbox cars from it too. I’m not sure if they were intended as decorative or to warn us of our fate if we dared to enter. Some things I'm afraid to ask.

Dan goes to Seattle this week and after that will be cutting his hours in half. Which is great because it solves child care problems and will give him a chance to do more work locally and actually see people, but a little sad because it was cool to be making so much money. Not that we were doing anything too exciting with it, but I was just getting used to the idea that buying prepackaged crackers didn’t have to be a special event. We’ll still have plenty (though less to throw at the mortgage) but we should take the time to look at the numbers and decide how much we have to play with.

should caregiving be prioritized over a really good gig?

I like this article on workplace flexibility because it includes the suggestion that flexibility should be available to ALL employees. Reasonable work schedules are often only provided to workers who have an "excuse" for needing them. Even though I have only benefited from such arrangements- my hours were reduced at PRA during my pregnancy, and I had increased flexibility at the UW because I had an infant- I see it as inherently unfair to those who either work out more dependable child care coverage (having a parent home full-time; expensive day care) or who dote on their dogs rather than their children*.

In some countries employees may refuse overtime if it interferes with their child care needs. Honestly, I think ANY employee should be allowed to refuse- if someone doesn't want to work because they'd rather play rugby, an employer shouldn't be able to prevent that. The employer can instead sweeten the deal with enough incentives to get employees to work more voluntarily. There's a reason that industries that require overtime need to pay well.

No one else at PRA was able to chop two hours off their work day just because they felt like it, yet business proceeded as usual without my presence. (Really, it was to their benefit- I did the same amount of work for 20% less pay.) I wonder why the East Coast is so much less open to the freedom and flexibility part-time work offers both employee AND employer than the West Coast.

(Another cool thing from the article: an EU directive requires part-time workers' salaries and benefits to be the pro-rated equivalent of full-time workers' salaries. Wow. Something the article didn't mention: how important socialized medicine is to any of these options.)

* Dan did in fact call in to work once because Paco was sick. And he didn't even lie about it. But I doubt most people can get away with that.

it's the manufacturing, stupid

I hate that so much "green building" research, investment, and of course marketing is focused on new houses. (Example here, with free plans even.) While it may make people feel better about the brand-new houses they're building (usually on formerly undeveloped land), in most cases the manufacture and transport of the materials are far larger energy-wasters than living in an older, less-than-ideally constructed home. It's better than building a standard McMansion, yes, but not better than getting by with a house that's already there.

Some exceptions may exist- in some cases, it might be environmentally benign to build with materials gathered or harvested from or near your own land- stone, strawbale, cordwood. But improving existing housing stock almost always has a better payoff.

irksome

The local youth softball outfit is called the Bethlehem Tomboys. This bothers me but I can't quite articulate why.

C still hasn't seen it

Indiana Jones: directly responsible for dragging out World War II.

how long have you been keeping this from me?

Did everyone except me know that Venice doesn't have any cars? How cool is that?

in which I account for my filthy kitchen floor

Articles and entire books about making your own household cleaners have been around for years now. I've never really understood them. They generally list all sorts of combinations of basic ingredients to mix together in spray bottles or shaker jars to use on specific surfaces, which seems like far more work than necessary.

Maybe it's just that I have a low standard of cleanliness? I clean pretty much everything with just water. If it doesn't come off I'll add dish soap. If it's really stuck on there I'll add baking soda. I don't need premixed containers of Borax and whatever taking up space in my cabinets to get the job done. But then, I don't care if my floors are whiter than white either.

I suppose the purpose of these recipes is to replace the specific products that most people have been (inexplicably) buying for years with an alternative that can be put in the same kind of container and used in the same way. Maybe this makes the transition easier for some people. But I think that it (a) unnecessarily complicates the process, (b) focuses overly much on the commercial products, making the alternatives seem like weak replacements, and (c) encourages obsessiveness over housework ("even if you don't want to poison your kids with chemicals, you should still be spending lots of time cleaning!"). A lot of earthy-crunchy tips seem to focus on making life harder when rethinking your goals and standards may be a better way to go. Your goal is to have a clean house without nasty chemicals and disposable packaging? Well, try using what you have and see if it works, and reconsider whether it's really necessary to scrub the counters with disinfectant every day. Want to stop using toxic lawn chemicals? Just stop and see what happens; if you don't like the results, look for some fixes, but you don't immediately need to start applying liquid manure and attacking weeds with a propane torch. Really, dandelions are no less attractive than hollyhocks.

university maintenance part 2

Speak of the devil. I just received this message off the staff listserv:

For your information:

Per a phone call received from the Plant Department, Matt and a student will be going around our building today doing maintenance (oiling) of all door hinges and locks.

love is a battlefield

Instead of a unity candle at their wedding, these people made a unity volcano. (It's around 2:05.) At first I thought, "wow, C would totally do that." Then I realized that by the time he's old enough to get married, he'll be away beyond that- he'll produce something much more explosive.

university maintenance

The maintenance guy I see most frequently in my building always calls me “doctor.” “Hey doctor, how’s it going?” I don’t generally hear him greeting anyone else so I don’t know if this is his standard moniker for everyone at the University or if I’m special. It cracks me up either way.

Maintenance work here is all centralized, resulting sometimes in surprising efficiency (large teams of men with tools appeared last month to remove all of the winter air conditioner covers at once; the breathless coordination via walkie-talkie lent the operation a SWAT-teamish air) and sometimes in shocking inefficiency (it took over a month to move a desk once because they weren’t allowed to do it or lend us a dolly so we could do it until a work order went through official channels). The staff at Alfred had a bit more flexibility. A man named LeRoy (pronounced Le Roy, not Leeroy) was detailed to the house I lived in my last two years there. The University had just purchased it so it needed a few tweaks to adapt it to student housing, which made LeRoy’s work a bit more interesting than otherwise- I suspect he enjoyed getting to spend his days designing and building customized shelving rather than oiling door hinges. Maybe that’s why he was so accommodating when we asked him to help with random tasks like tweaking our composter so it could be turned more easily or adjusting our faucets so they closed more tightly. Or maybe his years of experience with students made him realize that if we were left to our own devices, we were likely to REALLY screw things up. An ounce of prevention and all that.

Free Range Kids

Free Range Kids

As they get older, I'd like to give the kids more freedom. I feel that the risk of kidnapping is far outweighed by the psychological risks of being insulated and overprotected. But when community norms are such that letting kids do things on their own is an oddity, it's harder. I couldn't send C to the grocery store on his own without risking the cashier asking where his parents are, putting him in an awkward spot. The public library explicitly prohibits children under 12 from being left unattended. Some of the intersections near our house are not safe. And maybe because unsupervised kids are a rarity now, he would be a more likely target for a criminal?

I'm glad to live in a town that has amenities which permit more freedom to kids and teens than Clifton Park did- sidewalks, access to a bus line, streetlights. And I do see middle school aged kids doing things on their own- biking to friends', going to the coffee shop. But I wish we were a little bit closer to the time when Ramona Quimby had free reign of the neighborhood by the age of four.

And his shirt doesn't help either

C has had a series of "literature projects" due each week at school. Given his WWII obsession and unwillingness to follow directions, I suspect that his output has been rather different from what his teacher expected. The first week was supposed to be a "banner" about a book. C constructed a 3-dimensional military tank out of paper and attached it to a piece of paper (the "banner") with a string. I didn't see last week's, which was a mobile; I only hope that he didn't make the cutouts in the shape of swastikas.

This week, he was assigned to make a mask. His choice of character is not unexpected.

Yes, I tried to encourage him to choose anyone other than Hitler. Yes, I have an e-mail in to his teacher apologizing. Yes, I started to try to explain to him how Hitler's image remains very disturbing to a lot of people, but stopped when I realized I might be doing more harm than good. How to explain to a seven-year-old how the horrors of a war that ended before his grandparents were born are still so resonant?

of course it all ended in tears

Last weekend C wanted to test out a new boat he'd built and so we made a trip to Five Rivers.

A was shy.

The boat worked quite well.


Alas, immediately after this picture was taken, Dan slipped and both he and C fell in the water. C was furious and convinced that Dan had done this on purpose. He said he was not going home with us and stormed upstream. A started wailing, "I NEED MY BROTHER!" I send Dan ahead with A, assuring her that we would not actually allow C to spend the night outside at Five Rivers. I tailed C for about a quarter mile before convincing him to (begrudgingly) come home with us.

In a speech recently, Obama said the following:

We cannot prevail until we reduce our commitment in Iraq, which will allow us to do what I called for last August: providing at least two additional combat brigades to support our efforts in Afghanistan. This increased commitment in turn can be used to leverage greater assistance--with less, uh, fewer restrictions--from our NATO allies.

Whoa, nice on-the-fly less/fewer correction there, smart guy. Possibly staged to sew up the grammarian vote, I concede, but even that possibility is kind of endearing.

Someone on my floor at work corrected an improperly used "less" and a statistical error on a poster in the hallway. I desperately want to find out who so I can give him or her a kiss.

not a soccer mom

C's first soccer practice was last Monday. It was pouring. Half the kids didn't attend, and the coach thankfully sent them home early.

Lack of practice did not however prevent them from having a game on Saturday. It was at the "Soccerplex," which is a whole lotta fields alongside a highway, the noise of which adds to the chaos. Again, it was raining (though not as hard). Dan and I were surprised at the number of parents who enthusiastically delivered their children to the 9 a.m. game anyway- it was kind of a culture shock for us. We spent much of the morning entertained by the absurdity of the situation and wondering how many of the other parents felt the same way.

C played on half a field, with its lines painted across those of the full field, so it was confusing. That was perhaps the least of his team's problems however, since none of the kids had ever played together and C didn't appear to be the only one who only vaguely knew the rules. (Not our fault, by the way; Dan tried to go over them with him, but C rebelled halfway through.) A lot of the kids had been playing for years though (there were three-year-olds playing the next field over!) and some of them were surprisingly good, and even the clueless kids did better at maintaining their positions than I expected, especially given the well-meaning but disorganized coaching.

C surprised us by his ability to stand up for himself (requesting several times to play offense), management of his mistakes (he was able to shrug off being told to re-do a throw-in because both his feet hadn't been on the ground rather than getting upset/ embarrassed by it), and generally "normal" behavior. He didn't actually talk to any of the other kids, but he wasn't overtly antisocial either, which was good to see.

A was surprisingly patient for the first half of the game but then got understandably bored. She noticed the concession stand and tried to get us to utilize it rather slyly.

A: I'm hungry.
S: Here, Daddy packed potatoes for you!
A (whining): Daddy said he'd bring me a banana!
S: Really? Hmm- oh, here it is!
A (clearly disappointed that we hadn't screwed up): Actually I don't want a banana OR potatoes.
S: Well let me know if you decide you're hungry.
A: I want something different.
S: The game will be over in about 20 minutes.
A (giving up on subtlety): I think they sell food over there.
S: But we brought food with us, so we don't need to buy that.

I managed to distract her by running up and down hills for a while. But five minutes later, Dan appears and she again casually suggests a visit to the concession stand.

D: We didn't bring money for that.
A (bursting into tears): BUT YOU BROUGHT YOUR WALLET!!!!!

garden update, because I know you care

We had a week or so of summer, but now we're back to spring. The summer weather did make it easier to get the peas in our garden. This year we added a layer of horse manure in the fall and then put leaves on top; not the same depth of leaves as the previous year, but hopefully enough to keep most of the weeds down. (Though I have been shocked at the number that have already managed to work their way up through the 2-3" left of the leaves that were there all last season plus the 4 or so inches we put on top this year.) The only problem I had with the leaves last year was the slugs, and I have a few ideas for limiting their damage this year.

We plan on relying on a CSA for most of our produce this year since our gardening time is limited, so I didn't bother planting any greens. All we have in so far are sugar snap peas, which are coming up nicely. I'm putting in another row every week, which is supposed to extend our harvest; in the past I've found that the later plantings catch up to the first ones by the time the plants flower, but it's worth another try.

I harvested the few dried scarlet runner beans that managed to survive the deer last year. I'm not sure where to plant them since they obviously need to be inside the fence- I will sprout them first to make sure they're viable before devoting space to them.

Some of the strawberries' roots miraculously survived despite the damage inflicted by the deer last year. I'm not sure how best to maintain the plot (I'm not good at weeding, but don't want to use a heavy mulch because I don't want to drown out the strawberry plants) or prevent a recurrence of their annihilation. With Paco gone, we can only expect more trouble with wildlife.

We're clearing out our chest freezer to defrost it before we have greens to freeze, and discovered a forgotten bag of farmer's market broccoli that I used in dinner last night. Despite being thawed and refrozen when the freezer was accidentally unplugged, it was still amazing- much more tender and flavorful than commercially frozen broccoli. Maybe it's a different variety that's not chosen for its toughness? I wonder if it's too late to plant a spring crop.

more from the Fuehrer

I had the same reaction as this guy when C brought home his soccer "uniform" on Monday. Even more startling to me, however- the shirt is white. It is going to be covered in mud after the first game tomorrow, and I'm never going to get the stains out. Should I have a party for the whole team halfway through the season to convert from the white team into the tie-dyed team?

Given C's continuing independent study of WWII, I'm surprised he didn't point out the resemblance. Last night he asked me what started "the" war between China and Japan. I confessed to knowing nothing about it other than a vague sense of millenia-long cultural rivalries (which, of course, I could relate most closely to Nazism). He went on a bit about the U.S. not aiding Japan against China and Japan's motivations for bombing Pearl Harbor, which I also knew nothing about. I'll be needing to provide a lot more help with his research if he wants to trace back the antecedents to every war to the beginning of time. And I'll need to decide whether I should be actively engaging in my own study so I know what he's talking about.

gross but good

Fluffernutter bread.

Another reason to keep my posniesd username.

We don't actually live in Appalachia

Hudson-dregs swirl?

Name the new Stewart's flavors.

We'll miss you Paco

We lost our beloved Paco on Friday night. He died suddenly and unexpectedly; he was acting like his normal self for morning and afternoon walks, then after dinner started acting sick and weak. Within a couple hours he was bad enough that I drove him to an emergency vet clinic, but he died on the way...I had one hand on him and was telling him how much we loved him.

It turns out that he had advanced liver cancer, and died from fluid around his heart. If we had gotten him to a vet earlier, it would not have changed the outcome unfortunately, as they don't do liver transplants for dogs...I just wish we had known he was so sick--he never showed it until that night!

He blessed our home and was a loving, protecting member of our family for 10 years; our first "baby"... I still catch myself expecting to see him when I wake up in the morning, and when I come in the door from being out...Sometimes I hear something which sounds a little like him and I jump at the sound; it's funny how our senses and emotional mind play tricks on us, even while our rational mind knows the sad truth.

We are very relieved that he didn't suffer long, or at least as far as he let on, but are still in shock.

Tonight is the first thunderstorm of the year. At least he didn't have to be here for that...but selfishly how I wish he was, pacing and panting and following us like a shadow throughout the house.

We'll miss you Paco!

droogs

Despite the hideous color and antisocial message, I just had to buy this shirt.

darn librarians

I suppose I should be glad that the school librarians trouble to notice the books that interest C and direct him toward others they think he might like. But I kind of wish they weren't actively encouraging his current fascination with Hitler. His current pick is "World War II: Battles and Leaders." He asked me why Hitler commit suicide, what an atomic bomb does, and the definition of "execute." Maybe I should appreciate the fact that the discussion enabled a conversation that didn't involve him storming off in a huff, but....

When I casually asked why he liked WWII books so much lately, though, he said "because I want to think of ways to stop wars from happening again." Thinking that he'd come up with a rather sophisticated prevarication custom-designed to make me happy, I tried to elicit something more antisocial. "Sometimes, even though I don't like to think about people getting hurt, it's exciting for me to read about battles." He looked at me like I was insane, and said, "It's not for me." So just maybe we're raising a little pacifist after all.

We have some 18' chestnut beams

Matchup for reused building materials.

I participate in a strange shadow economy

We just traded a chicken pox exposure "opportunity" for a pint of homemade maple syrup.

wheat prices

When I picked up our last 50-pound bag of flour (organic whole wheat pastry from Champlain Valley Milling) the price had jumped so much that I embarrassed myself by suggesting that Lee had made an error in pricing. It was nearly double what I paid six months ago. Apparently it's not just the local stuff, though. Possible bright side- maybe it will convince more Northeaster farmers to grow wheat?

he's very proud of himself

C's high scores.

water is cheap

Seattle stops buying bottled water. I've always wondered why water coolers were such a mainstay of office employment; everyplace I've ever worked has provided them. Given that there is potable municipal water available from the tap, why is what little money that is set aside for employee perks is used to pay for water deliveries? I'd prefer doughnuts once a week myself, but to be inclusive of those people who actually care about their health, they could instead deliver fresh fruit.

(My favorite random perk was the monthly-ish catered lunch at PRA. I realize now that they could well afford that because they were underpaying all of us. But it both encouraged employee bonding and made us think well of management, all for around $20/ head. Good deal.)

more signs of spring

A couple of the bulbs I planted in 2002 are sending up shoots

I'm losing consistent reception for my preferred radio stations (based in Manchester and Amsterdam I believe; they only reliably make it to Delmar in the winter)

The maple trees along Delaware Avenue are budding

A wants to dawdle on walks, instead of hopping in the stroller for a quicker ride

Traffic at the fitness center around the corner has increased, presumably as people remember they're going to be wearing fewer clothes soon (usually, the New Year's resolution uptick lasts about a month; the warmer-weather jump lasts two or three)

The varieties of birds we're seeing (and especially hearing) are increasing- it's been several weeks since we saw our first robin, and last weekend we saw a V of geese

It's time to start planning the garden in earnest- somewhat trickier this year because we've joined a CSA, and we might want to focus on growing stuff we're less likely to get lots of through there. We do know that we can not have enough sugar snap peas, cherry tomatoes, broccoli, or basil to satisfy everyone so I can start there.

A new dress

A's new dress for late winter/spring that her Oma made...angle of photo makes it look shorter than it really is, but I guess I should have added more than an inch to my measurement of one of her old dresses...she's growing fast!

benefit of insomnia

Changing the clocks makes no difference! I'm no more tired than usual!

But loving the later daylight-
and signs of spring-
like the neighbor's lilacs budding-
Paco spending hours in the yard-
our basement flooding-
I'm going to try planting some peas this week; they probably won't make it but it's worth a shot.

someone just sent me this link

to which I just have to say HA HA HA HA

People with normal babies just have No Idea.

When do newborns get easier

why don't gypsies buy kids anymore?

A week of school vacation followed by Dan going away for four days followed by me succumbing to a really nasty cold and pinkeye is now topped off by C getting the chicken pox. He'll be feeling miserable and wreaking havoc on our work schedules for yet another week, presumably to be followed by A breaking out in spots. I'd been looking forward to a return to normalcy, but alas....

dilemma

I like the idea of having my home filled with beautiful things. I dislike knick-knacks and don't even care to have a lot of things on our walls, so it makes sense to make/ purchase functional things that are also aesthetically pleasing. This unfortunately conflicts with my unwillingness to fuss over care and maintenance. We spill food on our tablecloths, drop mixing bowls, wash everything in the dishwasher, and let our friends' kids bang things on the furniture. If I made (or spent a lot of money on) something like this hand-embroidered quilt, it wouldn't be long before the stitching was unraveling from the kids digging their fingernails into it and it had greasestains from the potato chips we eat in bed. And I'd be heartbroken over the destruction of something I put so much into. Bringing more art into our home would be decidedly easier if it weren't all so breakable....

no-VOC paint

We'll probably try this stuff the next time we paint. There's a Sherwin Williams in the Hannaford plaza on Delaware Avenue.

lyrics

It's hard to differentiate when A intentionally changes song lyrics (as we often do) from when she improvises because she can't remember the originals. But I've caught some funny ones lately.

There was a cat who liked to swim and Bingo was her name-o

There's a clean one and a dirty one and a pink one and a yellow one and they're all made out of ticky-tacky and they all look just the same

Oh give me a tree and I don't need to pee (tune of Home on the Range)

Away in a manger no crib for a bed, worked hard all my lifetime no help from my friends

Oh Christmas Tree, Oh Christmas Tree- how lovely are your friendships

Blocks of wonder, blocks of light, blocks of royal beauty bright

(I defy even those Christmas-ends-at-Ephiphany sticklers to phase out carols with a three-year-old.)

geeks and obsession

C has been playing these games during his computer time for a while. (My personal favorite is the one where you try to get cats to do the same thing simultaneously; he's more of a fan of the ones involving projectiles.) This morning he ran from his room shouting, "I made a top score! I made a top score!" and indeed he'd entered his name into the Top Score list. He was thrilled, and played some more and got his name in twice more (I wonder if the top scores are reset occasionally so it was easier for him to make the list today?) before running out of time.

We were especially amused because we'd just watched The King of Kong (Dan thought it would be a romantic pick for Valentine's Day). It's a documentary about people who are still trying to get top scores on 80's video games. Halfway through I said, "This is so weird maybe it's actually a mockumentary." Dan pointed out, "it's so weird it has to be real; no one could make this stuff up." It's a little too easy to picture C in that scene.

our house is on Google Street View

Apparently the pictures were taken while the contractors were here.

X is for-

What X is for.

I can add:
Xiphius
Xenophobia
X-Country Skis

unpaid advertising

Hey New Yorkers- try to make it to this. I know one of the people involved and it promises to be amazing.

Our weights may be naturally fixed within a 10-20 pound range. While it's possible to use diet and exercise to move above or below that range, it's really really hard. This doesn't surprise me too much based on my own experience (my own weight doesn't vary more than 20 pounds outside of pregnancy, though over the past couple years it has responded more to winter lethargy/ junk food) but it defies most of our cultural assumptions about fat. (via Shapely Prose)

I know someone who will like the dome

Sustainably designed gingerbread houses. We should encourage C's school to make edible compost bins, skylights, solar panels, strawbales, and wind turbines instead of trying to pass off graham crackers glued to milk cartons as gingerbread houses.

Wrong at so many levels. (from copyranter)

S: Does this outfit look okay?
D: It's cool in a kind of Star Trek meets Amish sort of way.

(So how am I supposed to use that kind of feedback? Can I wear this to work, or will it be too alluring for geeks with purity fetishes, or is it too bizarre to leave the house? Dan does not make a good fashion consultant.)

This would be more fun if it represented your actual DNA.

I'm thinking of breaking down and buying leather shoes, since my year-long search for synthetic replacements for my falling-apart shoes has been fruitless. I'm trying to decide what I can do to make myself feel less guilty about it- maybe a donation to PETA? I think that it's generally a cop-out to mitigate sins with cash (buying carbon offsets may be a feel-good solution, but really YOU SHOULDN'T BE FLYING SO MUCH) but I'm running out of other options. My feet are hard enough to fit that I can't get used ones off e-bay, and I never find anything appropriate at local thrift stores. (Two consignment shops are supposed to call me if they ever get anything in my size, but they haven't yet.)

Related- I like the idea of exchanging environmental sins but wouldn't trust most people to follow through. (Phoebe could at least ensure that Joey wasn't eating meat in her presence.)

A sang a song about vampires at breakfast today. We're not sure where she learned about vampires (Dan suggested that maybe they're doing a unit on them in school, but that didn't sound very Montessori-ish to me) but I was thinking it might be time to show her this.

A was seeming awfully big today, so I wanted a picture from when she was little.

Ah, fun at work. I haven't seen a lot of the supposed 100 best movies (italicized in list below). Now my coworkers can lay off my homemade lunches and instead mock me for never having seen Rocky.

Citizen Kane (1941) Dan and I wanted to see it after reading Kavalier & Clay
The Godfather (1972)
Casablanca (1942)
Raging Bull (1980)
Singin' In The Rain (1952) Renee saw it at the Alfred library but we lacked technology, so we took advantage of my boyfriend's VCR without his consent
Gone With The Wind (1939) read the book
Lawrence Of Arabia (1962)
Schindler's list (1993)
Vertigo (1958)
The Wizard Of Oz (1939)
City Lights (1931)
The Searchers (1956)
Star Wars (1977)
Psycho (1960)
2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) At some point after A was born we rented this, but were way too tired to follow the ending, even though I'd read the book
Sunset Blvd. (1950)
The Graduate (1967)
The General (1927)
On The Waterfront (1954)
It's A Wonderful life (1946)
Chinatown (1974)
Some like It Hot (1959)
The Grapes Of Wrath (1940)
E.T. The Extra-terrestrial (1982)
To Kill A Mockingbird (1962)
Mr. Smith Goes To Washington (1939)
High Noon (1952)
All About Eve (1950)
Double Indemnity (1944) at Bryan Park in Bloomington
Apocalypse Now (1979) a friend upgraded to DVD and gave us their VHS
The Maltese Falcon (1941)
The Godfather Part Ii (1974)
One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest (1975)
Snow White And The Seven Dwarfs (1937)
Annie Hall (1977)
The Bridge On The River Kwai (1957)
The Best Years Of Our lives (1946)
The Treasure Of The Sierra Madre (1948)
Dr. Strangelove (1964)
The Sound Of Music (1965) as a kid, plus as a sing-along in Seattle right after C was born
King Kong (1933)
Bonnie And Clyde (1967)
Midnight Cowboy (1969)
The Philadelphia Story (1940)
Shane (1953)
It Happened One Night (1934)
A Streetcar Named Desire (1951)
Rear Window (1954) college film festival
Intolerance (1916)
The Lord Of The Rings: The Fellowship Of The Ring (2001)
West Side Story (1961)
Taxi Driver (1976)
The Deer Hunter (1978)
M*a*s*h (1970)
North By Northwest (1959)
Jaws (1975)
Rocky (1976)
The Gold Rush (1925)
Nashville (1975)
Duck Soup (1933)
Sullivan's Travels (1941)
American Graffiti (1973)
Cabaret (1972)
Network (1976)
The African Queen (1951)
Raiders Of The Lost Ark (1981)
Who's Afraid Of Virginia Woolf? (1966)
Unforgiven (1992)
Tootsie (1982)
A Clockwork Orange (1971)
Saving Private Ryan (1998)
The Shawshank Redemption (1994)
Butch Cassidy And The Sundance Kid (1969)
The Silence Of The Lambs (1991) I actually saw this in a theater!
In The Heat Of The Night (1967)
Forrest Gump (1994)
All The President's Men (1976)
Modern Times (1936)
The Wild Bunch (1969)
The Apartment (1960)
Spartacus (1960)
Sunrise (1927)
Titanic (1997)
Easy Rider (1969)
A Night At The Opera (1935)
Platoon (1986)
12 Angry Men (1957)
Bringing Up Baby (1938)
The Sixth Sense (1999)
Swing Time (1936)
Sophie's Choice (1982)
Goodfellas (1990)
The French Connection (1971)
Pulp Fiction (1994)
The Last Picture Show (1971)
Do The Right Thing (1989)
Blade Runner (1982)
Yankee Doodle Dandy (1942)
Toy Story (1995)
Ben-hur (1959)

Next year's Christmas puzzle.

I’m feeling better than I have in almost a week, but the first five people I saw at work all mentioned that I look awful. Should take that as a blow to my ego or a sign that I should still be in bed?

I’ve managed to persuade all of my study sites that we really don’t have to give out Wal-Mart gift cards as participant incentives. We’re instead going to distribute cards from stores headquartered in New York. Two of the sites were really receptive to the idea, one was less-than-enthused but willing to give it a try, and two didn’t seem to care much either way. My boss is going to roll her eyes when she finds out, but I’m hoping that now that I’ve managed to navigate the headaches of ordering cards from multiple stores that I’ll be able to convince my coworkers of the merits of the idea so they’ll do the same for future studies. Wal-Mart is a convenient choice because it’s accessible from most locations; I need to purchase and track cards from four different companies, two of which are not local to me. But at least some of my coworkers are thoughtful enough to go to the trouble, and the others may be convinced if I make it easy for them and play up the benefits of fostering a sense of local connection among participants.

I should know better than to read popular magazines. Alas, the mindless allure of "Real Simple" was too hard to resist in my flu-induced delirium. Most egregious article: "Together for life: honest, intimate snapshots of what makes marriage work." The common theme among all five couples profiled? There's a problem, the woman changes. One gave up her catering business because the work was impinging on their Saturday night dates. "As much as I enjoyed my work, my family's happiness was more important to me. I learned then that marriage is really about compromise." One isn't really interested in sex (can't imagine why, after having three children in three years) but she bears it anyway because she "wants to be respectful of his needs." One worked a crappy job for ten years because her husband couldn't find a job in his field- it seems surprisingly common for women to support their families with whatever work they can find, while their husbands won't compromise their standards and take crappy jobs themselves.

It's entirely possible that these folks have fairly egalitarian marriages and that the writer focused on the wives' compromises because of the composition of their readership. Certainly a number of choices that Dan and I have made would appear anti-feminist in isolation. But the editorial implication that women alone are responsible for accommodating their families is infuriating. Why not include a man who waitered to support his wife through law school, or a couple that decided to move to a small town when they couldn't agree on an urban or rural area?

(Dan took advantage of my weakened anti-bad-media defenses by putting on a James Bond movie. We only got ten minutes into it, but in that time 007 added a surfboard and a hovercraft to his transportation repertoire, so I guess it was almost worth it. I was surprised at its PG-13 rating though- have rating standards eroded, or am I just hypersensitive? I'd expect any James Bond flick to be a lot more graphic than Young Sherlock Holmes.)

I'm having a really hard time fighting the (not uncommon) urge to steal the Hot Pocket that's been sitting in the communal freezer for two months.

But just because someone’s not marching behind you doesn’t mean they’re blocking your path.

My unfortunate emergency dental visit yesterday (to fix my ever-chipping front tooth) exposed me to not only this song, which is so wrong on so many levels it makes me a little queasy, but to a guitar rendition of the Carol of the Bells which sounded ominous enough to show up on a thrash metal compilation. It must have been the Bad Christmas Music All The Time station, because I was also treated to the Chipmunks song with the hula hoop and Feliz Navidad.

This explains why I left without asking the dentist to grind down the back of the tooth a bit more, because the reconstruction is slightly too large. Hopefully I’ll get used to it.

My lack of team spirit was evident at last week’s office party when I confessed to not knowing the University’s mascot. (It’s a Great Dane; certainly not something I would’ve landed on if I’d tried to guess.) In the ensuing discussion of my ignorance, however, it came out that the sports teams used to be nicknamed “The Pedagogues.” While I can’t picture an appropriate mascot, that’s something I could get into cheering for.

(My schools have all been a bit weak in the mascot department. While U Washington had a dog of some kind, Alfred had a Saxon, and I don’t even know what Indiana dug up to represent a Hoosier.)

If this actually works, it's really cool. Though also a bit creepy. Anti-bot random-letter deciphering on websites is replaced by badly-scanned-literature deciphering, theoretically increasing access to electronic texts.

I wonder what Alfie Kohn would think of this.

C brought home a worksheet from school. One of the questions was, “Would you want to be friends with the main character of this book?” His response, referring to Helen Keller: “No, because she couldn’t see a thing!”


S: C yelled at me this morning for telling him I put bread in the toaster for him. It went better than usual, though, because when I pointed out that I’d done nothing wrong, he just harrumphed at me rather than contradicting me.
D (with egregious British accent): “An argument isn’t just contradiction.” We have to show him the Argument Clinic sketch.
S: He wouldn’t get it; he doesn’t understand jokes.
D: But it’s still funny. Hand me the laptop so I can pull it up and show you.
S: You’ve already told me about it, which was probably a good deal funnier than having to actually watch it.


A: Here is a cow.
S: Moo.
A: Talk to me, not the cow!


A (mumbling to herself): It’s a catastrophe!

Golden Compass

The Golden Compass movie was visually exciting and included in passing some fun creative alternate-world-technology. Really, with the Panserbjorn and daemons, there was no way it could be a complete dud in the age of computer animation. But I suspect the plot would have been utterly baffling to anyone who hadn’t already read the book, and it was incredibly shallow in comparison- even if they’d been willing to make an overtly anti-religious movie (out at Christmastime at that!) there wouldn’t have been time to get it in.

I knew from the trailer that they’d made Lyra pretty, which I wasn’t all too thrilled about, but I was glad to find that they hadn’t completely whitewashed her character. Some of the casting was hard to take (Lord Asrael was a tweedy academic; he should have been much more imposing) but Mrs. Coulter, perhaps the most complicated character to try to portray, was quite well done.

The biggest shock though- they ended the movie a couple chapters early, so it concludes on an excited/ celebratory note. Not only does this completely change the story’s tone, but it fails to impart one of the biggest themes of the entire trilogy. If they’re planning to make the sequels, they’re going to have a hard time now; they’ll have to begin the next movie with a horrific betrayal with little space for setting it up, and given the downplaying of general evil in this movie (they avoided killing any children), it’s going to be tough to pull off.

mmm-dairy

In the past week I’ve learned that:

While eggnog-from-a-carton is indeed wholly disgusting, homemade eggnog is quite good. I’m too lazy to actually trouble to make it myself, but I’ll cheerfully imbibe if served.

Beating Meadowbrook Farms cream into butter takes about three minutes. Since local butter is only occasionally available at the food co-op, this is good to know. I haven’t weighed everything, but I think it’s cheaper than regularly-priced organic (non-local) butter, and about the same as on-sale organic butter. (Much more expensive than generic butter, of course.) We now have buttermilk to use up too, which is somewhat tricky because A can’t have it

A is nearly as disgusted by soy cheese as I am. I’ve never really seen the point of the stuff, but Dan thought she should have the chance to give it a try.

Sheep cheese is much more popular than goat cheese at all-women gatherings. Small sample, though, so I don’t know if I’ll let it affect my party-buying habits. (But who am I kidding- I never spend as much money on food as the single childless friend who served it did.)

Our company holiday party is this Friday. It's conveniently located in Delmar, so as long as I'm able to act sober for A's teacher conference I'll need to step out for in the middle, I'll be able to truly enjoy the wine. Only irksome problem- we're required to participate in a $10 grab-bag thing. I opted out of the gift exchanges at PRA, but I had backup- I talked two of my coworkers into joining me, so I didn't look as bad. Who DOES like these things? While I truly enjoy exchanging gifts with my family and friends, it's because I actually put some thought into what they might like- even if I end up being completely wrong, the process still gives me pleasure, and I hope that the recipient at least appreciates the thought. But coming up with something completely generic, which will randomly go to one of twenty people, half of whom I barely know- that's not fun.

Porn would be an amusing in-joke for about half the staff (those of us who attended an adolescent pregnancy prevention meeting last month) and generally appreciated by another 25%, but I'm afraid that the last quarter might take offense or consider it sexual harassment. From past experience I know that my best bet is probably lottery tickets, but I'm morally uneasy with sending my money to that system. I'm eager to support local businesses and artists, but the foodstuffs (chocolate, jellies, etc.) I can obtain for $10 would be fairly meager, and I'm wary of inflicting my musical taste on anyone. I think I'm stuck with the safe-but-boring route- maybe a blank book?

what we've been doing-

- met some friends to walk around Washington Park to see the light show. Nothing says the holidays like an incandescent sphinx.

-went to the Chocolate Expo at the state museum; free samples, a chocolate fountain, vendors, and the Look-Alikes exhibit. Friends were providing music there, and Dan got the chance to join in and sing. Which was great except that his outbursts of “Green Grow the Rushes-O” continued for the rest of the afternoon.

-let the kids break out the holiday decorations. So now there are ornaments hanging on all of our drawer pulls.

-watched friends’ baby a couple times. While he was extremely agreeable and low-maintenance for a 10-month-old, it reminded us why the adults in a family should never be outnumbered.

-introduced C to Dickens by telling him about Ebenezer Scrooge, because we thought it would be less annoying to hear him shouting “bah humbug!” all the time rather than “garr!” or “beep!” or “I’ll never do anything nice for you ever again for the rest of your life!” It is, in fact, but the others are still in heavy rotation.

-attended the Four Corners Tree Lighting, which was preceded by a parade of two fire trucks, a trolley, and a vintage truck from the town sewage department. I’d never seen anything like the latter in a parade before. At the church we went to afterward for cookie-eating, C said “bah humbug!” to the extremely nice pastor’s wife who asked if he wanted to make a snowman mobile.

-stopped by a local craft fair, hoping to purchase exciting locally-made gifts. Instead Dan got some horseradish cheese for himself and C got some maple candies for himself while A re-arranged all of the necklaces carefully arrayed at the jewelry booths.

-questioned the appropriateness of a class field trip to Wal-Mart. All appearances to the contrary, we really do want to have a good relationship with C's school, but we just couldn't let it go.

-bought all of the materials to make all of our storm windows, and made a working prototype. We now have a plan and a lot of money invested and no time to actually get the rest of them done. The big one for C’s room, though, which is the most important, is well on its way.

Not everyone wears long johns?

Last night I went out with a group that included a recent transplant from Texas, who’s trying to adapt to the whole winter-weather-world. After everyone discussed cold weather car maintenance issues (which frankly, we’ve never really paid attention to), I wanted to ensure she knew about the really important day-to-day stuff, and asked if she had long underwear. She did, and we hiked up our pant legs to compare her cotton to my synthetic silk, while half of the rest of the group looked on in disbelief. A long-term resident (who had been complaining about always feeling cold) said in surprise, “I never wear long underwear.” She had some for camping, but that was it.

I’d been thinking that pulling on long underwear nearly every day was just a standard part of life in the Northeast, but remembered that I didn’t really start wearing it until college, when it was necessary because of the amount of time I spent walking outside. (Unless I wore my flannel-lined jeans instead.) After getting in the habit, I just kind of figured everyone did.

his mother's son

I noticed that there was a request form on one of C's library books from school. While I have the public library set aside virtually all of our books for us, I didn't even know C could do that at school. Turns out he saw the book at the book fair but couldn't afford it. I'd like to know whether he pitched a fit and the staff found a way to appease him, or if he came up with the idea himself.

This is the first time I've ever seen a really good raffle prize.

Maybe I should make C stuffed buildings for Christmas. He never played with dolls or stuffed animals, so maybe he needs a cuddly inanimate object to love.

I read some books

Mothers and Other Monsters, Maureen McHugh

I haven't been reading short stories over the past few years, but this collection made me reconsider. Sci fi/ horror/ alternate history are all represented, but for the most part as means to her ends rather than important elements in their own right. The major themes I was intrigued by were of choice and culpability, but she also focuses on genetic engineering/ medical decision-making. The author has the rare ability to write tight not-of-our-world stories without wasting words with tedious explanation, and to know when to end without giving too much away. Highly recommended.

The Year of Magical Thinking, Joan Didion

The author discusses her mental processing of events in the year after her husband died and her daughter simultaneously became seriously ill. In some parts she does a good job of conveying the illogic of grief, and acknowledges the degree of literal insanity which I suspect is normal after a serious loss. But within the first 20 pages, she managed to alienate herself from me through casual references to the resources of the rich and famous that she drew upon in this period, and it only got worse as the book progressed. I'm not sure if she was intentionally namedropping as a way to keep herself from feeling pitied, or if she's so out of touch as to not realize that her lifestyle is nothing like most of ours, or if she just didn't care about the latter. But she inhabits a completely different world than the rest of us, and her seeming unawareness of her level of privilege made me dislike her as a person. Which of course makes an autobiographical book less powerful.

An Unconventional Family, Sandra Bem

Discusses the author's "experiment" in egalitarian childrearing. I would've been more interested in explicit discussions of the largest barriers they faced and how they overcame them. But it was more autobiographical, and instead went into (painful) detail about the woes of getting tenure. I also realized that while the author and her then-husband may have been very cutting-edge when they got married, they're not to me. I'm always pretty shocked when women don't seem to see themselves as equal partners in a marriage, even though a surprising number of my friends have seemed to think nothing of, say, moving and giving up an entire community they've built for themselves to enable their husbands to take a different job, or care for kids while their husbands work 80-hour weeks, or manage all of his relationship responsibilities (like buying anniversary gifts for his siblings). If anything, my marriage is more egalitarian than theirs was.
So an interesting skim, but not really enlightening.

The Atrocity Archives, Charles Stross

Turns out that nasty creatures from different dimensions are more reliably summoned through computer-assisted mathematical computations than via traditional methods. Turing figured this out, and governments around the world have been covering it up ever since. The protagonist works for the secret government agency assigned to prevent a demon takeover. The intrusion of bureaucracy in fighting the denizens of Cthulu is pretty funny, and I'm just geek enough to appreciate the system admin-speak which dominates the first third of the book. The writing is overly pulpish for my taste, and could use editing, but it's only occasionally intrusive. Good airplane read.

Two Girls Fat and Thin by Mary Gaitskill

I just didn't get it. There were good parts, but as a whole, I never figured out the point, and the conflicts it gave me to think about weren't too interesting to me. It might've been better for me if I were more interested in Ayn Rand, but I'm not even so sure of that.

A came down with a nasty stomach bug Thursday night, so we had to cancel our monthly potluck. This was especially sad because a lot of people we hadn't see in a while were planning to come, and our next one is at a busy enough time of year that it's unlikely most will be able to make it then. I hate to think that we'll have to hope to catch up in 2008; I've never liked having such busy schedules that seeing local friends is a rare occasion.

While no longer especially ill, A wanted nothing to do with going outside on Saturday, which was a bit of a problem because we were hosting a work circle with outdoor projects. She watched more television that morning than she had all together over the previous three years. Which we weren't particularly proud of, but it reminded us that videos were an incredibly powerful tool for Getting Things Done, and one reason our neighbors are more productive than we are is because their kids watch several hours of TV each day. Maybe if we plant the kids in front of the television for a week next spring we can get the chimney pointed after all!

redistricting

Because I know everyone is fascinated with this process- at last week's elementary school redistricting meeting, all five scenarios presented had C switching from his current school to one which is significantly larger and not within walking distance. Not the end of the world, but also less than ideal- walkability is important to us, especially since we only have one car, and he has enough social issues without switching schools next year. I contacted everyone I could think of to try to change the boundary lines, but figured it was a lost cause. But at tonight's meeting, it looked like they're going to make the change I requested! Apparently tracking down the e-mail addresses of everyone involved and knowing someone on the committee made a difference. I'm so glad I put in the time to get this fixed. It's still not 100% definite, but I'm optimistic.

More miracles of makeup.

A's birthday

Birthday walk at Blossom's

Roots and Shoots

A and friend at Five Rivers

Halloween Parade at School

Here are a couple images from A's first Halloween Parade at school...

spooky tales

Huck Finn's Warehouse and More!

The kids and I met some friends at the Corning Preserve last weekend, and on the way home C spied a sign for Huck Finn's and asked what it meant. I was perhaps a little too enthusiastic in my description- both the kids immediately begged for the Huck Finn's Experience. Conveniently, we were only blocks away, so off we went.

I've been thinking about getting A a new bed for her birthday, since she's ougrowing the toddler mattress. So after letting them rock all the cradles and sit in all the child-sized chairs and gawp at the cardboard displays intended to represent books or computer monitors*, I directed them to the bed section.

I've always been a big fan of beds with trundles and lofts with an entire bedroom's worth of furniture underneath. Turns out the kids are, too. Huck Finn's has an exciting selection of lofts with futons, and desks, and closets, and shelves, and drawers, and every possible combination thereof. The kids ran from bed to bed, climbing ladders and exploring the built-in tents and slides and cupholders, until they picked their favorites. We all decided that this style was the coolest because instead of having a ladder to the top, it has steps that pull out so they also function as drawers.

* C: Why do they have that there?
S: Because otherwise people might buy the shelves and think they're supposed to put salamanders on them.
C: (concerned) But salamanders need to live near water!
S: Exactly.

Who is the pumpkin king?

little cat A

Halloween Haunts

A's birthday is coming up-

so we're figuring out which ornaments to make for her birthday wreath this year. I'm deciding between a doll or a backpack. How tiny a purple princess can I sew....

At the playground on Tuesday, A filled all the buckets from the sandbox with wood chips and carefully lined them up on a bench. Thankfully no other kids showed up to demand seating or sand toys.

I can’t decide how to manage the kids’ use of public space. I would lean toward letting all but the most obnoxious behavior go, but the parents at Bethlehem playgrounds tend to micromanage the kids’ play. Disapproving comments have been made about rather innocuous behavior: A using trucks outside of the sandbox, C putting wood chips on the slide, both kids climbing up the slide. I understand complaints about their more annoying tricks- monopolizing one of the slides for an hour, hauling buckets of water into the sandbox. But even then I don’t know when to intervene. Yes, I understand you don’t want your kid to get muddy, and it’s hard for her to watch someone else making a moat when she’s not allowed to do so herself- but 75% of the sandbox is still available for her use. (Pouring water down the slide is something I don’t allow, because that ruins the slide’s attractiveness for everyone.) Yes, I understand that taking turns is important, but your kid can take his turn going down after my kid climbs UP the slide. (I was probably lax in letting C sit on a slide reading for an hour last weekend, but given that there were multiple identical slides and that we were at a less rigidly monitored Albany playground, I gave up trying to make him move.) A lot of my enforcement of playground etiquette depends on our exact location, whether toddlers are present, and whether overbearing parents are watching, which means I’m pretty inconsistent. C responds just as poorly to arbitrary restrictions as he does to inconsistency, though, so I’m sort of going with the do-what-you-want-as-long-as-no-one-complains-loudly rule.

This is really strange. It switches direction each time I look at it, but I can't make it switch if I try.

cargo trike

S: Did you sing any songs today at school?
A: Yes, we sang three songs.
S: Who did you sit next to when you sang the songs?
A: Clara. I like to sit next to girls better than boys.
S: Why?
A: Because boys pester me too much.
S: And the girls don't?
A: No.
S: What do boys do to pester you?
A: They do things like make alien hands* at me.
S: Well, C does that; do the boys at school do that too?
A: No. But Paul says, "stop looking at me!"
S: So that's why you don't like to sit next to Paul.
A: Yes.
S: Do you like to sit next to Casey?
A: Well, Casey likes to say, "I'm a dragon!" and I don't like dragons.

Unfortunately, C's bus came just then so I didn't get to hear what was wrong with the rest of the boys.

*Alien hands is what C calls it when he waves his fingers in someone's face. A hates it so much it makes her cry. We hate it so much that it makes us reconsider corporal punishment. Alien hands have been banned from our home.

Zombie Prom tomorrow.
*sigh* And I can't go.

I've been getting five hours of sleep most nights now, and (sadly) it's made a pretty big difference. I don't know whether the improvement is from weather changes, decreased daylight, magnesium supplements, or just chance, but I'm hoping it continues. And is not totally derailed by Dan's absence this week- since I need to deal with the kids' nightwakings, I usually get much less sleep when he's gone.

I met a woman at a meeting on Tuesday who'd had gastric bypass surgery. I'd heard of it before but never thought much about how it worked. It sounded like while the surgery reduces the body's ability to absorb food, the main reason it's effective for weight loss is because it makes people stop eating. They get so sick if they eat more than tiny amounts of food at a time that they give up.

If someone's desperate enough to be willing to so radically change their relationship with food, I'm surprised there's not a way of doing so that's less drastic. (This woman was in the hospital for five days, and now, two years later, she's still barely able to eat.) Never having had a major weight problem, I can't speak to that experience, but it seems like there should be some other way....

The meeting was held in a large white windowless room. There is no clock. Its sole features are a projection screen and a Big Brother-ish poster of an eye that reads, "HPO WATCH: WE SUPPORT LEADERSHIP FOR HIGH PERFORMANCE." It's the only formal meeting I've ever been to where attendees were expected to pony up cash for the mediocre lunch provided. One thing PRA knew how to do well was run meetings- everyone's happier and more productive in pleasant environs with lots of good food.

(I realized afterward that I hadn't sized up my competition- in this case, I knew my precise location in the organizational hierarchy before I even went, so it wasn't necessary. I didn't need to jockey for position.)

Seventeen rules for a sustainable community

I've been to a few more redistricting meetings and asked around, and learned that the comments on "socioeconomic diversity" do indeed seem to refer to the fact that the school C currently attends has a bit more rental property within its current catchment area. It's pretty darn funny.

Excluding NYC, about 32% of elementary school students in New York qualify for the school lunch program. 55% of those in Albany's Montessori magnet school do. It's only 6% at Elsmere, 3% at Hamagrael (the "rich" school). It amazes me that people really stress out about those 19 "poor" kids (potential bad influences?) without seeing the bigger picture here.

(And it just occurred to me that I've been spending too much time going to redistricting meetings. Dan and I have an agreement that each of us can go out two evenings a week; that still leaves us at least three nights a week together. He spends most of his nights out seeing friends or playing volleyball these days. Me, I go to meetings. I need to get a life.)

It's extremely difficult to motivate myself to work when no one's pressing me for results, I know full well that the output will be meaningless, and getting it done will require deciphering old syntax files.

(Syntax example: /OUTFILE=* /BREAK=caseid /iwbefore_intake = SUM(iwbefore_intake) /iwintake_birth = SUM(iwintake_birth) /iwra_birth = SUM(iwra_birth) /ywbirth_year1= SUM(ywbirth_year1) /twyear1_year2 = SUM(twyear1_year2) /hwyear2_year3 = SUM(hwyear2_year3) /hwyear3_after = SUM(hwyear3_after) /prenatal = SUM(prenatal) /postnatal = SUM(postnatal) / hvclosed = Max(hvclosed) / racloscd = max(racloscd)/ int_char = first (int_char)/ oy_char = first(oy_char)/ ty_char = first(ty_char)/ hy_char = first(hy_char) .)

And it's a beautiful day. This is my favorite season, and I really don't think I'll be missed if I roam around Washington Park for a few hours.

I was wrong about the garden being finished- the warm weather over the past week set the zucchini going again, and we have five more. Glad I was too lazy to pull out any plants yet.

An article about speeding up Ph.D. completion.

What it fails to mention is what I saw in my program:

- people stayed in because they didn't have jobs yet, and didn't have anywhere else to go. You need a university affiliation to be considered by a hiring committee; you can't just go work in a quarry while you wait for the offers to roll in.
- other stayed in because they were comfortable there, and in no hurry to go out into the big bad world.
- a good amount of time needs to be spent learning academic culture and playing the game, including putting face time in at conferences and hoping to get introduced to important people.
- a lot of students get bogged down just because they're lazy- I don't know anyone in my department who regularly worked productively more than 25 hours a week (including myself). Motivation is tough, but necessary.

It also doesn't point out the fairly obvious fact that we really don't need too many people with Ph.D.s!

After A went to bed, we broke out the Indigenous Peoples Puzzle. Our Columbus Day tradition for the past three years has been to do the puzzle, which is an illustrated map of pre-Columbian North America societies, and talk about the different cultures represented and what happened to them. This year involved less discussion (C was cheerily humming while he did the puzzle, and he's been so contrary lately that when he's happy we savor the moment and avoid changing anything) but it's always sobering to see the names that now only exist as place-names if at all.

We closed up Twin Trees for the winter over the weekend. We're enjoying A's newfound ability to remain halfway reasonable in the car; so long as we feed her continuously, she can usually handle the confinement for a bit over an hour. Once she's finally full, though, things get desperate. On the ride up, no one was exactly impressed by my dramatic solo rendition of the buzzard song but it did shock them into silence for a while. C likes Mercedes Benz because he doesn't understand its irony, but we haven't come up with too many other songs both the children will allow us to sing without complaint. (Oh, in desperation I tried Thick as a Brick and they actually put up with it, but I only remember half of it, and not in order, so I couldn't keep it going for too long without a flute.)

In between raking and wood-stacking, we got to go to the harvest festival at Gore Mountain again, and attempted to dance to the Ernie Williams Band while A insisted on holding our hands and C ran around us in circles. We remain confused as to where all the people who attend the festival come from; it's certainly larger than the population of North Creek.

We missed Aunt Maureen and Uncle Gene, but were glad Aunt Meredeth spent the night and that we didn't encounter any unforeseen disasters. (Just the predictable ones.)

My ideal of keeping our books corralled on the number of shelves we currently own requires regular thinning. When we moved bookshelves around last year, an entire box of books somehow didn't fit on them anymore, and I finally got around to redistributing them a few weeks ago.

This is always a somewhat fraught activity in our household. I feel that the public library does an excellent job of storing books, and we only need to keep on hand those that are not generally available or those that have significant personal meaning and are reread over and over. Dan disagrees, or maybe it's more that he feels EVERY book he's read has been important in some way. At any rate, I've given up trying to pass on the worn paperback versions of modern classics ("Half the pages are falling out!" "But it's Aldous Huxley!"), less-than-amazing titles ("It's yet another writer writing about writing- yawn." "But we know the author!"), poetry ("When was the last time you referred to the Western Wind anthology from freshman year?" "I plan to frequently, once our lives are less busy."), or anything work related ("Isn't there a bit of duplication between the The Art of Tracking, The Science of Tracking, The Art and Science of Tracking, and the Science and Art of Tracking?" "No!!!")

I think our longest debate was over Jack Kerouac. On the Road had a good beat, but its whole point was pointlessness; I found the first half about as interesting as sitting around with a bunch of stoners telling stories, and the second half sad but predictable. Dan, however, must've read it at just the right time; for several weeks, he channeled Dean's manic persona. (I wonder if I still have any e-mails from back then; just as Dan temporarily picks up foreign accents with long exposure to them, he assumed a stream-of-consciousness writing style in response to Kerouac.) As one might expect, this made me dislike the book even more, and at some point when we were preparing for a move, I tried to give it away. Dan caught me, though, and now I must forever live in fear that he'll re-read it at some point and start raving feverishly about jazz and freedom.

Our garden is mostly done for the year; my two attempts to put in broccoli for the fall were foiled by the slugs, and I didn’t take the time to plant greens because none of us really LIKE them- we’ll usually eat them (though much of our spring spinach went to seed), but we don’t especially enjoy it. We still have tomatoes and peppers, which I’ll leave out for a couple weeks, and then we’ll hang up cherry tomato vines from our kitchen windows and spread the bigger green tomatoes out on trays to ripen. The past few years we’ve eaten the last of our tomatoes right around Thanksgiving. I don’t think they’ll last so long this year- the cherries ripen more quickly, and the larger tomatoes were mostly determinants this year, so they’re pretty much gone. We’ll see what the Romas do, though.

I planted the Romas for drying, but didn’t get to do a lot of that. They tended to drop before they were ripe, and then the bugs damaged them on the ground before I collected them- not sure whether we were supposed to pick them when they were green or if the plants were unhealthy or what. We still got to use a lot of them in cooking, but since they were not perfectly ripe I didn’t take the time to dry them.

So far, the local produce experiment has gone well, though Dan and I have had some disagreement about what qualifies. I didn’t think we should be buying processed potato products, like fries and chip, but I was overruled. This weekend I felt a sore throat coming on and bought orange juice to fend it off- though maybe I could have found local cranberries instead? The kids demand bananas whenever they see someone else eating one; we let them know we’d be buying them in the winter. We’ve been less able to obtain organic fruit, but we knew that would be the case. I’ve been trying to keep everyone away from apples while we have other options- the peach and blueberry seasons just ended, and we can still get pears- but I’ve pretty much given in now. (Good local apples are available until early spring, so I don’t want everyone to get sick of them now- they’re our main winter fruit.)

I should itemize what’s in our freezer; we’ve been putting in small quantities whenever we have a chance. We have a lot of black raspberries, pesto, and tomatoes in there, my lone jar of pear butter, and several quarts of blueberries. Nowhere near as much as we’d originally planned, but this pesky job wasn’t on my radar then.