forts, junk, and muscles

C has been spending a lot of time lately building forts inside. He’s renovated a niche in our upstairs hallway with a mini-futon and plants and he keeps on stealing couch cushions to build tunnels. I’m wanting to snag discarded furniture and give him some tools to make something outside, but Dan is less than enthusiastic about the junkyard aesthetic that would lend to our property.

He doesn’t really have a leg to stand on though. It was his idea to grab the discarded wooden utility spools; we made a family fun trip across the railroad track to get them, and attracted some attention as we rolled them home. Even less attractively, we salvaged a metal futon frame he hopes to turn into a utility trailer for his bicycle. We were careful to put it where our bad neighbor would have a nice view of it, which is also where we keep our stack of reclaimed fencing/ pallets.

Unrelated:
To keep from going numb during my work days I occasionally get up and do modified push-ups, leaning against a railing in the hall. This is somewhat less awkward than doing push-ups on the floor in public, though I still get funny looks. Over the weekend I was curious to see how many real push-ups I could do. (12; I have no idea if that is above or below average.) Interestingly, the limiting factor wasn’t my arms (though they were almost there) but my abs. And three days later my stomach STILL hurts. I’m clearly not getting enough general exercise. I suppose that’s not too big a surprise, since most of my non-work hours are spent lying down, trying to catch up on some of the rest that insomnia steals from me.

wasn't there a movie about this?

"Robots must be constrained to adhere to the same laws as humans or they should not be permitted on the battlefield," Arkin wrote. Asimov already came up with excellent laws of robotics, but by definition war robots can not conform to them.

this is NOT a suggestion. Just popped into my head.

When I read Stranger in a Strange Land as a teenager, the messages about freedom and religion and sex didn’t seem too profound to me. But eating dead bodies- that was something to think about. Made sense, after all. Maybe that’s why Soylent Green never made an impact on me. It was only logical, what with the hunger and overpopulation, and meat was harvested in a rather less disturbing way than in the warren surrounded by snares in Watership Down.

my dreams are serials

While the plots of my dreams do not pick up again, incidental details do all the time. One example: dreams about Twin Trees, my family’s cabin in the Adirondacks. Over the past year or so I’ve dreamed about it numerous times and there are several things about Dreamworld Twin Trees that are different from the real one. But they remain consistent within Dreamworld. There is another bedroom in the basement (no basement in the real world) that my aunt and uncle normally sleep in. I do occasionally when they’re not there, but don’t like it because it’s creepy. A secret door off this bedroom leads to a deep closet. There are lamps and dishes that are consistent in my dreams that are nothing like the ones actually there. The woodstove is a different style in a different location (where the telephone table is) and includes an oven for baking. In one of my dreams the oven broke and my relatives slid parts of a broken electric oven into the opening, so the stucco-ish woodstove sports the door of a 70’s-era oven on its side. It’s been there in all my dreams since.

maybe I should've gone for a Harlequin

A few weeks ago I realized that I couldn’t recall ever having read a romance novel. I decided to remedy this with Pride and Prejudice. I was unimpressed.

I remember getting into a debate with a women’s studies professor at Alfred about whether Tom Sawyer was more entertaining than Little Women. I felt exploring caves to be inherently more interesting than reading Pilgrim’s Progress. She pointed out that the values placed on stereotypically gendered diversions were socially defined, and that my preference for action/ adventure stories was likely because they, like masculinity, were valued more by my culture. I’m still not sure how much I agree with her. But even the March girls, whom I found boring, were more interesting than the Bennets. Both books concluded in marrying off a passel of sisters but at least in Little Women they did a few other things too.

I do not however miss tape drives

In fourth grade or so I did an in-depth research project on the Pony Express. My mother suggested I dig up newspaper articles as source material and escorted me to the Schenectady Library (the main branch of our library system). Paper indices of the New York Times were cross-referenced to the boxes of microfilm I needed, but staying on-task once the film was loaded into the reader was near impossible. These were real newspapers from the 1860s! The advertisements! The headlines! Sitting in front of the machine with the stories glowing in front of me, the film whirring as I skipped forward and back, heightened the sense of time-travel.

The process became somewhat less exciting as my academic career progressed; looking up 20-year-old academic articles isn’t quite so fascinating. But in graduate school I worked in the library’s microfilm department and was again enchanted. Most people were too lazy to get their articles themselves so they sent in a request and paid me to do it. I’ll admit to occasionally being glad when they wanted something from the less time-consuming microfiche collection. But the process of seeking out articles on all subjects from all eras was made more romantic by the pages of the microfilm flying by, and I became adept at stopping on the right page on the first try.

Long periods of reading microfilm is awful on your eyes; storage and retrieval is space and time inefficient. But it gives me the same pleasure as a few other time-consuming anachronisms- darkroom work and mixed-cassette-tape production come to mind. There’s the visceral pleasure in the process itself plus the technical pleasure in accomplishing something that requires some work- it gives a sense that you’ve Done Something, not just hit “print” after using a search engine or clicked an icon in Photoshop. I miss it.

(Reminded by this.)

"I take my family everywhere I run."

Interestingly, this cell phone ad clearly articulates one of my major reasons for NOT purchasing a phone. If you have one people assume you're always on call. I want to avoid this primarily for selfish reasons, but being unavailable also empowers other people to work out their own problems. Really, a caregiver who's regularly interrupting her exercise to discuss pacifiers ought to be fired or divorced.

(Imagine a gender role reversal in this ad. Click on picture for larger image.)

Dollhouse review

The most annoying character on Firefly was a girl named River, who spent most of her time walking around in a dreamy daze but occasionally said and did batshit crazy things. This was a side effect of the government manipulating her brain to turn her into a weapon or something. In the first episode, Dollhouse appears to be all about a group of underweight but otherwise attractive women who walk around in dreamy dazes until they are injected with mission-appropriate personalities, and then they kick ass with occasional craziness thrown in. They have new-agey names like Echo and Sierra. I am thusfar unimpressed, but I’ll admit that it took more than one episode to draw me into Firefly.

I hate difference feminism

Women can not save an economy. Different values can. But they're not "women's values."

head wounds bleed a lot

C just walked into my room with blood dripping in his face. He'd hit his head on the corner of the medicine cabinet. Tiny cut, he's not in pain or even as stressed out as he normally is over these things. But feigning calm when your kid's head is COVERED IN BLOOD is really really hard.

And I don't know how to put a Band-Aid on when there's hair in the way.

regional foods fail

In small print on my "Cape Cod Cranberry" juice: "Cranberries in this product are not from Cape Cod."

technology fail

30 Boxes is down and Dan and I have no idea where we're supposed to be. We converted away from the paper calendar about six months ago so we could both access our info when I was at work.

Orin Scrivello is looking attractive right now

Dan’s been having trouble with his teeth for a year or so and decided to go to the dentist. I suggested he make appointments for all of us, since the kids have never gone and the grown-ups haven’t since living in Seattle. (We’ve tried but had administrative issues at several different offices.) It was a several-month wait before anyone could fit us in but he got appointments for us all for this morning.

A, C, and I were all supposed to be seen simultaneously. We checked with C to make sure he was okay being on his own, so Dan could stay with A, and he said it was fine. We foolishly believed him. Apparently the hygienist said something about him “missing” teeth, perhaps referring to some permanent teeth that haven’t come in yet, and he got scared and freaked out. Even after Dan tried to soothe him, the dentist was unwilling to make any effort to work with him and gave up.

I was unaware of this because I was being tortured by an X-ray machine for 45 minutes. In the past when I’ve gotten X-rays they put small pieces of plastic in my mouth and take a few shots. This involved moving a large uncomfortable metal contraption around my mouth for each of about 20 takes. The hygienist commented on how small my mouth was. I could not reply because there was metal digging into the roof of my mouth.

Apparently I desperately need a cleaning and have a few small cavities. I have to make another appointment for the cleaning and a third for the cavities, however. Because why get everything done at once when they can charge for three visits? (Seriously, why couldn’t they do a cleaning today?)

A was happy enough with her dad and actually got a cleaning, but the dentist claimed that her teeth were too close together and she was going to need all sorts of work done and blah blah blah bad stuff. I suspect exaggeration.

Dan was supposed to have his appointment when I was done. But they told him, “Oh, we’re running behind, so we’ll have to schedule you for another time. We might have some openings in March.” What? Someone comes in for an appointment and you say “oops, sorry, just kidding?” Dan, you may recall, was the one who actually needed to go to the dentist in the first place.

This is why we avoid doctors.

there are so many things I don't anticipate

My bike lock was frozen this morning.

everyone's gonna be jealous of my beans

Note to self:

When you're already cutting it a little close to meet a friend on time, it might not be the best idea to grab three of the surplused bulk bins the food co-op is selling for $2. It will very much confuse the cashier, though I did have a PLU. And then when you try to push your cart full of groceries, with the bins balanced precariously on top, you will fail. The 50# bag of oats alone, draped halfway over the front edge of the cart, would make it hard to navigate the parking lot because of their weight. A parking lot full of ice, slush, and potholes? Even harder. When you can only push the cart with one hand because you have to use the other to keep the bins from smashing to the ground? Nearly impossible.

But I was only a little late, and even if I can't find anywhere to put these bins, they're still pretty damn cool.

Milestone!

As of April '08, more than half of our monthly mortgage payment started going toward principal rather than interest. Last month 62% went to principal. Even without making additional payments, which we do whenever we have extra money in our checking account, we're on track to pay it off in less than half its 30-year term.

(Excluding, of course, property tax escrow, which is 29% of what we give the bank every month. And likely to only increase, since state education funding is decreasing. Thanks Governor Paterson!)

SimCity and urban planning

This reminded me that I once tried to set up a city with no roads, just rail. Didn’t work. I tried building one road leading from the edge of the screen (presumably where other cities might be) that stopped on the outskirts of town but that didn’t work either. Wonder if it would in real life. If there’s not a SimSustainableCity out yet, that allows you to build windmills and greenhouses and bike trails and horse stables, there should be.

(The rate of nuclear meltdowns, incidentally, was more than a little high in the Sim universe. I guess that was the only way they had to provide a reason NOT to go nuclear, because otherwise it was by far the best choice. Maybe they should have had protestors instead, or bad-karma points.)

don't let Tumnus break your heart

A has informed me that she doesn’t believe in Jesus but does believe in Santa Claus. She cites Santa’s presence at the Delmar holiday parade as evidence for this position. I’ve cautiously suggested that sometimes people like to dress up as Santa, but she does not think anyone other than Santa himself could produce a costume that good. Dan wonders if she’ll convert if we take her to a production of Jesus Christ Superstar.

Some people say they felt betrayed upon learning that Santa wasn’t real. I’m not concerned about that. The big betrayal of my childhood was perpetrated by C.S. Lewis. I read and reread The Chronicles of Narnia at an age when I could immerse myself in fantasy and half-believe that it was real. I longed to be Lucy and set up elaborate worlds with paper and glue and Playmobils and gerbils (one named Aslan).

I was 12 or so when I picked up The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe again and saw the religious symbolism. I was truly devastated. To see that something that meant so much to me was nothing more than a medium Lewis created to forward his religion (which was, by chance, the same ones I’d been raised in, but had never particularly subscribed to) was profoundly disillusioning. Now I can appreciate that most of the books can be read as damn good stories irregardless of Lewis’s intent (or was it that he used the proselytizing as an excuse to justify writing fantasy?) but as a teenager, no.

I’m not the only one who had this experience. I thoughtlessly mentioned it to an unsuspecting friend at summer camp in 1989 and he had to fight back tears.

I don’t think that C is as fanatical a reader as I was. While he reads continuously he never rereads books or uses their characters in his play. If I hand him the first book* it’s likely that he’ll whip through it cheerfully and then go back to drawing up his plans for snowball-throwing tanks**. On the one hand this makes me sad because I’d like to share the experience with him (in a way I really couldn’t with his WWII obsession) but on the other I hope it means that he’ll never experience the same sense of betrayal I did.

Until now I put off giving him the books because of the violence, but given his research on the invasion of Normandy that’s not really relevant at this point. I’ve considered mentioning the allegorical components to him but decided against it. I’m hoping that the joy he may obtain from reading them uncritically*** will override any loss he might feel when he recognizes what’s behind the story. And if he doesn’t read them soon he won’t appreciate it in the ways that only children can. But I still hesitate to do it, remembering how hurt I was and wanting to protect him from that.

* Meaning The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe- there’s a movement to reorder the books chronologically but starting with The Magician’s Nephew is WRONG. Gee, you think I have any emotional investment in this?

** Inspired by the go-carts in The Dangerous Book for Boys. Thanks Shannon- I think.

*** I am usually incapable of reading uncritically now which is somewhat of a shame.

it's all what you're used to

I love it when the New York Times talks about the economic troubles of people with lifestyles insanely outside of the norm.

Shortly after Scott lost his job, the couple replaced their full-time nanny with a more cost-effective au pair and began choosing long-weekend getaways instead of weeklong family vacations. Some expenses, though, haven’t changed: they still shell out for membership at a local country club (“the most modest one in town,” Tracey said); they rented a condo last summer on Block Island; and they continue to pay hundreds a month for soccer, skating, T-ball and karate lessons for the children. They afford these things by dipping into the savings Scott put away during the flush years.

I’m betting their downsized vacation expenses are more than my family’s annual income. Oh the suffering!

stocking up again

I can make wheat flour prices a regular feature! Slightly down from last time- $56.00 for a 50-pound bag instead of $69.50. But it’s unclear whether or not that price included a 10% case discount (former prices listed did not) so it’s probably not as dramatic a drop as it appears.

Seems that we’re consistently going through 50 pounds in a bit less than five months. We use more than 10 pounds of white flour in that timeframe too. I was thinking that was a lot but average annual consumption is 147 pounds per capita. We’re buying about 180 pounds per year for the whole family. We eat more than that- C buys school lunches, we eat out occasionally, etc.- but the vast majority of our meals are prepared at home. We also buy bulgher (best guess- 20 pounds a year) and crackers and breakfast cereal in small quantities.

why no one gets newspapers anymore

I need to remember to check in on the awesomely random comments of the Bethlehem blog more frequently. A post on a pleasant experience at the Delmar post office led to a shrill indictment of Bethlehem snobbishness (recurring theme), a rail trail announcement became a forum to complain about irresponsible hunters, and a picture of my kids led to the TU being damned for using children to push their political agenda.

Granted, it is pretty

I decided not to bike this morning when I saw the snow. Instead I took the bus. It was 45 minutes late. I got very snowy while waiting. I continued to get snowy on the bus because the window next to my seat leaked. And even snowier walking the half mile from the bus stop to my office. I'm kind of wishing I'd taken my bike, though even if I got enough traction to remain upright I probably would have collapsed trying to power through the snow.

Ten minutes after I got to work (an hour late) my boss said we could all go home. But I'm waiting around 'til I can hitch a ride home with a friend. And hoping someone starts plowing so our plans for the evening aren't ruined.

only them

A: (forgetting for a moment that her brother isn't a human child, like yesterday when she tried to snuggle with him on the same pillow by the fire)

"Let's pretend I'm a princess and you're a prince"

C: (uncharacteristically congenial) "I'll be Obama and you can be Bush"

A: "OK!"

D: "She wanted to be a princess, not Bush"

S: "Yeah, that doesn't sound like a good game"

C: "OK, I'll be Obama and you can be Ralph Nader... (she agrees). OK Ralph Nader, go get Bush and throw him out of office."

A: Picks up the cardboard box that he indicated was Bush and tosses it across the room... (they go on to do lots of arrest and imprisonment charades with various members of Bush's administration. Cheney, for example, was a small, hard pumpkin...)

he'll sleep tonight

One of my neighbors hired C to shovel his driveway for him. Not sure if he was being nice or if his three teenagers are that unhelpful; I suspect a bit of both. It took C forever but he did it, and he'd already shoveled our walk.

beauty contests would be more interesting if they had talents like this

C (leaving for school): Oh, I forgot the Obama picture I need for the demonstration!
D: What demonstration?
C: I wrote speeches for a demonstration at school. I'm going to be Obama and Owen is going to be Bush.
D: You can't have a demonstration at school. It's...
C: I have to GO! Bye!

(later)
S: So how did those speeches go?
C: It was great! At the end I pretended to hit Owen and then he pretended to kick me and then I pretended to knock him over!
S: So was this at recess or what?
C: No.
S: It was in class?
C: Music class.
S: Uh, what did your music teacher think of that?
C: She thought it was great!
S: ??
C: It was for the talent show.
S: You and Owen did a mock debate for a music class talent show? What did the other kids do?
C: Oh, singing and playing instruments and things like that.
S: Those are more traditional skills to share.
C: She said she'd never seen anything like it before!
S: I'll bet she hadn't. You wrote the speeches for both of you?
C: Yes. It was kind of hard because I was Obama and wanted to say lots of bad things about Bush but I didn't say all of them because I didn't want to make Owen feel bad.
S: That was thoughtful of you.

sing we joyous all together

Since we dug out the decorations, including the old Christmas songbook that Aunt Maureen gave us, we’ve been singing carols regularly. A not only has most of the lyrics memorized but can find the correct page for each song based on the pictures. Her favorite: Away in a Manger. I referred to it as a Christmas carol and she corrected me: “No, it’s a Solstice song.” When I suggested that it lays the Jesus theme on a little thick to not be a Christmas song she was a bit disgruntled.

C would know the lyrics of most of the songs if he were willing to think about them for a microsecond but he insists on reading the words. He’s singing in a slightly less monotonic way but I fear that he’ll forever sing as poorly as I do. I think his favorite is Deck the Halls, but this may be because I can’t bring myself to do the Twelve Days of Christmas with him too frequently.

(My secret favorite: O Holy Night. Thankfully this is NOT in the songbook. Most professionals seem to have trouble performing it well. While A would sound cute singing it and Dan might be able to do it some justice I think it’s best if we don’t try.)

C's reactions to YouTube videos

Radiohead (Creep):
I think he's a good singer but I don't like what he's singing about.

Jane's Addiction (Ocean Size):
It's great!!
Why aren't they wearing shirts?

Metallic (Unforgiven):
It's a sad song. I think it's about how people are never free.

Black Sabbath (Iron Man):
Do they just keep doing the same thing over and over again?

(Yes, I like to play happy stuff for him before bed.)

newsflash: it's cold

I just checked the temperature to see whether it’s REALLY cold and windy or if I’m sick and that's what accounted for my slow and painful bike into work. Indeed, it is “7° F (Feels like -7° F)” right now so it’s not all in my head.

(The trees misled me. How can they remain still when there’s enough of a breeze to prevent me from riding in higher gears?)

Morning treats from C

A breakfast in bed order form. Click to enlarge.

So apt to his personality. ("Leif who? "Leif me alone!")


Transcript of middle joke:
Knock-knock.
Who's there?
Aroo.
aroo who?
Aroo impeaching Bush?
Well, you should be!!!!

(Something tells me he made that up himself.)

C never had these

We'd never push our kids into particular careers.

Mad Scientist Blocks

well, he could be neater

I think I'll put bits of the "Yes We Can" speech on a poster for him as a solstice present. (We already got him this book; we were amazed to find it on the shelves of an independent bookstore before Thanksgiving with details about the election. Impressive printing and distribution.)

they took my idea

Years ago I started leaving surprises out for C each day of December- usually a winter-themed library book, occasionally a pencil or something from the year before. I've included A in the tradition since she turned 2. She still enjoys the books/ trinkets but C was not impressed with them last year, so this year I'm leaving him a joke or a puzzle each day.*

This morning C gave me a puzzle to solve (scrambled word, with letters he'd cut out individually for me to rearrange, including one "mystery letter") and A hid a picture (labeled "MOMMY") under a block tower for me. It was super cute.


*Dan suggested leaving out Obama facts for him, which he would surely love, but I like to pretend I have a normal 8-year-old every once in a while. Not the kind who use their computer time to transcribe Obama speeches from YouTube.

adult bath toys

There is a children's book about the true story of thousands of rubber ducks lost in a shipwreck being washed ashore and helping scientists learn about ocean currents. A loves it. It would be a very different kind of story were it following 130,000 inflatable breasts.

I should commission C to build a better mousetrap

We’ve bred smarter mice. Every year or two we have mouse problems but diligent live-trapping and releasing for a week or so has kept them under control. (I don’t doubt that mice remained in our walls/ basement, but if they’re not invading our living space I don’t have much of a problem with that.) This time our old traps were entirely ineffective- they were tripped, often with the bait stolen, but detained no mice. We bought another kind and caught a few. The captive mice often destroyed the more complicated mechanism of these traps, but we could live with that. Alas, we’re now encountering the same problem of the mice escaping after tripping the trap. We may be seeing evolution in action here- we took out the really dumb mice in past years and have already removed the dumbest offspring of those left.

I totally jinxed myself

A, realizing she desperately needed to pee, forgot to go in through the back door which was left unlatched for her and instead walked all the way around front to the door she has trouble opening by herself. While struggling with it, she wet her pants.

better than potty training

It's pretty fantastic to have kids who are old enough to independently decide to go play out in the snow, get themselves dressed for it, and amuse themselves unsupervised.

tut tut

After years of eschewing weather reports, choosing instead to make my own best guess and bring in the laundry if it starts to rain, I have begun checking them the night before biking into work. So far it’s been more so I know whether long pants would be advisable rather than to convince myself to reconsider, though as ice becomes more of a possibility it will begin to serve that purpose. The forecasts are generally pretty accurate but not as detailed as I’d like- since they’re covering the whole region they can’t tell me just what time it will be snowing on Delaware Avenue, which is more relevant to me than knowing that snow will at some point occur. After four years of spending a good amount of time outside each day at Alfred, I could figure such things out myself pretty reliably. I haven’t managed to do so here yet but I’d like to make it more of a priority. There’s no excuse for not having a better grasp of typical weather patterns in a place I’ve lived for the past seven years.

basilisks and rats

(in the car today)

A: Wombats live in Australia too.
C: I don't think wombats are real.
S: They are actually.
C: Basilisks aren't real. But anacondas can be like 30 feet long. A, that's as tall as our house.*
A: Wow!
S: Anacondas don't live around here. But black rats snakes do and they can be as long as daddy is tall. They don't bother people though; they eat rats.
A: Why?
S: Because their bodies evolved to digest them and they think they taste good. Do you think they're right?
A: Yes, but people don't eat rats.
C: Not usually, but I wouldn't be surprised if people living in the Warsaw ghetto did. A, a ghetto was a walled area of the city where people were forced to live. It wasn't very nice in ghettos but there aren't any anymore.
S: If people are really hungry they'll eat just about anything. A lot of people eat chickens, and eating rats isn't all that different from that. It just sounds grosser to most people.
C (deciding that A needed additional education): The Axis was made up of Germany, Hungary, Japan, (blah blah blah) and in 1939 they (blah blah blah) and Poland (blah blah blah for several minutes)
A: Wait! I need to say something!
S: Hang on, C. What is it, A?
A: Sometimes we see the moon in the daytime!

* Note the voluntary not-unkind engagement with his sister. I remain somewhat shocked every single time it happens, even when he is trying to show off.

(I won't regale you with yesterday's car ride, in which I taught C the differences between the mean, median, and mode in a discussion of "average" speed.)

a big corporation sucks slightly less than before

Amazon.com is a serious overpackaging offender. More then once we've been sent a single book in a box that would fit a dozen, and plastic has been used to shrink-wrap the book AND fill the empty space. But maybe they're getting a little better. They are starting to work with manufacturers to produce items with minimal packaging (which is not only less environmentally egregious but also less frustrating to open) and have "developed software that determines the "right-sized" box for any given item based on dimension and weight." I hope not to personally experience these changes anytime soon (we can get just about everything we need from stores we can walk to) but I'm glad it's happening.

A's birthday

It's hard to believe A is 4! She had a great 3 days of birthday celebrations (kid party on Tuesday with Nana and YeYe and Aunt Maureen also in attendance, birthday walk at her school and our immediate family party on her birthday, and this morning her play group kids celebrated with her).

I'm glad we have a 4 year-old who enjoys simple celebrations, like the duck themed kid party where we played games like Duck Duck Goose and had a cake with a duck on it...and doesn't require renting ponies or hiring clowns, etc. :)

Here are a couple photos from the last couple days. Don't forget to click for larger views.

enjoy,
Dan

embarrassingly spot on

I've wanted to put this up for a while but BoingBoing crashed his server for a bit. Photoshopped sci fi/ fantasy book covers.

We had nothing to do with it

C made signs and recruited his sister to campaign with him.

halloween pics

C is cool...he's been campaigning in school a bunch and took it to the next step. he carved this himself.



A drew her jackolantern herself too, and helped with the carving (and scooping the massive amount of guts out of this giant pumpkin sarah grew in the garden).



she really loves the halloween songs at school--they sang to us after the parade...



C of course did the makeup and costume himself here--he is a "bloodstained black spy" and had neck wounds and blood on his shirt you may not be able to see... he really enjoyed going out for two rounds of trick or treating since A wanted to go before it got dark. Now we need the great pumpkin to take LOTS of candy away...



sarah is a superhero that needs a backstory... I am one of those arcade "crane" games (not yet attached to me in this photo). It was fun having people play...

subversive schoolwork

Choice excerpts of C's spelling classwork below. The underlined word is the spelling word.

Alex P. Keaton strikes again:
Always try to make much more money!
I am saving money now to make a foundation for businesses later.

Reading fantasy to him out loud means he doesn't learn how to spell the REALLY important words:
Ogers are very unpleasant.

Perhaps I should challenge him to make the whole assignment an ongoing dialogue:
When will I start the mission?
Why do you want this mission completed already?

I think assignments like this almost beg for these kinds of random responses, but I do wonder about what free-association world they come from:
Would you like to make some guesses on the stealth of contestant no. 37?
I had some sandwiches for lunch and found a topaz in one.

And we don't even make him listen to them:
Obama and Micane will give many long speeches before the coming election.

And from math class:

I attached 3 plastic fingers to one hand. Then I cut off 7. How many fewer fingers do I have than I started? (I had 10 to begin with.)

He was supposed to come up with a word problem with the numbers 4, 7, and 11. We are indeed disturbed by the finger-chopping bit, but disregarding his sociopathic tendencies, I'm intrigued by the complexity of the problem he came up with. (The answer is 4, for those of you distracted by the blood.)

I'm a mean actuary

I hope the numbers in this article are wrong. Because if not, the booster seat industry is a big scam.

“About 350 children ages 4-7 die in crashes each year in the United States.... Because half of the fatally injured children in this age group ride unrestrained, the first step is to get them belted.”

So 175 kids wearing seat belts or in carseats/ booster seats die each year.

“A 2006 study by the same authors found that boosters reduce fatality risk among booster-age children by about 28 percent compared with belts alone.”

Let’s pretend none of those 175 were in boosters, so the 28% risk reduction is obtained by all of these kids. That would mean 49 fewer children would die per year if the kids who use seat belts start using boosters.

If we pretend the unrestrained kids started buckling up, boosters would prevent an addition 49 deaths. So we’d be up to 98 fewer deaths per year if every one of the 16 million children aged 4-7 in America used a booster seat. The cheapest booster seat costs about $20. That’s a lot of money for preventing 98 deaths. Worth it, yes, if your kid would be one of them- but imagine if all that money went to, say, children’s health care! Or perhaps promoting public transportation, which would reduce fatalities among all age groups....

gollum's riddles

C reset the clocks in the kitchen before bed with the hope of tricking me into reading to him for longer.

I just need to remind myself that other people let their kids play GTA

I decided not to read past the third Harry Potter book with C because they get disturbing after that. But then I somehow thought it was a good idea to read him The Hobbit. Clearly I didn't really think this through. It's not gory, and doesn't delve into "evil" in the same way The Lord of the Rings does, but its casual violence is a bit jarring. I have to wait until A goes to bed before reading it.*

In the period when C's computer was out of commission (thanks for fixing it Dad!) I loaded Gazillionaire and a Doom-ish multiplication game onto our computer. But Dan let C borrow his laptop one day and C found a trial version of Fate . Bad parents that we are, we don't do much monitoring of his computer time so we didn't vet the game at all before he found it and played it. Luckily it appears to be relatively innocuous because he absolutely loves it.


* C is thrilled by the book, however, and I'm enjoying it too- I'm not sure if I've read it since I was 8 myself. The language makes it much more difficult to read out loud than most of the books I choose, and it's too complicated for me to give the characters different voices as I usually do. But that means I have to pay more attention to what I'm saying instead of letting the words bypass my brain.

we didn't stop at pi

A is throwing a fit in the car- we're ten minutes from home and she's suddenly starving (despite having just eaten). We try distraction, empathy, humor, music, etc. and nothing is cutting it. Five minutes from home I can't take the whining any more, and tell her we'll have to pull over if she can't calm down. She pulls herself together and is silent for a few seconds. Then we hear a mournful whimper from the back- "10... 20... 30..."

Apparently A comforts herself by counting by tens. We joined in and got to 1200. She was happy by the time we got home.

(She often includes zero in her counting, both forwards and backwards. This may make her more developmentally advanced than the middle school kids I used to tutor.)

recruitment efforts

I convinced a coworker to try biking into work and, since she was too nervous to go it alone, accompanied her this morning. I was afraid that THIS would be the day that a driver did something stupid or we hit a freak rainstorm or something would else happen to convince her to never do it again, but it was happily uneventful. I doubt she’ll start doing it every day, especially since the weather is getting colder, but at least now she knows it’s viable, not unpleasant, and doesn’t take all that long. I’m unreasonably proud of myself.

fall garden

We have two enormous pumpkins growing, but one of them seems to be rotting on the vine. There are several small ones too but I don't know if they'll ripen before the plant dies. Or if they’ll ripen off the vine. Really I don’t know anything about pumpkins, except that if I allow them in my garden next year they will be re-routed out through the fence as soon as they have more than three leaves. Dan says I was foolish not to know that they’d trample over all my other plants, but since our pumpkins last year were all stunted from being planted in 2” of gravel and munched on by the deer, I didn’t. I should have taken Pumpkin Circle more seriously.

I transplanted a few strawberries into the fenced-in garden so maybe next year we'll actually defy the mammals and get berries in June.* The everbearing plants are still producing but Dan is less-than-appreciative of the tiny berries. I cut up old jeans to use as mulch in the strawberry patch and they're working really well. I used large swaths of denim with slits cut in them for the plants to poke through- effective and stylish. Unfortunately, I fear that I'll need to re-do it in the spring because I doubt that all of the plants will find their way up through the same holes.

The broccoli plants are hanging on but look pretty pathetic and unlikely to produce. The tomatoes also look awful but have a lot of fruit on them; it's nice to see them surviving despite the toll a month of rain took on them.

We pulled up the basil and drafted potluck guests to pull the leaves off the stems. Dan has frozen pesto.

Cowering under the pumpkins is a plant which, despite its attack, has produced several hot peppers, which add good flavor to chili. They also, alas, burnt my hand on Sunday. Someday I’ll learn. The scarlet runner beans are still flowering. Next year I'm planting more- we like them better than green beans.

The fall carrots failed and I forgot to plant spinach. Soon I’ll put in some garlic. (I wonder if it would be safe from the mammals or if it needs to go inside the fence too. I think I’ll try outside; it’s used as a repellent after all.)

A demanded an apple yesterday so I filched a few from the ground below a neighbor’s tree. Luckily she, unlike C, is undeterred by mottled skin. We want to ask the owners of our local apple trees if we can bring ladders over to pick but haven’t had a chance yet. (There’s a public apple tree near my office with lots of good lookin’ apples on it, none of which I can reach. All the limbs within my reach have stunted fruit that look like crab apples. I’m baffled and ladderless.)

*Y’all can give me copper tape for Christmas to help me defy the invertebrates. The slugs annoy me, but as long as I consider them relatives to sandworms I can live with them. It’s when I start thinking of them as Hutts that they really piss me off. When I encountered one last week that was about the size of A’s hand, they became Hutts.

what a lyricist

A, who is supposed to be sleeping, is singing rather tunefully, “Water, salt, and then then then then then- oil, molasses, then then then then- flour, yeast, and - then then then then then….“ She’s assisted Dan in breadmaking just about enough to take over the job.

Yesterday she was singing "Summer, fall, winter, spring" over and over again to the tune of Dona nobis pacem.

No, not crying....

Whatever I'm allergic to seems to be reaching its peak. Fall is my favorite season, but this is not its best aspect.

wouldn't Bob be surprised if we'd left it there

So C is supposed to be watching Neighbor Bob’s cats this week. When he went to feed them today, one of them had disappeared- whether C left a door ajar or if the guy working no the house did, we don’t know, but the cat was found lurking in the woods, refusing to be caught. As Dan left tonight he asked me to go try to get it- “it’s almost come onto the porch; maybe it will like you better than me and C.” So I stroll over as Dan is driving away, find a docile cat sitting on the porch steps, pick it up, and toss it inside.

Then it occurs to me- there are bunch of cats in our neighborhood. I have no idea what Iggy looks like. So I retrieve C from our house to identify the cat. We find it warily circling Delphina, the cat that DIDN’T run away; she looks terrified.

C: “No, that’s not Iggy.”

Random cat was very happy to leave. Delphina hopefully will get over the trauma. Iggy remains on the lam.

This post is of no interest to you unless you have trouble with the Monty hall problem.

I never believed the "correct" answer to the "Monty Hall problem." (In brief: you're on a game show and pick a door, hoping for a new car. The host opens one of the other doors and reveals a goat, and then gives you the option of switching to the unopened door you didn't pick. Should you do it? The problem presumes you prefer cars to goats, despite goats being cuter and more ecologically friendly and producers of feta.) It turns out that you always should, even though in my mind it shouldn't matter. No matter how many times I heard it explained I still couldn't get it. In part this is because if the host opened one of the other doors without knowing what lay behind it, and just happened to encounter a goat, the probabilities would in fact be equal. But I finally read an explanation which helps me to wrap my head around it:

It may be easier to appreciate the solution by considering the same problem with 1,000,000 doors instead of just three (vos Savant 1990). In this case there are 999,999 doors with goats behind them and one door with a prize. The player picks a door. The game host then opens 999,998 of the other doors revealing 999,998 goats—imagine the host starting with the first door and going down a line of 1,000,000 doors, opening each one, skipping over only the player's door and one other door. The host then offers the player the chance to switch to the only other unopened door. On average, in 999,999 out of 1,000,000 times the other door will contain the prize, as 999,999 out of 1,000,000 times the player first picked a door with a goat. A rational player should switch.

Thanks Wikipedia!

too many keys

Upon my arrival to work every morning, I must:

1) Unlock my bike lock from the frame
2) Relock it under the stairwell
3) Unlock the secretary’s office
4) Unlock the key box to get the key to the locker room
5) Re-lock the key box
6) Re-lock the secretary’s office
7) Unlock the locker room
8) Unlock my locker (currently using combination lock*; not sure if another key would be more or less annoying- I may steal the keyed padlock off C's window)
9) After showering, etc. re-lock my locker
(The locker room door re-locks automatically! Hurray!)
10) Unlock the secretary’s office again
11) Unlock the key box and return the locker room key
12) Re-lock the key box
13) Re-lock the secretary’s office
14) Unlock the door to my office- and then I’m finally at work!

This also occurs in reverse on the way home, but at least the secretary’s office is usually open then. I’m angling for my very own locker room key, which will eliminate more than half of the above steps, but I’m having to fight for it.

* Purchased for my middle school gym locker in 1987. I still know the combination because I taped it on the back- in hexadecimal. So only geeks can steal my dirty clothes. I don't actually think this lock is necessary to prevent theft, but I want to prevent overly-diligent maintenance employees from "cleaning out" my stuff.

Pollywog Holler still has the best ones

Stair porn

mr potter

C obviously is enjoying hearing the Potter series (earlier books for now until he's older). Sarah is reading them out loud in the evenings... (in case you can't read what he wrote under her "Beware of Voldemort" it's "I can easily counter Voldemort.")

happy code talker day

An early morning conversation today:

Me (just having gotten up upon hearing C coming upstairs). "Good morning!"
C: "Happy Code Talker Day Daddy!"
Me: (stares sleepily; does not quite compute yet)
C: "Argghh! Don't you know what Code Talker Day is?!!"
Me: "No, I don't, but tell me about it"
C: (some additional angstful noise) "Why didn't you know it was Code Talker Day today?!"
Me: (now waking up slightly) "You mean the Navajo Code talkers?"
C: (calming down finally) "Yes...Code Talker Day honors the Navajo Code Talkers who served in the Pacific in the war against Japan.."

Later on in the morning:
C: (holding his Code Talkers book from the library) "In 1982 the President awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor to the original 29 Navajo Code Talkers... In 2002 the others were given the silver cross [I'm making that up; not sure what medal they got, wasn't as big as the 29 got posthumously]...There were over 200 Code Talkers total during the war... (etc. etc.).
Me: (thinking it was typical of our government to finally honor native americans after many of them were dead)"Cool! What should we do to celebrate?" (He ended up setting off "fireworks" in the afternoon, which in this case were water balloons and various containers of water he dumped on the heads of A and her playmates out front--they liked it though at least).

-Dan

bikes

Last Wednesday I contemplated biking into work, but the thought of packing up extra clothes and digging up the key to my U-lock was just too much for 7 a.m. To avoid having any such excuse in the future I brought in clothes/ towel on Thursday. So today I had no choice but to give it a try.

Traffic was low since I was out early and everyone’s on vacation, which made it less nerve-wracking than it might have been. I avoided the problem I have with exercising in the morning (can’t eat when I first wake up or I feel sick; can’t exercise until after eating or I’ll get dizzy) by taking my time and not particularly exerting myself. (There are only two uphills of any significance on my way to work. The route home is harder.) My only issues:

a) I could really use a side mirror. I can’t keep from drifting while looking over my shoulder, even for a second.
b) I couldn’t get in to the showers here until after 9. I did without today because it was a cool morning and I don’t have any meetings, but I do sweat buckets and will normally have to shower when I get in. I need to find someplace that will copy keys that say “do not duplicate.”
c) I suspect that if I rode home my quads would be unhappy with me. Obviously that problem will solve itself if I commute regularly.
d) Rumor has it that I’d be much happier with road tires than my current mountain tires. I’ll consider switching them out if I start riding more.

I’m probably not riding home because it looks like the thunderstorms are not going to clear up as I’d hoped. But we’ll see. (I was very much wishing I’d ridden last Thursday, when I sat in traffic for an hour on the way home due to flooded streets.)

C can ride surprisingly fast. On short stretches I can only overtake him by using higher gears. (Dan claims this is cheating because I have 21 and C has 10.) Unfortunately his bursts of speed doesn’t translate to getting places faster- he was taught at school to dismount the bike and walk while crossing intersections. Dan has been regularly biking the kids to the pool (2-ish miles) and it definitely slows things down. He’s starting to feel more comfortable staying on his bike past small streets at least.

Dan has been biking more and is starting to get disenchanted with having A’s bike seat permanently attached. In addition to looking dorky it prevents him from using the toe clips on the pedals. However, besides being useful, I also see it as a good theft-deterrent- if you’re about to steal a bike, you don’t want the one with the bright blue toddler seat on it, right? We’ve decided not to invest in a removable one for that reason and because we expect that she’ll be ready to use the tagalong bike next spring. (She won’t be able to help Dan by carrying six-packs of beer for him anymore but he’d have space for a bike rack to use instead.)

I'm so dull that I blog about what I ate for dinner

I’ve had the hardest time planning meals since I started working. I used to figure out what I was cooking for the week, carefully maximizing efficiency (planning double batches of grains or beans or tomato sauce to work for several different meals) and minimizing monotony (the extra rice would go into a casserole rather than another stir-fry). Maybe because what little intellect I have left is devoted to other things or maybe because I’m now only responsible for 3-4 dinners a week rather than 5, I just can’t motivate myself to do it anymore.

So we end up with dinners like last night’s which, despite their eclecticism, actually work. I got beans going in the pressure cooker. Next step- figure out which vegetables from the CSA need to be used up most. The answer, unfortunately, was a large eggplant. I’ve never understood the appeal of eggplants; they have a funny texture and not much flavor and generally if they’re tasty it’s only because they’ve been slathered in something else that’s good. Why trouble to grow it when you could just plant zucchini instead? But eggplant it would be since my antipathy toward food waste far outweighs my eggplant prejudice (1). I wanted dinner to be ready within 20 minutes, so none of the methods described in the first two cookbooks I searched would do- there would be no salting or soaking and there was no way I was willing to leave the oven on for 30+ minutes for roasting on such a hot day.

But- a recipe for broiling! Which will only require the oven to be on for three minutes per side! That’s my speed. I’d never actually used the broiler before but I figured it out and slid in the eggplant, sliced and splashed with tamari. And it came out FANTASTIC. Still not quite enough flavor, though the soy sauce helped a lot, so I made a sauce with lemon juice, peanut butter, parsley, and some sugar to tone down the lemon.

Made a vinaigrette for the beans and cut up some CSA carrots and green beans for color. All I was missing now- a grain. I’d rather overused bulgher lately in my last-minute cooking so I went for the obvious choice- popcorn. (Do most families of four devour two batches of popcorn in fifteen minutes? Everyone with their own bowl, since we’re not good at sharing?)

And dinner was a hit. Or at least it got eaten, which is good enough for me.


(1) I’m not really an eggplant-hater; I dressed up as one for Halloween one year. But I still maintain that their good looks are hiding a dull interior.

maybe for A's birthday?

"The nice thing about a pi scarf is that you can really make it as long as you want."

a geeky way to disturb your children

A: We can make pyand sometime.
S: What is pyand?
A: No, PI END.
S: (?)
A: It doesn't have to go on forever. We can write the whole thing down.
(Loyal readers may recall that we discussed pi with the children about a month ago. A has voiced frets over it several times since then.)
S: Well, um, in a way you're writing the whole thing every time you draw a circle.
A (thankfully ignoring my last statement): We should make pi end. Let's do that now.
S: Well, usually people shorten it, so we can just decide to stop after three digits and call it 3.14.
A: (displeased)
S: The rest of the numbers after that are so small that they're not very important anyway.
A: Why aren't they important?
S: Because they're so small compared to the first three numbers.
A: But I want it to stop at 9.
S: Oh, so you want it to be 3.14159?
A: Yes!!
S: OK, sounds good.
A: What is it again?
S: 3.14159.
A (after taking a bite of dinner): What is it again?
S: 3.14159.
A: 3.14159?
S: Yes.
A (very pleased): Oh!

wheat prices again

The last time I bought a 50-pound bag of organic whole wheat flour I thought it was expensive at $42.50. That was up from $26.50 the previous year. This time- $69.50. Ouch.

But hey, the Research Foundation gave us 3% raises, so we only took a small pay cut in relation to inflation.

luckily no kudzu

Abandoning a garden for more than a week is a dangerous thing to do in July. We came home to three ripe cherry tomatoes, five sugar snap peas from the one plant that’s still hanging on through the heat, and a pumpkin plant trying to take over Earth. While we were gone it snaked five feet across the garden (putting down roots ever 18 inches or so) over the chives to an unsuspecting tomato plant, and pushed up another four feet through the tomato cage. It grew more than a foot a day. Now that’s scary.

Monday night I wrestled it down. The plan was for the pumpkins to grow along the fence abandoned by the sugar snap peas and I redirected it that way. Looks like I’m going to have to monitor it daily to keep it in check. The tomato plants are having enough trouble finding places to grow without intruders; they’re wending their way over their neighbors’ cages and one has made a dive for the basil.

Lots of little zucchinis also greeted us, and only one foot-long. We ate it yesterday and it was still incredibly sweet. I made a tabouli-ish salad, only with beans and raw zucchini and without tomatoes, utilizing the mint plants which three people donated to us following the mysterious demise of our patch. C was hungry a few hours later so I offered him a raw yellow squash and a knife to cut it up with. I’m so glad he has become willing to eat much of what we give him. This is the first year I’ve even considered serving raw summer squash to my family and no one’s complained yet. (I think Dan has been tempted to but he knows better.)

Oh, and raw beets are pretty fantastic too. The first recipe listed here http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/02/dining/02mini.html (but we don’t have fancy ingredients on hand so ours had walnuts instead of pistachios and no goat cheese). A mistook it for our Thanksgiving cranberry sauce. I feared she would burst into tears when she took a bite and the taste didn’t match but she didn’t bat an eye.

Twin Trees play-by-play (warning- long)

Day 1: The kids are so badly behaved in the car that Dan and I aren't speaking to them by the time we arrive. It rains as we unload the car. Dan and A go raspberry picking but A doesn't like to walk through the tall wet grass. Dan, whose packing responsibilities were limited to his own needs, finds that he brought no socks or underwear. We break out the Twice 55 songbook (1) and argue about whether there is ever any merit to drawing out the last three syllables of each line of the Doxology (2).

Day 2: We go to North Creek in search of groceries, sunscreen, and socks. C is unbearable. There are no socks to be found, though a Rite Aid employee suggests we try the deli (?!) next door. Alas, it is closed, and Dan considers rifling through a rafting company's lost-and-found. We stop by the beach at Ski Bowl on the way home. A leech attaches itself to A's ankle and its removal involves squishing it. (Refraining from jumping up and down and screaming EW EW EW, and instead smiling and telling A about the cute little "snail" that liked her so much, took all of my will.) At home we realize C never ate his breakfast; once he finishes it he remains unbearable but in a cheerier way. At least until he slips into the brook and scrapes up his leg. I distract him from the pain by musing about how Bactine has gotten away with falsely advertising its "no-sting formula" for so many years. A says it's been so long since we've been at our house that she doesn't remember what it looks like.

Day 3: I decide to go for a run, but think better of it about five yards up the hill on Cemetery Road. My parents join us for a hike around Thirteenth Lake and we pick lots and lots of blueberries. C loses his wallet on the trail and is distraught (3). We give up on the local map puzzle; while only 400 pieces, it consists solely of contour lines. Dan finds NEW socks for $10 at a rafting company and invests in a single pair (4).

Day 4: We head back into town for building supplies, ice cream, and TP. I steal an unguarded wireless connection in the Grand Union parking lot to ensure that Friday's work snafu didn't escalate. We bribe the kids to play together (5). We stop at the swimming hole again (in the rain) and are surprised to find a teenaged lifeguard on duty, accompanies by two friends loudly discussing the quality of their weed and Husker Du. I dirty every pot in the kitchen to make dinner while Dan tries to learn Spanish. We utilize the military songs in Twice 55 to convince C to sing with us (6), and find that despite the limitations of the house dictionary, it is able to define "caisson" for us.

Day 5: Rain postpones our beach plans so we sing "If I Had a Crowbar" while taking out a defunct piece of drywall from the Rose Room (7). My parents arrive with a new sheet and we commence grumbling about our ancestors’ building techniques (8). My mother walks the kids to the larger creek and I revel in the silence. Dan and I replace the terrifying pictures of puppies and kittens to the repaired wall, thinking that way no one will notice the expanse of white among the fake wood paneling.

Day 6: We trek up to Raquette Lake to see the work my parents have done on their cabin and to enjoy Golden Beach (9). My kids forgot to take their smart pills- A asks where she can fill her bucket with water at the beach (uh- the lake maybe?) and C cannot grasp the concept of floating in an inner tube. We decide to forego dinner out to avoid child-meltdowns ruining an otherwise good day and head home for the lasagna Dan had made in the morning before I got up (10). Dan coats the seams of a leaking roof with sealant and hopes it does the trick.

Day 7: C demands a trip to Hooper Mine and we comply. There are red raspberries and coyote scat on the trail. I encourage C to descend via the scary rocky cliff face (11) and rip my only pair of shorts (12) accompanying him. Dan and A drop us off at the driveway so we can lie around and read while they refill the water jugs and play by the river. I manage to create a reasonably tasty dinner utilizing the last of our food stores (13) and replace the lightstring leading upstairs with an equally antique and knotted drapery pull. We have a campfire after it stops raining. C escorts A into the woods to search for birchbark and, shockingly, refrains from pushing her into the ravine.

Day 8: I yell at people while packing and cleaning. And we’re off! Pictures to follow.

(1) Which really should be named "Twelve Dozen" based on its song count, but anyway.
(2) Especially since they still pronounce "'nly" as only one syllable.
(3) Dan and I both advised him not to bring it to no avail.
(4) He continues to save his lone pair of sorta-clean boxers for special occasions.
(5) Not for the first time, but this time was notable because it actually worked.
(6) Our enthusiastic rendition of The Battle Hymn of the Republic may have frightened away the rodents for the next few weeks.
(7) We are surprised to find that the fake woodgrain pattern was factory-applied to the drywall. The lumberyard, alas, doesn't sell it anymore. How shocking.
(8) The studs were rotated 90 degrees, so there's only 2" between the bathroom and bedrooms, and they were installed 4' apart. We don’t like to wonder what’s holding up the roof.
(9) An especially fun beach for kids, because it’s nice and sandy and stays shallow a long way out. It is always windy, however, which only my mother considers a benefit to a swimming beach. This also means there are lots of waves which produce ripples in the sand underwater. My cousin Rebecca told me that they were snakes lurking under the sand and I fully believed her.
(10) He planned to bring it with us to Raquette Lake but I forced him to rethink that when he had no plan for how we would cool it and then reheat it at dinnertime.
(11) I thought it would be an exciting confidence-building adventure, and I went first so I’d break his fall if he slipped. (I’d like to say I’d catch him, but chances are I probably couldn’t.)
(12) Peter Harris and the church thrift shop have failed me this summer.
(13) The 1935 Fannie Farmer Cookbook was no help in telling me how best to combine turnips, lentils, and feta but I managed.

vacation in review

we enjoyed a much needed week away from our house and work up at Twin Trees in North River (which now consists only of rafting companies as the sole businesses, but at least they sell socks for those who forget to pack them, like me :).

Even though there was a thunderstorm virtually every day, we still managed to fit in fun hike around nearby 13th lake where we picked wild blueberries, lots of swimming in various bodies of water--C is improving by the week with his swimming endurance and confidence, a day on Raquette Lake (the only sunny all-day day) with Jim and Shelley where the kids played in the sand on Golden Beach and in the water most of the day, our traditional short hike with a good view up to the old Hooper Garnet Mine--this year A was big enough to go to the high cliff overlook too and we fit in some red raspberry gathering there as well, some fix-it projects at the cabin, a campfire one night in between rainshowers, local walks and playing in the yard and brook by camp, and lots of reading and indoor time while it rained. Here are a couple pictures, below. Click to enlarge.

-Dan

more raspberries

I have at least 16 quarts of whole black raspberries frozen now. As the season winds down it’s getting hard to find freezer-quality berries (there are still some that are firm and of perfect ripeness out there but they’re few and far-between) so I relaxed my standards yesterday and picked a batch to make jam with. We now have two quarts of very tasty preserves. I was too lazy to can them (it was HOT yesterday) so they’re in the freezer, but we’ll still be able to enjoy it all winter if I can keep people from eating it with spoons.

Raspberry season will likely just be beginning in North River while we’re there next week. Alas, I don’t think I’ll be able to convince my family to maintain their enthusiasm for long picking expeditions any longer. Especially amongst blackflies.

In which the last decade of my social life is accurately mocked

Weekend Plans

furious

A bawled for twenty minutes after she saw the tree limb with her brand new swing being hacked down. Dan spent a whole day installing the swing two weeks ago, replacing the baby swing and giving her a treat to help compensate for her broken elbow. Our next-door neighbor Sue, who owns the trunk of the tree, didn't trouble to tell us she was going to have the limb cut off. (And given that it only overhung our property, we strongly suspect that she only did it out of spite. We wonder if she watched Dan working on it, chuckling to herself.) We're friendly with all of our neighbors except her. She dissed Dan the day she moved in; we've been nothing but pleasant to her, but she just plain doesn't like us.

Now I'm so angry that I can't stop shaking, and am trying to figure out how to turn the other cheek rather than exact revenge. And trying to figure out where on earth we can re-install the swing so A won't freak out over its loss every day, which is going to be a trick because all the other potential tree limbs on our property are like 40 feet up.

Edited to add: Just learned that when Dan went over to confront her, the tree guys offered to re-install the swing for us on a higher branch. Sue said "no way." It wouldn't actually have worked anyway, but her attitude is totally ridiculous.

watched pots

We keep staring at the green cherry tomatoes but it doesn’t seem to make them ripen any faster.

steampunks love peak oil

Dirigibles might make a comeback.

we are not alone

The gmail quick-reply box decided about a month ago to randomly default to reply-all. This is extremely hard for me to remember and decidedly not ideal. I've inadvertently sent replies to lists of people a half dozen times now- luckily none of them extremely embarrassing, but half committed minor social faux pas. Oops.

CDTA just isn't as fun

The boys and the subway.

CFCs be damned

The air conditioner in our car died (on the way to the party A broke her arm at- a decidedly ill-advised trip). This has of course led to the kids bickering over who has which window rolled down how far, but my biggest mistake in attempting to ameliorate the situation was to give them each ice packs on Saturday. A decided she was done with hers about five minutes into the trip and dared to put it down next to her carseat. C is offended if anyone other than himself dares to use that space, so the two of them argued over the precise placement of the ice pack for the rest of the trip. I had been debating whether we should fix the A/C but now I’m pretty sure it’s necessary.

the song remains the same

We braved another concert outing with the whole family. (C was convinced to join us voluntarily by the lure of kettle corn and advance agreements to only attend from 10:15 to 3:45 and to stay home on Sunday.) We actually shocked him into dancing when we first arrived, but after he remembered that he hates music, he spent much of his time reading The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers (occasionally asking me to help interpret tables for him; who knows how much he's absorbing about the 1950 per capita GNPS of the G-8, but it's somehow holding his attention). Except of course when he was taking breaks to beg for lemonade, antagonize his sister, or ask if it was 3:45 yet.

A, meanwhile, sweet-talked her father into spending an inordinate amount of time doing crafts at the kid tent and playing in the sandbox. I eventually managed to lure her away, but she was fairly cranky and wholly uninterested in the music, so after a while we let her paint in the kids' tent while we sat elsewhere (in view).

We heard a decent amount of music and saw a lot of friends, but like our last venture to Falcon Ridge when Alyra was a baby, we're not quite sure whether it was worth it given the constant child-management required. We considered bringing a friend along for C which might have helped- maybe in a year or two we'll be able to bring buddies for them both to keep them entertained. They each had friends over on Friday afternoon which was fun for all. Hopefully we'll be able to do more of that this summer to keep them distracted from each other.

C's last soccer game

C finished his soccer season last weekend with a bang... Great to see how far he and his teammates have come. They played the same "dark blue" team that they had played their very first game, after only one, 20-minute practice in the rain.

That first game of the season they were, understandably, very disorganized and got crushed. This time there was still the extra-tall coach's son on the other team who was able to dribble around people well and move down to score. And he and others still scored several points. But C's team scored more (unofficially of course, at this level/league they don't even keep an official score and certainly don't maintain team rankings...which is great...but the kids usually know who won, and the parents do to, even though we try not to mention it around the kids :)

C's team passed a lot to each other, which was one of the things his coaches worked on all season and it really helped them in this game. And they were just better individual players too. C plays better on defense--very instinctively in fact, so much so that the coach's were surprised that it was his first time playing on a team...but he wants the thrill of being on offense. So he played goalie for one quarter so he could then be guaranteed a chance to play center the next quarter (that's how they reward goalie participation). As you'll see in this photo, passing in an obvious way to start the quarter off...(don't forget you can click for larger views of these pictures).



I found it hard to get good photos of his great defensive playing. I was usually too busy cheering him on, and with the time delay on the camera and all... Here's a blurry one of him having just kicked it up field away from an opposing player (and a pass to a girl on his team no less).



Some of the highlights of his playing were an amazing save when the other team had bypassed his goalie, and the ball was on the line right in front of the goal just waiting a little nudge by one of the players running towards it, but he flew back there and kicked it out--to the cheers of his team and us parents... He also did a backwards pass (behind him, while facing away) to a teammate who scored a goal soon thereafter, and he was also proud of kicking it between some girl's legs on the other team...

Here's one of him going up to assist goal making if necessary. I hope he gets the satisfaction of kicking it into the goal himself one of these days soon...



All in all, a great way to end his first soccer season. He's already signed up for next Fall.

-Dan

know when to roll 'em, know when to fold 'em

D&D origami.

gosh darn it

I'm lucky not to have hit the problem of striking a balance between being likable and being taken seriously. Partly from not working in a cutthroat field, but partly because men over 50 have historically found me adorable in a remind-them-of-their-daughters kind of way and they do their best to make ME like THEM. Now that I'm running into younger men in positions of power (PRA and ADAI were run by older people and thus networks were generally older) and I'm getting older myself I might not be able to take the "likability" part for granted anymore.

kismet

I took the first step in trying to encourage fireflies to colonize our property. Strolling past A's preschool around 10 last night, I spied a presumably female firefly blinking hopefully on the ground. I relocated her to our garden and hope that the ones we've previously seen in our yard are males of her species.

it's the last day of school-

We'll see if C manages to effect a significant enough attitude adjustment for us to be able to keep him home next year. (I don't mind the homeschooling; I do mind the constant badgering of his sister.) Interestingly, our backyard-adjoining neighbor is pulling her same-age son out for next year, which could make things easier in many ways.

now I know it's summer

The first black raspberry picking outing of the season is a treasure hunt; ripe berries are few and we trek farther along the trail before we're satiated. While A pops most of her finds right into her mouth, she (like Little Sal) likes to have a container for the few she wants to save. C invented berry-basket necklaces when he was four which usually work well. But they do need to be held to keep them from spilling, so we broke out Bucket Blast and belted a pail around her waist to make up for her one-handedness.


(Fashionable, eh? Note the empty-but-stained bucket; she does put berries in, but they are retrieved quickly.)

It worked well enough that C used one on our post-dinner walk, and when I'm picking in earnest next week I might too. We'll see how much my productivity increases with two hands.

bioluminescense

I took C up North Street at 9 p.m. on the solstice so he could see the fireflies at their peak. It's hard to get him to express excitement over anything outdoors so his awe at the display was fun to see. He caught them and I contemplated them, unsurprised that anyone would believe in fairies.

He wanted to relocate a number of them into our yard but I suggested we find a way to attract them instead. Turns out the larvae eat slugs. Now I'm definitely on board with his plan. We typically see a few in or yard every night but not the numbers we'd like!

Little Elbows

An update to Sarah's post from yesterday. A and I only had to spend about an hour today at the orthopedic specialist's office to confirm that yes, her elbow does indeed have a hairline fracture. That gives her the dubious distinction of being the first person in our immediate family to have broken a bone, at least that we know of... Funny that she broke her elbow falling on soft grass/plants in the woods, while each of us has had what looked like more serious falls or injuries over the years without a break...

As you can see by the following photo, she is happy with her new cast, and doesn't seem to have been in any pain since it was immobilized. Cast-off date is 3 weeks hence...

hope for transit?

The number of Delmartians riders of "my" bus (the 18 at Four Corners at 7:22) has quintupled since last summer.

Thanks American medical system!

Dan and A have been in the ER for six hours now trying to figure out whether she broke her arm yesterday. (Minor fall, major reaction that's unlike her, and still hurts today). He just called and they're pretty sure now that they have the THIRD set of x-rays done (go radiation!) that it's not broken.

(This is why I sent Dan instead of taking her myself- I'd be throwing so many fits by now they'd have kicked me out.)

in which we deal with our son's annoying one-upmanship by doing it ourselves

C: I know more than any of you about anything.
D: Everyone has different types of knowledge which they know best.
S: I know how to use logistic regression.
D: I know how to change the oil in the car.
C: Well I know most everything better than you, and EVERYTHING more than A.
D: A knows people's names better than any of the rest of us.
S: When people we can't remember show up at parties we ask A what their names are. (This is in fact true.)
C: Well that's not really useful information.

A: Five hours is a far car ride.
C: You mean a LONG car ride.
D: We are far away from Oma and Opa's house.

A: I can count to 100.
C:You can't count to 1000. I can count to any number there is.
S: You can't count to pi.
C: Pie isn't a number.
D: Pi is the name of a number that's 3.14 something...
A: I can count to ten in Spanish. Uno, dos...
S: "Cosine, secant, tangent, sine, 3.14159!"
A: tres, cuatro, cinco, seis...
C: Shut UP, A!
D: and it's interesting because it's an irrational number that goes on and on forever after the decimal point.
A: siete, ocho, nuev, diez!
D: That's great A!
C: Shut UP, A! So how do you count to it?
S and D: YOU CAN'T.
C: Wow, that's weird.
D: Invisible numbers are even weirder.
C: How can a number be invisible?
S: You mean imaginary?
C: (giggles) If it's imaginary it's not real!
S: That's right, it's not a "real" number, and you can't count to it either, but it's useful when you're calculating things.
C: So what IS it?
S: The square root of negative one.
(Numerous other questions arose that got too difficult to field since (a) C has no experience with negative numbers except arithmetically and (b) we were in the car and I couldn't try to demonstrate anything on paper.)

(At our potluck, all the other kids were off playing and C hung out with the grown-ups for a while. His method of making conversation was to quiz us on WWII.)
C: What was the Marshall Plan?
Brian: The Marshall Plan was the U.S.'s post-war plan for rebuilding the economic systems of Europe (etc. etc. etc.)
C (shocked): How did YOU know that?

the basement shouldn't freeze

Because of the volatility of petroleum prices, our heating oil company is no longer offering prepay agreements at a preset rate. In the past we saved a lot by paying upfront for a year's worth of oil. The next few years will be interesting....

we can't be trusted

Last summer I was happy to be moved to the third floor because it didn't have autoflushing toilets. Alas, they've now "upgraded" here too. Interestingly this occurred the day after our organization was granted additional office space up here. Maintenance continues to work quickly 'round here.

rockin'

Dan and I decided to check out Rockin' on the River tonight; we figured it wouldn't be a particularly family-friendly concert but we wanted to go out and it was free and the opening act was a band we'd seen at a friend's wedding five years ago so there was some nostalgia there. ("Hey, remember when we only had to convince my parents to take ONE kid so we could go away overnight?" "Yeah, and Mala had So Much Food.")

Our method of getting C to leave the house voluntarily, especially for a venue where we may encounter people or, heaven forbid, music, is to settle on a reasonable timeframe and agree to buy him junk food while we're out. He settled in with some kettle corn and a book (Spies and Saboteurs of World War II, of course) for about five minutes before the noise started getting to him. He relocated to the hill along the side of the Green Island Bridge a little bit away. Eventually the volume even there was too much and I took him for a walk until the end of the first set, when we agreed to leave to make him happy.

It wasn't until we were leaving that it occurred to me that most kids don't sit by themselves and read at concerts. But given the other recreational activities taking place there it was probably for the best.

yes, I'm conducting a literature review

Most researchers have a financial incentive to obtain positive study outcomes. I don't have direct incentives, but my research center will not continue to obtain grants if we don't make our funders happy. And our funders are, for the most part, trying to maintain their jobs, which means the programs they run need to be funded and they don't want to risk this funding with bad news.

Even if researchers are not financially tied to positive study outcomes, they often are emotionally tied to the programs under study. Many of our funders are completely convinced that the programs they oversee "work," and no research would ever convince them otherwise, even if their jobs weren't on the line. It doesn't take too long to get emotionally invested in a project.

So we come up with something nice to say in our reports even if we don't find anything positive. And even though we own the rights to all the data we collect (one thing SUNY insists on when accepting grants), we don't publish anything negative or null results (in our case, usually meaning that an intervention did not have an effect).

Null results are rarely published even in more purely academic settings simply because such studies are often less interesting to read. They're much more likely to be rejected by top-tier journals unless they're refuting something previously published and have a larger sample or better design. Both of my published papers are of null results and we didn't even bother submitting them to prestigious journals.

This is a problem because 20 people could conduct similar research and even if only one gets statistically significant results (which with a 95% confidence interval is likely to happen by chance), that one paper is likely to be added to the published literature and all the others trashed- if not by journal editors, then by the researchers themselves who won't trouble to write and submit a paper that's unlikely to get into a good journal when they could be spending their time on more effective career-building activities. Meta-analyses of published work are becoming more popular; to compensate for small sample sizes in research on a particular topic, they collect all the decent published studies on a topic and analyze them as a whole to see if they have statistically meaningful results. Problem is, meta-analysis can not compensate for publication bias.

natural selection in action

I seem to have cleared the garden of just about all the slugs that come out before 9 p.m. and all the slugs that are foolish enough to drown in beer. I picked off dozens surrounding the plants and beer the first couple of nights, but now I'm rarely getting more than four. I know they're out there since they're still doing damage, but apparently only the late-night teetotaling slugs remain. I'll have to go out there with a lantern sometime. And maybe some margaritas- perhaps it's just the IPA they're uninterested in? I can relate to that.

Word of advice: Unless there's no reasonable alternative, I advise against picking up slugs with your bare hands. I've been collecting enough that it's been the best option, but the secretions of a frightened slug are the stickiest, nastiest ectoplasm that I've ever encountered. They don't wash off with soap and water either.

I looked into the edibility of slugs, figuring that in an emergency there's enough of them to provide a significant amount of food. Even if they eat all our plants, we'd still have a highly productive slug farm, and people eat snails after all. Alas, I wasn't able to get a clear answer, but I suspect they're as nutritious if not as palatable as escargot. And easier to catch than squirrel.

why I'm not a farmer

In addition to another large batch of lettuce and mystery greens, our CSA today provided us with strawberries, basil, broccoli, and several summer squash. I just remembered to PLANT zucchini last week, and they're harvesting. I did just pick a pint of sugar snap peas, which is exciting, but apparently they're the only thing I should trouble to grow.

(Off to hunt more slugs, who are intent on munching up the zucchini, pumpkin, and scarlet runners moments after they've emerged from the soil. I got a dozen about half an hour ago- let's see if there's more. Another reason I'm no farmer- I can't even bring myself to kill the slugs I pick off. I relocate them across the yard to the Japanese knotweed.)