and women don't like beer, either

This article discusses how bicycling is a white, upper/ middle class pursuit and wonders why. It irked me. First, it doesn't actually have any data at all to back up bicycling as "white." It sounds like someone asked a few (probably white) people if they think most cyclists are white and they all said yes, which isn't exactly an accurate sampling method. Second, it jumps to assumptions about cycling as transportation after considering cycling as a sport. It's likely true that a smaller percentage of non-white people take up bicycling as a hobby for the same reasons they're probably less likely to take up any sport that demands expensive equipment and travel; like skiing, it just doesn't make sense for most of us to do it, and if all your friends aren't doing it there's no good reason to take it up. But I suspect that a lot MORE poor people, who are disproportionately non-white, use bicycles for transportation because they can't afford cars.

Maybe things are different in Toronto; it has much better public transportation than my area, so maybe the poor have better options than bicycles. But about half the cyclists I see once I cross into Albany are black. I'm not riding anywhere that a sane recreational rider would choose to go; the people I see are just trying to get around, just as I am. Unfortunately, they're apparently invisible to the powers that be.

I'm still not entirely comfortable with it

I forgot my first name last week. I was signing a work e-mail and it didn’t seem quite right, and I sounded it out and it didn’t seem like it ought to be pronounced like that, really it’s an awfully odd combination of letters and sounds, and is that really right? The first “a” really should be more of a schwa sound, shouldn’t it? My, I need more sleep. And, apparently, a less complicated name.

not part of his job description

A: C, will you make a prince puppet for me to go with my princess?
C: No, why would I want to do that?
A: To make me happy.
C: Er, no, I'm busy.

late blight moves fast

When I got back from vacation on Sunday the garden looked all right; neglected after ten days, certainly, and my broccoli seedlings had been devoured, but overall everything was healthy. By Tuesday, two of the tomato plants had late blight on 75% of their leaves. Today all the rest of the plants had it too. I pruned them back to only a few stems, but don’t have high hopes of saving the plants unless we get a week of sun starting now. I haven’t even gotten to harvest any tomatoes yet- the Early Girls set fruit more than a month ago but nothing has ripened. Sad year, and I’m glad I’m not a farmer.

clothes are useful when it's cold

“Now that I've got long lovely red hair and wear skirts and push-up bras and shit, life is better.... Part of attracting boys is wearing the "I'm attracted to boys" uniform, and, well, I know it's weak but I'd rather have the boys than be a Gender Revolutionary.”

I don’t think I could begin to separate the way I present myself from the way I want other people to see me. I make choices based on comfort, time, and personal aesthetics, but what I choose to wear is fundamentally determined by the message I want to send out into the world. I have no idea how I’d dress if it didn’t affect other people. At home I go naked a lot and wear more dresses. (The dresses I own are very comfortable for many tasks but not for bicycling or anything that requires pockets, so are fairly impractical for leaving my neighborhood.) Would aesthetics matter if no one else noticed, or would comfort be the only consideration? I have met a few people who appear in most circumstances to think very little about what they project to the outside world (though I know this can be misleading; I had a good friend in college who spent hours to look as if she’d just rolled out of bed and thrown on a flannel shirt). I’m a bit jealous. Some of them (men) are judged less on their appearance, but all of them have decided that they don’t need to get the benefits I do from looking a certain way, and I’m a bit in awe of that. I’ve chosen to give up some of the things I’d get if I wore makeup and dressed more “nicely” by Delmar standards; in return I feel more true to myself. How much more self-actualized are the folks who’ve given up more?

thanks for showing me your swiss army knife

What to do with the boxes, my friend wonders, the old photos and graduation tassels and ticket stubs, the stuffed animals from my high school boyfriend. So many things to keep.

A couple of years ago my mother dropped off a humidor of old letters to me, I say. I glanced at a few, shuddered to remember how lonely I was as a teenager, and recycled the rest unread so I wouldn’t have to think about that anymore. Dan tried to dissuade me but I have no regrets. If the love letters could have sorted themselves out, I might have saved them, but smiling about the gushiness of my gay boyfriend from ’91 wasn’t worth going through the rest.

She considers. I don’t think I have any love letters, just the teddy bears and hand-me-down bongs.

I’m shocked, and surprised that I’m shocked. She dated athletes, nice boys all, but perhaps less likely than the tortured artists I coveted to write her poetry. Plus I had summer-camp boyfriends back when long distance calls were expensive, and I started using e-mail obsessively as soon as college began; we were writing to each other anyway so paeans of joy were no great stretch. Even the perpetually stoned potter left haikus about my feet on my whiteboard freshman year. (The limericks, well, they don’t count.)

But I hadn’t known that I considered such words to be a standard part of even a fleeting relationship. I don’t remember anyone before Dan giving me tangible gifts. My friend has a collection of jewelry and toys from birthdays and Christmases; she’d have been hurt if a boyfriend had failed to provide her with such. I got sonnets, and just now realized how much I took them for granted. To all my exes out there: thank you for skipping the heart-shaped magnets.

bike plan meeting

Last week’s Albany Bike Master Plan public meeting was a bit of a let-down. It was not well-publicized (indeed, the only reason I knew about it was from an e-mail sent out a month in advance by the organizers to those who’d signed in at the last meeting) and had a much lower turnout than the one in February. That wasn’t too disappointing, though, since they weren’t presenting any new information. The facilitator tried to avoid taking questions publicly, asking us to instead talk to the staff individually. This didn’t stop some irritated people from the audience from voicing their legitimate frustration with the fact that several major roads in Albany were in the process of being reworked without any provisions for bicyclists.

There were two workstations where they asked for input- one on prioritizing different goals, and one to comment on the maps of desired bike routes drawn up from feedback obtained at the winter meeting. There wasn’t a whole lot to say about the latter other than “sure, great, but is any of this actually going to be done?”

I left not really knowing what the point of the whole thing was. It certainly wasn’t to tell us anything, so presumably it was to give the agency our input. But given that the only attendees were a small self-selected group of politically-minded folks who have very strong feelings about cycling, this meeting was not a good place to gather information if they’re actually interested in hearing from a reasonable cross-section of Albany bicyclists. After we were dismissed to the workstations I asked the woman running the study how they were reaching out to other demographics. (Most visibly absent was significant representation of non-whites, when more than half the people I see biking in Albany are black. A lot of people bike because they can’t afford cars, and they weren’t at this meeting) She said something vague about having a meeting in the South End but was quite defensive, even though I broached the subject politely.

I fear that the city is just going through the motions. Someone out there wants to pretend they’re listening to concerns of bicyclists, so they’re making a “plan” and holding public meetings, but they are not making any effort to reach out to most current bicyclists (much less potential ones) and are unlikely to actually implement any of the things we ask for. Well, maybe they’ll put up a few bike racks; that’s cheap and easy and doesn’t piss off drivers. But nothing that will substantively improve the safety and ease of bicycling in the city.

Committing suicide after a failed marriage is courageous?

I haven't read this book; the review alone are pissing me off. There's nothing new about romanticizing dramatic love affairs that end badly. I hate that so few people seem to see how passion can coexist with stability, that happily living with someone day in and day out is in fact love, and that chasing excitement may be a fine option for some but opting out of that doesn't mean settling.

I agree that just because an affair doesn't last forever doesn't mean it wasn't important or worthwhile. But I don't think being subsumed by someone who treats you badly shows self-confidence, either, as Nehring seems to suggest.

IT’S sad to admit, but while some children are easy to love, others require more of us — sometimes more than it seems we’re capable of. But given the right combination of awful circumstances, you can discover surprising things about yourself. Loving Theo required lavishing affection upon him and receiving almost none in return. It required a willingness to think like him, to see the world through his eyes, so that he wouldn’t have to suffer constant frustration.

And it required work, a whole lot of grinding, tedious, physical work. More work than I ever could have imagined having to do for another human being. And yet I did it — most of the time with tenderness. These days, when I catch Theo’s eyes and tap my heart, he says sweetly and dutifully, “I love you, too, Dad,” and the sound of his voice, the look on his face, it cracks me up.

this isn't love, it's narcissism

If Dan were dying and decided that he was going to devote all his energy to making a statue of himself for me to remember him by when he was gone, instead of spending time with me, I'd leave him too.

no clip-ons at least

Dan has a tie hanger that lives in the corner of the closet because he never wears ties. He pulled it out today so he could install some cables. I asked if we could sort through them, but alas, he wants to keep them all. Even the skinny purple polyester one, the brown paisley one, and the one with Winnie the Pooh on it. Maybe someday….

why do I look at articles on NYC renovations?

The bike must be for show. No one uses a kickstand on floors like that.

this summer we can calculate prime numbers

A: Me too!
D: Me three!
C: Me five!
A: Me 600!
C: NO, A, that's not part of the Fibonacci series!

Proof that anything your kid learns will just be another excuse for an argument.

Stay at home parents are trophy wives

Stay at home parents are trophy wives and/ or arm candy. While presumably if they went to work for minimum wage to take care of other people’s children at a day care center, even though their husband’s earnings would eat up that income pretty much entirely because of their household’s higher tax bracket, they’d be considered “real” contributors to their marriage.

I wonder if he could sell it at the Little Book House

All the kids in C’s class are doing reports on different countries. For their final project, they are making an alphabet book on their country, with each letter discussing a different topic. (A, for example, could be about animals, and they’d list some animals found in the country.)

Of course, instead of choosing Ireland or France like a normal child, he had to go with Afghanistan. Some of his topic selections? J is for jihad, O is for opium, Q is for al-Qaeda, V is for vengeance (post-9/11 bombings by the U.S.), Y is for yearning (for children to no longer be killed by land mines). I suspect this was not quite what his teacher had in mind. Now he is supposed to add illustrations- I can’t wait to see it when it’s done.

A few weeks ago he sent the President a letter asking him to pull out of Afghanistan. He included diagrams suggesting a withdrawal plan. I thought it was pretty awesome but realized that most parents probably don’t get sappy over their kid’s military strategies.

On the incompetence of bureaucracies

HR e-mail: I noticed that for one holiday in January you charged .5 of a day, but for the other one you charged a whole day. I know you are at 50% FTE, but we don’t have any information on your work schedule and so we can’t determine if the way you have earned and used your holiday leave is correct. Could you please send in your schedule using the form found at (link to a form that’s not editable and so cannot be submitted online) as soon as possible? A fax or scanned copy is acceptable.
S: I’m sending in the form, but I have already done so twice. Just in case this one disappears also, I work full days on Mondays and Wednesdays and half days on Thursdays.
HR: You really sent the form twice!!?? That’s weird. I will print this e-mail so we have that at least…thanks for explaining your schedule.
S: Once when I started the job, once when I switched from a Friday to Thursday schedule last summer. Hopefully this time it will make it!
HR: Oh – that was a while ago…who knows where they ended up.

So what, they just randomly throw away forms that are more than, oh, six months old? I guess that might have been code for “someone who used to work here really sucked” but if so, don’t act all surprised about it going missing.

the problem with encouraging independence

So say you’re eight years old and you just heated up some peas and want to put some salt on them. But the saltshaker is sitting in the dish drainer, empty. You could ask for help, given that your mother is in the next room, but you don’t. Instead you find the big container of salt. You could pour a little bit out to sprinkle on your peas, but you’re feeling helpful and decide to refill the saltshaker. When you do, the salt doesn’t shake out. (You don’t know that this is because the saltshaker was wet and salt doesn’t like that so much.) You get a pencil and poke it in the holes of the saltshaker (breaking off the lead in two place) to no avail. This inexplicable failure doesn’t stop you. The logical next step- getting some Tupperware out of the cabinet, poking some holes in the bottom of it with scissors, and filling it with salt to replace that defective saltshaker. Mission accomplished.

environmental and financial win

New York state agencies no longer provide bottled water. I'm pretty happy about this (wrote about it last year) but am shaking my head at how complicated they're making it.

"Each executive agency will have to provide alternative sources, like fountains and dispensers for tap water." These already exist in every public building. They are called sinks.

"The order requires the state’s Office of General Services to monitor the compliance of agencies and to identify ways to make tap water available free..." Given the way bureacracies work, I suspect this will take up a lot of time and money when it shouldn't.

I also imagine it will take a lot of time before it changes anything here at SUNY, if it ever does.

of course we could have told a more interesting story

These accident-explanatory slings might have been useful when A broke her arm, but I'm not sure whether an illustration of a child tripping over nothing and falling on the grass would have kept people from asking questions anyway.

I want these around town

Bicycle air pump station

All of our bicycle pumps have lasted, hmm, maybe a month? Our spare bike currently has a flat and our regular bike tires are low- guess we're going to have to invest in a $60+ bike shop pump.

they surely had time to grow it out

For the most part, Hair has made the transfer from Central Park with its high spirits intact. But during the famous mass-nudity moment, my companion noticed a lack of hair that helped crystallize what feels just a little off-kilter about this production: "I didn't think," she whispered, "that hippies had Brazilians."

Would it kill these actors' careers to be seen with body hair?

Are front loaders the best environmental choice?

Our Kenmore 417 front loading washer worked very well when it was working. Huge capacity, got clothes and cloth diapers clean, spun everything out so it dried quickly. But it needed service twice in the first three years we had it and just irreparably bit the dust after only seven. The bearing needs to be replaced (apparently a typical failure on these machines) and it was constructed in such a way that fixing it is virtually impossible. If we did choose to repair it, we’d have to replace basically all the innards of the machine, and the parts alone would cost about as much as a new one.

We are hugely disappointed. It was expensive to purchase (and all the service calls made it even more so) but we expected it to last a good long time. We also consciously paid a premium for doing the right thing for the environment; it used much less water and electricity than a top-loading washer. But from what we’re hearing from the two repair guys we talked to and from online research, seven years is about as long as you get out of front-loaders. This makes them decidedly NOT a sustainable choice. The energy and materials wasted by having to replace it so soon negate its efficiency during its brief period of operation.

It seems that “low-end” front-loaders are just not built to last or to be repaired. (I can’t get much information about the $1000+ ones. I certainly hope they are fixable. It’s not like it’s a brand-new technology that still needs the kinks worked out of it.) Top-loaders can be kept running for at least twice as long.

So now that we’re past the need for having a washer than can tackle big loads of diapers, we decided to go with a top loader that can be repaired when it breaks. We got one from a used appliance dealer two miles away, who advised us not to buy the front loader he had (“they’re junk”) and only charged us $25 for delivery and removal of our ungodly heavy washer from the second floor. And saved us from the potential hell of having to deal with people on Craigslist.

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.