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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Seventeen rules for a sustainable community

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

An article about speeding up Ph.D. completion.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I went to a conference-type meeting of about fifty people today, and during the introductions, I caught myself assessing my appearance in comparison to the rest of the attendees. And I realized that in situations like this I do it all the time. While ignoring the interminable Review of the Agenda, I think I figured out why- it helps me get a sense of what kind of power I can assert in a group that includes a number of people with more organizational or social networking power than myself. It also helps me decide how I want to present myself (which in professional situations can range from cold, driven, numbers-focused academic to young and amenable student) in order to get what my organization or I want from the meeting.

It's possible that the self-confidence I gain or lose from deciding whether or not I'm one of the pretty ones affects my perception/ wielding of my power, but (obviously) I don't think it's all in my head. I am listened to more closely and taken more seriously if I rank near the top, which is especially ironic given that I'm most likely to do so when I'm one of the youngest (and presumably less experienced) present. It's true whether I'm working with men or with women, academics or social service providers. Now that I think of it, it's also true in social settings when no one really knows each other.

I'm trying to decide whether it's more a factor of the fact that (a) I am assessed with more value if I'm deemed comparatively attractive or (b) if the interplay of the subconscious comparisons we make between each other affects each of our confidence enough to make a difference. It's not news that people rated as more attractive are more successful (they earn more money and are seen as more likeable), but I find it interesting that the population present in the room seems to matter so significantly, and that at some point I subconsciously started using it to my advantage.

Rumor has it that extremely attractive women have a hard time being taken seriously; thankfully, I don't have that problem.

(But lest you fear I have self-esteem issues, I tied for second today, based on my perception of typical American beauty standards. Perhaps I actually just have an inflated ego.)

I went to a meeting last night about redistricting the elementary schools; on the current map, we're only a block away from being assigned to a rather less desirable school, so I wanted to see if it's likely we'll be reassigned next year. Unsurprisingly, the meeting didn't begin to give me any answers to that question, but a somewhat unexpected issue was raised- someone asked if the redistricting was going to consider the socioeconomic balance between the schools in its decision-making.

One of the elementary schools located in a more rural part of town has the most economic diversity (i.e. a few not-so-rich people live out that way). Busing kids to and from that area would be illogical and, I would imagine, undesirable to anyone involved. So I'm not entirely sure what they were getting at, and it wasn't explicitly stated. Other than that rural area, Bethlehem residents for the most part range between pretty rich (I include those who'd consider themselves middle class in this category, because compared to the folks a mile down Delaware Avenue into Albany, they are) and very rich. I've heard some grumbling about the new PTA-funded playground equipment at one of the elementary schools that includes more of the very-rich, and am wondering if that's what this is about- is the person who raised the question (someone I dislike, incidentally, whose kids attend C's school) offended that his kids might only benefit from the fundraising efforts of the pretty-rich folks, rather than the very-rich?

Following the question, someone said something earnest about how we needed more economic diversity in the schools (racial diversity, of course, being completely off the table). I muttered "we live in Bethlehem!" under my breath, which got a few snickers from those around me, so I don't think I'm missing something obvious here....

Twin Trees

Robert Jordan died. I wasn't a big fan- I read the first couple Wheel of Times and didn't feel the need to continue- but wonder how his followers are going to deal with the lack of completion of the series. Fanfic? Legal demands for his notes? Zoloft? And of course I'm always concerned about a similar fate befalling G.R.R. Martin before my pet series ends....

and less sleep-

Two hours. And today I need to work, put in hours at the co-op, pack everything for the weekend, and drive to Twin Trees. Not even catnap time in there. Maybe it's time to find better drugs....

pear butter

We obtained large quantities of pears from my parents' tree yesterday, and while the kids are eating all the fruit they can as fast as they can, we figured we should save at least some for the winter. So I decided to make pear butter. Pulling ideas from various Internet-derived pear butter recipes, I peeled and cored the pears (a time-consuming process, because most of these pears are only about two inches across, and they're bruised and twisted and generally look like wild fruit usually does), tossed them in the crockpot for a few hours on high with some sugar and cinnamon, pureed them with the stick blender once they were soft, and then cooked them on low overnight with the lid ajar to let the steam escape. It worked beautifully, and produced delicious pear butter, but is perhaps too efficient a space-saver- I used a gallon-sized bowl of pears, and ended up with an 8-ounce jar of pear butter. When the rest of them ripen, I think I'll make pie filling instead, just so I feel like I got more out of it!

Honest slogans. (These also make me think of the backside of the "Welcome to Indian Lake" sign along Route 28- instead of the more typical "Hope you visit again soon!" or some such sentiment, it just says, "You'll be back!" Which is, of course, true, since that's the Only Road Out.)