watched pots

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

steampunks love peak oil

Dirigibles might make a comeback.

we are not alone

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

CDTA just isn't as fun

The boys and the subway.

CFCs be damned

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

the song remains the same

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

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

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

C's last soccer game

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

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

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



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



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

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



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

-Dan

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

D&D origami.

gosh darn it

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

kismet

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

it's the last day of school-

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

now I know it's summer

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


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

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

bioluminescense

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

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

Little Elbows

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

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

hope for transit?

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

Thanks American medical system!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

the basement shouldn't freeze

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

we can't be trusted

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

rockin'

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

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

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