What? Another hobby?

Humbug?

2011-12-13T07:24:00.000-08:00

For those of you who were ready to mount an Internet search party to find out whether I succumbed to my pneumonia, rest easy. I woke up feeling almost normal today. This would be more of a relief if it weren't (seemingly) suddenly December 13. Holy crap, Batman! It's only 12 days 'til Christmas!

I haven't sent out Christmas cards. I haven't sent in my money for the children's teachers' holiday gifts. I started my Christmas shopping YESTERDAY, folks. Thanksgiving passed without me, but now I'm (more or less) healthy, and I'd better get my convalescing ass in gear if I want any semblance of Christmas.

The thing is:

Two years in a row, Maggie has been assigned a project to describe her family's Christmas traditions. Only, we have none. OK, we have some, but it's a stretch to fill four pages with a tree, some presents, and a dinner of unspecified menu. We don't have Uncle Monty's show tune sing-a-long or Great Aunt Maude's special recipe for Christmas goose in raspberry Jell-O or, well, any family gathering at all. Both my immediate family and JL's have (justifiably) removed ourselves from our extended family. (Nobody wants to repeat the traditional Christmas stabbings: literal in my family, merely emotional back-stabbing in JL's.) And distance and economic instability have prevented even grandparent Christmases for most of the last ten Decembers.

So without extended family, traditions dwindle. Add in my own inability to do anything consistently or in the same way twice, and this whole tradition-making thing becomes really challenging. I have inherited the Christmas ornaments that my mom made when I was little, and we get a tree to put them on. We get presents, which is always fun. JL hates virtually all of the traditional American Thanksgiving and Christmas foods, so the menu is always up in the air. (We've had game hens, ham, duck, and baby back ribs in the past. I'm dreading this year's decision, which is fast approaching.) For me, the highlight of the whole season is my mother's 35-year unbroken record of making me the best Santa Claus cookies ever, even when they have to be shipped across a continent.

And on top of it all, I am so deeply lazy about doing these things that nobody really appreciates. Up until this year, I have been the one to dig the guts out of the Halloween pumpkins, cook the (always disappointing) holiday meals, decorate the tree, strip the tree, bake the pies and cookies (with the exception of my mom's aforementioned Santas), all without much help from JL, who doesn't want to think about it until right before a holiday, at which point he feels like we really ought to do SOMETHING.

But as I'm getting older here, I'm going to have to woman-up and embrace the mantle of the WOMAN OF THE FAMILY, and this year, I'm going to make Santa cookies. And I'm even going to try to channel my mother and let the children "help."

Lord, grant me the patience....

"It's alive!"

2011-11-30T14:25:00.001-08:00

The pneumonia put the final nails in my NaNo completion trophy's coffin. (There's a messed up mixed metaphor.)

Don't get me wrong. There was no way I was going to finish it on time at the time I got sick. (I'm guessing it was about 4:38 am on the Tuesday before Thanksgiving.) I was at 20,000 words and with the four-day with the DH and kids, there was NOT another 30K forthcoming.

So I guess my body gave me a handy excuse: a 104 degree fever! Yay! Thanks, body!

Maybe next year. In the mean time, I have a third of a novel written. :-)

sigh

2011-11-15T08:24:00.001-08:00

I have stalled out on my NaNo novel. I had a sick child, a long weekend, and though I'm a third of the way to 50,000, there is no way I can finish it by the end of the month. And I finished listening to The Night Circus, which was beautiful and amazing and magical, and I can't praise it enough.

But it did make me feel like a total hack.

I could never write anything so wonderful, so purposefully structured and complete, so complexly intertwined, yet coming to a perfect conclusion.

Or could it be that I'm expecting just a smidgeon too much from my first two pieces of fiction?

and fie, for shame

2011-11-08T12:53:00.000-08:00

So I'm in my car listening to satellite radio, and I see before I hear "Peter Gabriel -- In Your Eyes (Ne" on the display screen. As would happen to any woman my age, my heart thuds and I perk up at the thought of being reminded the wonderful feeling of watching ...Say Anything. And then...

Denied.

Evidently, for reasons probably only understood by avant-garde artsy types like Mr. Gabriel, he felt the need to remix the song with a clunky staccato string quartet.

Now, I'm not a purist by any means. I love the idea of fan fiction. I like that Christopher Moore gave King Lear a happy ending. And I usually really like covers of songs. (It gives me the illusion of a granfalloon* connecting me to artists whose work I like.)

But some things you just should not fuck with. The whiney 90s slacker-loser who covered "In Your Eyes" should be forbidden from making any more albums. And Peter Gabriel himself is on thin ice for defacing something that was perfect to begin with.

Here is a non-exhaustive, utterly inconsequential list of works that I firmly believe should not be touched, even by their creators:

"In Your Eyes"
"Layla" (what were you thinking, Eric Clapton?)
...Say Anything (while we're at it)
The Princess Bride (the movie, not the book)
Moonstruck
The Blues Brothers
Almost Famous

*Look it up.

I Should Be Noveling

2011-11-08T08:09:00.000-08:00

Just a quick note on book length. As I march steadily, if a little behind, toward 50,000, I keep checking my word count. (11,405 right now!) The project statistics page in Scrivener also shows the paperback page count, and it's a disappointing 31 pages. So a 50,000 word novel is perhaps 150 pages long in pocket paperback format. There are a number of notable novels of that length: Slaughterhouse-Five, Of Mice and Men, Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, The Great Gatsby, Orphans of the Sky.

So why, oh why, do most contemporary novels seem to be about 450 pages long??? Why are these people so darn long-winded? And don't even get me started on those trilogy people.

Well, back to the grind.

Dude, Did I Really Just See That?

2011-11-06T06:13:00.000-08:00

So I'm flippin' through the Target weekly ad, checking to see if Tide and Coke Zero are going to be on sale this week, and I see this labeled as "K-Y Movie Night":

Upon closer inspection, it turns out it contains a discount for theater tickets. Oh, OK. For a second there, I thought that, along with featuring disabled kids, Target was leading the charge for making porn mainstream. I mean, what kind of movies do you need to watch within reach of K-Y jelly, am I right?

NaNo Kismet

2011-11-05T10:03:00.000-07:00

The first week's pep talk letter from NaNoWriMo was written by Erin Morgenstern, author of The Night Circus, to which I am currently listening and enjoying very much. She describes that she began writing with an aborted attempt at NaNoWriMo 2003 but pressed on, and The Night Circus is an indirect result of one of her (successful) NaNoWriMo efforts.

Along with that little fantastic bit of knowledge, she may have finally answered the question of what I would willingly have tattooed on my body, knowing it will be there for life:

I love adverbs so much I sometimes contemplate getting an –ly tattooed behind my ear to encourage the whispering of sweet, sweet adverbs.

Stephen King be damned!*

Oh, and she uses Scrivener, too. :-)

Thanks for the words of encouragement, Ms. Morgenstern.

*Don't get me wrong, I love Stephen King, but he once said, "The road to hell is paved with adverbs."

NaNoWriMo Kick-Off

2011-11-03T15:41:00.000-07:00

I went to the East Line Books NaNoWriMo kick-off write-in. (I had to do the evening event because of the field trip in the morning.) It was surprising in a couple of ways. I went to meet people, but the other people went actually expecting to write. I was therefore unprepared--OMG, did people actually write books before computers?!?

But I decided to hang around for a while and borrowed a handy-dandy Ticonderoga pencil and a legal pad and wrote long-hand. I got down about 300 words in the hour I was there. It was odd because I am so used to being able to click and insert anywhere in my previous text, and that's a wee bit harder on paper than with a word processor.

It was also a very distracting place for me. In my pink room, the only thing surrounding my computer screen is my inspirational writing quote:

Literature is a luxury. Fiction is a necessity. -- G.K. Chesterton

In the book store, every time I paused and looked up, I saw another book I enjoyed or would like to read. I don't need to read right now, I need to write. My novel. Now.

5300 words so far, only about 47,000 to go!

November's Adventure

2011-10-27T06:47:00.000-07:00

As I've been creeping toward finishing my first novel, I've been leaping ahead of myself and turning over ideas for my next novel. And lo and behold, by chance, November is National Novel Writing Month.

I've registered for NaNoWriMo, and I'm going to give it a shot and see how it goes. Since it's taken me all year to reach not-quite 50,000 words in my first novel, I can't say that I have high hopes of finishing the new one in only a month, but I'm going to give it a shot. If nothing else, it will give me a start on Un-undead.

And in furtherance of my aspirational career, I am going to...gasp...try to meet some new people. East Line Books in Clifton Park is having a NaNoWriMo kick-off, and I think I'll go. (gulp)

Well, That Didn't Go Well

2011-10-20T06:54:00.000-07:00

I sensed when I was a child that most teachers hated children. I found out as an adult that they also hate parents. (I can understand this because mostly I hate people, and children and parents are subsets of people. That's a big part of why I'm...NOT a teacher.)

I figured out pretty quickly that I couldn't win against them, so I didn't ever try to argue with them. I had to teach this lesson to Antonio, first in the battle of the jackets in California. His old lady teacher insisted they always needed jackets in the frigid California tundra, and I told him he had to humor her because he COULDN'T WIN if he fought her. Unfortunately, I failed to realize that the lesson applies to parents as well as children, and I went and pissed off Antonio's current teacher.

I didn't mean to. Really. It's just that I was not issued that handbook of social interaction that keeps most people on the straight and narrow, so I say things that I don't think are awful but that any neuro-normal person takes as being completely heinous. That part is my fault. I take full responsibility, and I apologize.

I am also aware that my son is emotionally volatile. He's been that way since the day he was born, so I feel only partially responsible in that I gave birth to him, but I did not MAKE him that way through poor parenting. He was shockingly intense from day one. Knowing this, I called his teacher to find out how far from reality Antonio's perception of an event as school was. I really did.

When I called to tell Mr._____ that Antonio was upset about the recess soccer games, I tried to present how Antonio viewed what had happened, but that I wanted Mr._____'s take on it. He explained that on this particular day, the girls had had a rare win and he'd participated in about 30 seconds of trash talking, which he admitted that maybe he should't have, but since the girls almost never win, he had allowed it, and Antonio had taken it bitterly, as he often does. (This is a where we see the difference between Antonio's perception and reality--the girls actually almost always lose.) It was also at this point that I will freely admit that I fucked up. I asked why he plays girls versus boys if the games are that lopsided and (here's the bad part) besides, I thought playing the girls versus the boys was as inappropriate as playing the white versus the brown kids.

Honestly, it is a fair comparison. I didn't mean it to be inflammatory or accusatory. Everybody plays boys against girls, while nobody would play whites against Asians and Indians because it would cause a shitstorm. At that age, the only difference is that one is socially acceptable and the other isn't. Clearly I am not an activist. I'm not complaining to the principal, I'm not petitioning the school board, I'm not calling the ACLU, I didn't even ask him to change what he does. I just threw it out there as my opinion and food for thought. And for a few beats, he accepted it as I intended it. He said something to the effect of, "wow, when you put it that way, I guess you're right," and said that boys versus girls was the only way to know who was on each other's team. (Not being a player of team sports, this rationale simply hadn't occurred to me.) But as he continued talking, he decided I'd been implying that he was racist or sexist or some other "ist," and the whole conversation took a turn for the worse.

He turned it around and said the real problem was my son's daily inability to control his emotions, and that if I was going to question the way Mr.______ performed his job, he'd just stop playing soccer with the kids. When I figured out that things were going awry, I tried to interject that I was NOT attacking him, and I was told pointedly that HE was talking now, and that yes, I had questioned him, implying that to do so is utterly unacceptable.

Breaking this down as only someone with that mysterious handbook could, when he began feeling attacked, he shifted the focus from himself onto my son, i.e., it's not me that's the problem, it's your kid, who's pretty fucked up, by the way. He implied that I had no right to speak and told me I had no right to question his authority. And he threatened that if I continued to do it, he'd take it out on my child and the other kids in the class.

Around the fifth time I said I really wasn't trying to offend him or criticize or attack him, that Antonio idolizes him, that I had been really impressed with his Open House presentation, that for fuck's sake, I wasn't trying to pick a fight, he shifted gears again. He apologized for having gotten defensive, for having made me feel uncomfortable, that he knew how hard it is for parents to call their kid's teacher, that I have a great son who's "the spark of the classroom," that Mr.______ has seen that Antonio has difficulties and that he tries to help redirect his negative energy into something positive. Mr._____ said he reacted in the worst way possible, and he's really sorry and hopes that we can meet to discuss Antonio's emotional state, and then the kids were coming back from recess, and he had to go. At this point, I was near tears, reliving my elementary school trauma, my sinking feeling of utter powerlessness in the face of arbitrary authority, and terrified that instead of steadily improving, as I've seen for the past three years, Antonio is actually getting worse and that he'll be hoarding guns and shooting up the high school in a few years.

After we hung up, I cried for twenty minutes, ashamed of my inability to conduct a normal conversation with a normal human being, then ashamed that my own emotional instability was the root cause of my son's problems. I dreaded having to talk to Mr._____ again at Parent-Teacher conference time, and I felt like an utter failure of a human being.

And as I've obsessed about it for days now, I recognize that, while Antonio is and always will be highly emotional, he IS controlling his emotions. Everyone can see the struggle play out on his face, and he has not lost it and blown up in more than a year and a half. Jesus, he put up with the indignity of being swatted on the butt several times by his teacher last year! Yet she never felt the need to call me about his behavior or refer him to the school councilor. When I talked to her at our Parent-Teacher Conference, she didn't mention anything about his temper. She said I'd done a wonderful job as a parent! And if I hadn't called Mr._____ and made him feel attacked, he probably never would have said anything to me either. Antonio is fantastic, and the work he and I need to do is to help him to not get upset so that he doesn't have to try to control those powerful emotions.

So, if I do my standard thing and try to think the best of people, Mr._____ had an imperfect human moment and reacted badly to what I'd said then realized his mistake and apologized and tried to make up. I certainly hope so, because the hidden-agenda alternative is that he threatened me then apologized so that if I go to the principal, he can say I'm just a crazy bitch.

What Advertising Says About You

2011-10-12T09:13:00.000-07:00

On Google+ a friend recently shared an icky post: "Stop using dirty catheters." I might have worried about him, but I recognized it from a TV ad for a medical supply company, and I felt the same way as Ken. Am I really part of that demographic? Ew.

I don't know about Ken, but we watch basically no network TV, just lots of Food Network, Science Channel, Discovery Channel, news, Adult Swim, and some soccer. One can hardly help but notice that the pool of commercials is quite different from channel to channel. Interestingly, the Spanish language networks have ads similar to what I remember from the main networks: McDonald's, Coke, Verizon, t-Mobile, cheep beer, a bilingual, but annoyingly sincere guy selling some company's insurance in both English and Spanish. A lot of megacorporations have jumped the language barrier to tap the Hispanic market.

Food Network? Commercials for food, drink, restaurants, and cholesterol drugs. CNBC? Investment companies, ED drugs, and luxury cars. (Given the recession we're in, I guess the Lexus commercials are pretty aspirational.)

Those two are pretty obvious, given that all of the programming is embedded advertising, but you can't really sell science or discovery, so what are those channels trying to get us to buy? Personally I miss the Enzyte commercials with Smilin' Bob, who's "livin' large," that we used to see on Science Channel before the Feds shut the manufacturer down for fraud. It was a head scratcher that, yes, the main audience for the Science Channel is likely men, but aren't they supposed to be skeptics? But then I guess they can talk themselves into believing the 30-day free trial counts as an experiment, right? Just to be sure it doesn't work?

Currently, we are entertained by two cycles of commercials: Allstate's "Mayhem" campaign and Capital One's "Peggy the Ukrainian Customer Service Rep," though honestly, that one's getting stale. Additionally, off the top of my head, I can recall commercials for

VW (because I own one and because the mini Darth Vader Passat commercial is cute),
Ford and Lee jeans (because Mike Rowe is an understated shill for both of them),
Swiffer (because the puns are kinda funny),
Samuel Adams beer (wow, that beard is amazing over that bald head)
Sonic (because the song is irritating, and anyway, where the hell is there one near here?),
Cover Girl (because with their white backgrounds they look like old GAP ads or iPod billboards and they have Queen Latifah and Drew Barrymore)
Air France (because Maggie called the ballet "cheesy"!?), and
Cialis (because I keep waiting for Antonio to ask what they are selling and because who has two claw-foot tubs side-by-side out on a deck, whether the moment is right or not?).

Now, quick, name ten products for which you have recently seen commercials. What are they, what does that say advertisers think about you, and are they accurately targeting you?

Feminism on the Playground

2011-10-07T05:41:00.000-07:00

My nine-year-old son needs to learn how to lose. Well, actually he is very good at losing. What he needs to do is lose graciously. That, or get much better at sports so he can win at them at least once in a while.

While we work on this, he is stuck at school where his teachers, male and female, keep playing girls against boys. As a good feminist, I don't think it's any more appropriate for teachers to put boys against girls than it would be to put white kids against Indians and Asians. At this age, there is no physical difference that skews the playing field--many of the girls are taller, stronger, and more athletic than my wimpy-kid son and many other boys--and so it's baldly sexist, it creates antagonism between them based on gender, and it's wrong.

I probably never would have heard about it from Antonio but for the fact that the teachers, both men and women, always throw in with the girls. When the teacher is female, at least the lines are clear. But Antonio's male fourth grade teacher plays on the girls' team, too. Not only does this assure that the boys always lose, which is the only reason I hear about it, but it also sends a message to the girls that they can't win unless a man helps them.

Add on that the teacher encourages chants and trash talking, and I am going to have to Say Something and make myself an annoying, meddlesome parent.

Insanely Great

2011-10-06T07:02:00.000-07:00

I was reading the Wikipedia on my iPad last night when Erin Burnett announced on CNN that Steve Jobs had died. It was not a shock or surprise like so many have said--he had been fighting cancer for years, he had stepped down from Apple last month, he was sick and dying--but it was very sad.

JL and I laughed about the Apple store employee who told him the iPad was a "life-changing device" when he bought me one for our anniversary, but in so far as one can love an object, I love my Apple products. I love my Mac, my iPod, my iPad. I'd love an iPhone, but I can't convince JL to change cell carriers just so I can have another Apple product.

Much like his resistance to Apple products, JL refuses to accept that Steve Jobs was brilliant. Jobs didn't build the Apple I or Apple II. That was Steve Wozniak. Jobs didn't invent the GUI. That was done at XEROX PARC. He didn't write or animate Toy Story. That was John Lassiter and the folks at Pixar. He wasn't even at Apple when they started developing the iPod. JL insists that there is no difference between Jobs and Bill Gates, and that, in fact, Gates did more to "change the world" than Jobs--an analysis based largely on the hollow numbers of market share.

But what he stubbornly refuses to see is that Steve Jobs was a visionary. He saw how computers could be used, not as a hobby for socially awkward geeks, but truly as life-changing devices, fixtures in home and life. If it weren't for my computer, I would not be a novelist. I would never have had the confidence and patience to write out a book long-hand or with a typewriter. With my Mac and Scrivener, I can. I would not have had the ability to research all the odd little details that bring a story to life. With the Internet, I can.

Yes, Jobs was a counter-culture flake, a tyrant to work for, a zealot, but he saw the possibilities in the technology that even their creators couldn't see, and he insisted that Apple do it better than anyone else.

Time will tell whether the heart and soul of Apple gets buried with him.

Guilt by Association

2011-09-27T09:36:00.000-07:00

or, The Treacherous World of Beta-Testing Google+ Circles.

On Google+, I am Following a couple who make high-quality feminist porn. (So what? There aren't a lot of people on Google+, and it's better than Following Brittany Spears and Paris Hilton, whose output is also supposed to be titillating but certainly isn't feminist. And don't make me get into a discussion of sex-positive feminism because I totally will.)

One unintended consequence of this is that I'm now being Followed by some of the people who Follow the porn stars. In fact, they now outnumber the people who actually know me. And these people, by and large, have fake names, impersonal profile pictures, little biographical information, and exclusively have scantily-clad women in their Circles.

Admittedly, my profile picture may possibly have led them to make an incorrect assumption. But hey, it's the nicest picture anyone has ever taken of me, so I'm gonna use it.

Does this look like a porn star to you?

But in addition to suddenly having to carefully limit the visibility of the pictures of my kids and the location data of my posts, I have to decide what to do about the situation.

I could remove the porn people from my Circles, and at least stop adding to my collection of creepy, aliased Followers.
I could announce that I am not an amateur or aspiring porn star, but a stay-at-home mom whose husband uses her to practice portrait photography, and see if I'm suddenly less Followed. (Can you imagine the giggle-fits from my friends and family on Google+ when they read that?)
I could just ignore the Followers until they realize from my boring, asexual posts that they've made a mistake and remove me from their Circles.
Heck, I could probably message the porn makers and ask them to remove me from their Circles. They seem like nice people who could understand my concern.

At the very least, I've removed the list of my Followers from my Profile. I don't think they bolster the "brand" that I'm going to need to market in order to promote my romance novels.

Shameless Self-Promotion (or not)

2011-09-08T09:27:00.000-07:00

So I got the job at Michael's because I had no interest in trying to scare up a knitting instruction clientele. I figured a craft store that sells yarn would provide me with a slow but steady stream of students (and income). Turns out, not so much. I still haven't had a single sign-up. This is somewhat deflating, but not a real problem. My husband views the job as more of a social activity than a source of income anyway.

In the same spirit I've also never made any effort to promote my blog. I have my faithful core of three Constant Readers and the ten-or-so clicks a day from Ravelry (yay, Ravelry), and knittingcentral to my two free patterns, some of whom stay to poke around the blog a bit. I don't go to BlogHer, not even when it was right down the street from me in San Jose. I don't have any hope of monetizing the site. It's just a place alternately to bitch and to try to be funny.

The trouble is this: if I want to get a novel published, it would be helpful to have a following. And I have the distinct feeling this is somehow going to involve...people. As in, finding people and convincing them that I can write entertainingly.

Self-promotion is not my forte. This is going to be a long, hard slog.

OK, OK, You've Got My Attention

2011-09-06T07:21:00.000-07:00

In the last two weeks here in Upstate New York, we've had two earthquakes, a tropical storm, and now a tornado. Jose keeps taking pictures of bugs in the yard, and given the recent events, I'm starting to worry it may turn into a plague of locusts.

We've been quite fortunate that our only losses have been the willow tree at the back of our lot and Maggie's Sunflower That Lived, which survived an elementary school bus ride home in June but was finally felled by the severe thunder storm that produced the tornado.

There are no volcanoes nearby, but I swear, I'm watching the yard for lava--just in case.

It's Not Your Pain You're Wallowing In

2011-08-30T10:02:00.000-07:00

We've had two earthquakes and a tropical storm in the last two weeks here in Upstate New York, a place we're not supposed to have those sorts of things. We expect the occasional blizzard and the even more rare tornado, but there are no active faults nearby and we're not exactly in the tropics. It was a strange month.

I didn't feel either of the earthquakes, and by Californian standards, they weren't even that big, about a 4.2 and a 2.9 here--hardly enough to shake a fork off the edge of the table. And by the time the Category 3 Hurricane Irene had reached us, it had been downgraded to a tropical storm that was, eh-hem, less than impressive. It didn't even blow away the empty watering can on our back deck, and Jose drove 150 miles to Boston in the middle of it without a problem. We lost power a couple of times the day after the storm had passed, but the basement didn't flood and my precariously rooted tomato plants stayed in the ground.

My cavalier attitude has been politely admonished on Facebook, with links to news stories, photos, and YouTube videos of flooded areas and pointed remarks about how lucky were those of us who thought the events were "no big deal." To that, I say, "yes, we are lucky. "

In my defense, it does not minimize the suffering of people who lost their homes and their loved ones to say that the media are unduly alarmist, decidedly classist, and occasionally truly ghoulish. However, it does minimize their suffering to try callously to be included in it. For me to sit in my dry house and say that I share in the pain of those who've lost everything would be presumptuous to the point of insult. I cannot know how it feels to have lost loved ones, to survey the sodden remains of all one's worldly possessions.

And reposting videos of flash flooding does no more to help those affected (notice the "a") by the storm than reminding people that, over all, it was far less terrible than it was predicted (and practically begged) to be during the week of media lead-up.

English, Please...

2011-08-29T17:53:00.000-07:00

I love knitting. I love the Internet. I love Ravelry, the intersection of the Internet and knitting. I found a knitting pattern through Ravelry that I wanted to use, but unfortunately, the pattern is in Finnish. (It's cold in Finland, so, bless them, they knit a lot of beautiful things.)

Inconveniently, I do not speak Finnish, so I tried the Google translate function to translate the page into English. Unfortunately, it seems not many knitters have helped Google improve the translator to include the specialized jargon that we use.

"Create both 14 sts on needle loops and share them with four needles, each needle is 7 stitches. Make the following additions to a single loop from the loop to knit a sock from the front pages and the back right."

Hmm....

This might be better than trying to guess from the Finnish directly. Maybe.

Macs vs. PCs

2011-08-26T10:33:00.000-07:00

I am a Mac person. I've been a Mac person since my first generation iMac. You remember the first iMac.

The only things I didn't love about my iMac were the tiny, uncomfortable hockey puck mouse and the fact that I didn't wait for the second generation, which came in pink, too.

My dear husband has shaken his head at the expense and the sometimes whimsical designs, particularly the toilet lid--uh--"clamshell" iBook.

And can you really blame him for that one? But despite his reservations, he and my wonderful brother have been providing me with a new Mac every 2-3 years since 1998. I love Apple, and I love my Macs.

Yes, Macs crash. Occasionally. But there is no notorious "blue screen of death" equivalent for the Mac. I have faced the blue screen of death enough times in my life to dislike that particular shade of blue intensely. I wonder, did they pick blue because red would only intensify the anger and frustration of the user? Or was it, like everything else about Windows, a part of the user experience not worth any serious thought, despite how often the user would see it.

Through the years, when the time came for him to buy a new computer, Jose has considered buying a Mac for himself. First, he stayed with Windows because, as a scientist, the software he used was not necessarily available for the Mac OS. Now, it is available, but he hardly uses his personal computer for science, but rather for his hobby of digital photography, which is far more up Apple's alley.

And still, he resists buying a Mac for the main reason that they have only 9% of the PC market: the cost. Macs are expensive. He is especially offended because Apple has switched to the same Intel processors that PCs use, they have the same hard drives, the same graphics cards. So now, more than ever, Mac buyers are paying for the Mac experience: the bright white stores full of the not-quite-geeks of the genius bar--I had to show a "Genius" how to find out the internal hardware manufacturers from the OS; the glorious, consciously designed packaging that not only protects the high-cost goodies, but opens in an unfolding striptease; the sleek, clean industrial design of the computers themselves; the stunning look of the OS, with its curves and shadows and beautiful proprietary fonts and icons; the software that just...works. Macs are works of industrial art.

It may take a third Sony VAIO, with its bad power adapter design and endless freezes and crashes, but I think that eventually Jose will succumb to the only argument I could make that he couldn't deny or minimize.

Macs are pretty.

Crafting Classes

2011-08-02T05:36:00.000-07:00

I got the job teaching knitting at the Michael's stores in both Clifton Park and Latham. (There's a lot to be said for being the only candidate. It greatly improves your chances.) Now the real problem is finding students. I've done two knitting demonstrations in Clifton Park with no sign-ups for classes. The scrap-booking classes, on the other hand, are packed to the rafters 13 times a month. Hopefully as the weather cools off, knitting will become more appealing than paper crafts. Let's see if your scrapbook can keep your head warm through the Upstate winter. ;-)

So I have no classes to teach yet, but I did sign up for a painting class--no painting experience required! After all, what I really need is another hobby.

Gardening Successes and Failures

2011-07-31T07:38:00.000-07:00

There is a reason the average gardener is a college-educated woman in her forties. Gardening requires lots of work and, more importantly, loads of patience. It is a mature person who can spend 3-9 months working on something that depends on many factors entirely out of her control--droughts, deluges, fungi, pests--and that may turn out badly despite all her hard work. And then sigh and think, "maybe it will turn out better when I do it again next year."

Last year, I had lots of yummy spinach and lettuce in Massachusetts, but my zucchini all died a powdery-mildew death after producing only three small fruits. I did, however, have great success with the potted heirloom tomatoes that I lugged across state lines in the move. This year, my lettuce and basil were stunted at four inches and mere sprouts, respectively. Some animal came in the dead of night and mowed down all my string beans to bare stalks after I'd made cute little teepees for them to climb. And then when the plants seemed like they were trying to bounce back, the animal returned for seconds. No purple beans for me, I guess. This year, the tomatoes spent what seemed like two months at four inches tall after I transplanted them into my patch of garden, though somehow in all that time, I never managed to put cages over them and now they are a scary jungle just begging for some disease to take hold. I finally staked them and I'm just pruning away and hoping that the many, many green fruits on the plants will finally ripen sometime in late August, shortly before the first frost. Nuts. Similar story with the watermelons.

On the other hand, I have more summer squash than I know what to do with. It was almost with relief that I killed one of the squash plants yesterday because it seemed to have some sort of disease that I didn't want to spread to the other plants. If the tomatoes get a move on, I'll have way too many of them, too, so I'll need to buy canning supplies or waste all that beautiful tomato-y goodness.

And somehow, I'm still planning what to do differently next year: build raised beds this fall so that I can grow peas and lettuce in the ground; plus, with raised beds the the soil is warmer so that when I transplant the less hardy plants maybe they won't take so long to establish; be sure to cage the tomatoes and prune the suckers so the plants grow up instead of out; buy liquid fence so that the bunnies don't eat my beans; spread out the garden a little so that the evil squash plants don't knock over the pepper plant!

And that doesn't even cover the bulbs I'm drooling over in the fall planting catalogues!

Note to Self

2011-07-16T07:06:00.000-07:00

Make sure you write a note to self when you have an idea for the book. Otherwise you'll forget it, you dippy bitch.

Q: What's Your Worst Trait? A: My smart mouth?

2011-07-07T17:11:00.000-07:00

I have a job interview! Imagine that! After nine years of unemployment, I have a job interview to teach knitting.

I had to create a new resume because I can't find my last one. It was four computers ago, after all, and not in the least bit pertinent to the job in question. I don't think the craft store will care that I'm an expert user of FrameMaker 5.5. (For that matter, I don't think anyone would any more.)

The online application was quite entertaining, no doubt developed by highly-paid human resources people. The quiz was surprising: a little math, which I expected, a few analogies (really?), a few vocabulary questions. Sadly, no logic puzzles like the ones I aced on the GRE. The longer "personality" portion of the questionnaire caused much head-shaking.

Do you think it's OK to use illegal drugs while on the job?
Have you ever stolen anything from an employer?
Do you often yell at people when you are angry?

Hmmm.... Can I think about those and come back to them?

I was intrigued by repeated questions about ambition and fact-based decision-making. No, I'm not ambitious--I'm a stay-at-home mom applying to teach knitting a few times a month. But yes, I think business decisions should be based in fact....as opposed to???

And I had to consent to what will be the most boring background check anyone has ever had to do. Yes, I graduated from the schools I said I did. Yes, I held the jobs I said I did. My credit is fantastic. No, I've never had so much as a traffic ticket. If they could check back far enough, I never even got sent to detention in school.

I'll wear a hand-knit sweater, take along some cable-and-lace socks, a scarf and hat set, my newly-written knitting resume, and bring my most friendly, winning smile.

Exactly How Much Did You Hear?

2011-06-30T15:57:00.000-07:00

The kids are off for summer vacation, so they have to accompany me to the grocery store. We were walking toward the milk when a fellow shopper turned to me and said she had to compliment me. She said she was a child abuse counselor, and that she was very impressed with the way I was actually talking to my children. She said I was a wonderful mother.

You don't hear that too often, and it's always welcome.

The thing that I wonder is this: how much of our conversation did she actually overhear? Because I happened to be talking to Antonio about the list of words he wasn't supposed to say when he was a toddler. I didn't remember the whole list any more, but I knew it included "mine," and, for a brief time, "ouch," because he used to say it when I picked him up while he was throwing a fit. In this day of activist adults calling child protective services--which, don't get me wrong, can be a good thing--it just doesn't do to have your child yelling "ouch" when you're touching him in public.

So did she hear me tell my 8-year-old son that I didn't want people to think I was abusing him when he was being a bratty 2-year-old?

And then tell me I was a good mother?

Maggie's Blog Post

2011-06-30T15:53:00.000-07:00

Maggie asked me what I was doing, and I said I was writing a blog post. She asked what that was, and I explained. She repeated it back to me in her own little Maggie way. "It's a tiny short little story."

Then she wrote her own little blog post:

Once upon a time there was a little girl and she was very loved. The End.

How Did We Ever Survive? (Warning: Offensive content)

2011-06-29T13:32:00.000-07:00

or, I still hate the Consumer Product Safety Commission

Yesterday it became illegal to sell drop-side cribs anywhere under any circumstance. Not to minimize the indescribable loss suffered by the parents of the 32 babies killed since 2000 in drop-side cribs, but REALLY??? 32 babies in 11 years?

Just for perspective, compare that to over 2,000 children killed every year in car accidents, about 800 who are accidentally poisoned to death every year, over 100 who are killed by firearms, around 1000 who drown.

Why exactly has CPSC taken up cribs as the new deathtrap? Especially when they have already declared that your baby will die if you take him to bed with you?

I read a comment on a news article from a mom of a 2-year-old who had had her daughter's crib, her stroller, her high chair, her car seat, her fever-reducer, and her family sedan recalled for safety concerns. (I guess her daughter is too young for the Thomas trains lead paint recall of a few years ago.) I'm sure there must be an Onion article somewhere out there about this.

My mom co-slept part time, put us in drop-side cribs part-time (on our tummies!), never bought an outlet cover or baby gate. We ate nuts and grapes and hot dogs and hard candies when we were toddlers. We had no car seats, wore no seat belts, no bike helmets, no knee or elbow pads with our roller skates.

And somehow I lived to adulthood. And you know why? Because the world is just not that dangerous!

Kudos

2011-06-28T04:52:00.000-07:00

...to cafepress.com and Barefoot Winery for celebrating same-sex marriage in New York state!

I saw the ads of Facebook and I'm proud of them. I may even buy some cheap wine to show my support.

The Tribulations of Motherhood

2011-06-26T17:33:00.000-07:00

So Maggie asked me if we could download some Taylor Swift songs so she could listen to them when her friend Katie comes over.

I guess it's good that she recognizes that listening to Green Day and P!nk with her seven-year-old BFF might not be quite the right thing to do, but OMG, Taylor Swift in my house???? On my computer???

Disappointments and Delights

2011-06-24T13:25:00.000-07:00

The woman from the Craft Yarn Council never called me back, which is probably OK. I found out that I'd have to pay them $125 for a piece of paper that says I know how to knit. For free, they could check Ravelry and see that. Duh. So I'll probably not end up teaching knitting. It would have been difficult to schedule anyway, so no huge disappointment there.

Alli from Hot Guys Reading Books got 30+ applicants for the volunteer editing position, so unless I can come up with some way to prove I'm wittier than they (and I doubt my application did that), it's unlikely I'll get my dream job there. That IS a big disappointment. sigh...hot guys reading books...sigh

Excuse me, what was I saying?

Ah yes, this week's delight is so huge that it makes up for everything: I can write romance novels. I am quite nearly finished with the first draft of my first book, and with the kids home for summer I'm not anticipating getting a lot more done until fall, so I started reading the first real romance novel that someone else wrote.

And, hallelujah, my book fits the genre amazingly well. Without ever having read one, I intuitively understand the narrative structure, the themes, the vocabulary, and even the references to The Princess Bride. I still don't know whether I'll be able to sell it, but I can sure as hell write it.

And yes, if you're reading this, Alli, the hot guy reads. A lot. :-)

The Master of Ugliness

2011-06-20T05:26:00.000-07:00

I'm looking into getting a job teaching knitting classes at a craft store. It would be fun to share my obsession and earn a tiny bit of money, perhaps enough to subsidize my yarn purchases. (Yes, yes, I'm on a yarn diet, but doesn't it just make sense that the money I might make from knowing how to knit should be spent on furtherance of knitting? Pretty please?)

Researching the limited number of programs available to prove that one can knit, I found The Knitting Guild Association's Master Hand Knitters program. I agree with most of the requirements: knit swatches showing knit, purl, stitch patterns, mirrored increases, decreases, and so on, research knitting topics, design a pattern, write intelligently about knitting. All lovely, lovely, lovely. The one hiccup is that to finish the program, you have to make an argyle sock and a fair isle mitten, and I am opposed to both. Argyle socks are knit flat. (HELLO??? Let's just bail on everything that is brilliant and beautiful about sock construction!) And fair isle is ugly. OK, with the exception of this hat:

Fair isle is difficult to do well, it's not fun to work, the wrong side is a nightmare, and the results are usually...busy, at best. It's extreme knitting, kinda like bungee jumping, but without the danger of falling to your death. I guess it does prove you are truly the master of your craft, but you end up with a (usually) ugly FO.

Happy Birthday to Me

2011-06-16T20:02:00.000-07:00

Last year's birthday sucked. I spent it 150 miles from my husband and 2500 miles away from the rest of my family (my children excepted) and friends. I was older, depressed, and surrounded by 100 screaming kindergarteners on a bus.

This year was much better. I wrote more of my novel (see previous post), I knitted, I had drinks and lunch with JL, I knitted some more, I taught Maggie how to subtract.

Here's hoping this will be a harbinger of a wonderful year to come.

Graduation Day

2011-06-15T17:54:00.000-07:00

It may be cliched and pretentiously bad, but my book has 40,000 words.

I am now a novelist.

OMG, Maybe I'm Not Cut Out for This

2011-06-14T07:58:00.000-07:00

Writing sex scenes is just embarrassing. Even alone in my pink room.

Maybe especially alone in my pink room....

Dream Job

2011-06-13T06:46:00.000-07:00

Alli from my favorite blog, Hot Guys Reading Books, has asked for volunteer editors to help her post more pictures of hot guys reading books each week.

I would be over the moon to be chosen to write for it, but even if I'm not, it's still another five hot guys a week, so the consolation prize is totally OK with me.

Actual Conversation

2011-06-05T08:05:00.000-07:00

Watching Food Network over coffee this morning:

Maggie: Claire Robinson has a big butt today.

Me: That's just her apron.

Antonio: But all women have big butts.

Me: No. Some don't.

Jose Luis: And that's very unfortunate.

Maggie: Mom has a big butt, and she looks beautiful.

Jose Luis: Yes, she does.

Antonio: All men have dinky butts.

Jose Luis: No, they don't. And that's very unfortunate.

Update on Blacklisting

2011-06-01T05:07:00.000-07:00

After fretting insanely that it was something I posted here that made the other mother decide my home is not a proper place for her child to visit, I plucked up my courage and called her to ask if something had happened while said child was here. Picture it: my hands shaking as I dialed the number, concentrating on keeping calm while preparing to apologize and assure her that my blog is for adults and that I would never do or say anything inappropriate or adult or even controversial in front of someone else's child* but that I respected her right to decide what is best for her son.

Well, it was all for naught. She called me back several hours later--hours I spent totally freaking out--and told me she had no idea where that had come from, that the boy is welcome to visit us, my son is welcome at her house, it's all good, and kids are strange.

WTH???

On a happier note, and proving that I need a new site counter, while the blog was temporarily underground, I had four people contact me on Ravelry to ask why they couldn't see my blog to access my free knitting pattern. Wow.

*For evidence, I submit that when he asked me, I politely told the Catholic boy from across the street that I also wonder why they call it "Good" Friday when that's the day Jesus died and that he could ask his mommy about it.

Just Call Me Joy

2011-05-23T14:17:00.000-07:00

In an episode of My Name is Earl, Earl discovers that his sons have no friends because the other moms don't want to deal with his ex-wife, Joy.

Antonio had a friend over to play last week, and I met his mom when she dropped him off. She seemed perfectly pleasant, and we chatted for a few minutes. She said it was great for the kids to live so close, and Antonio is welcome to go play at their house.

My son told me today that this friend isn't allowed to come over to our house any more because his dad doesn't like it. I saw this same child at another friend's house when I dropped off Antonio, so I can't help but take it personally.

I wonder what I did or said...even when I try to behave myself.

Inappropriate?

2011-05-16T19:54:00.000-07:00

A friend of mine linked to these inadvertently funny children's writing samples on a somecard. In addition to some silliness about penises, it had paper that is NOT "inappropriate" but answered the assignment question quite well and one to whose philosophy I whole-heartedly subscribe:

"I practice freedom of religion by not going to church."

The right to freedom of religion should include the right to freedom from religion.

Book That I Intend to Read

2011-05-11T13:21:00.000-07:00

I was going to title this "Book Reviews," but I guess you should probably view it before you can review it.

I've seen (and in one case heard) blurbs about three potentially interesting books in the last few days, so I thought I'd share.

I tuned in to the middle of an NPR interview about zombies. Yes, you heard me right, zombies. A Tufts professor wrote a tongue-in-cheek book, Theories of International Politics and Zombies, describing international responses to a hypothetical zombie invasion. What would Kissinger do? Obama? Would there be protests for zombie rights?
I hate it when somebody beats me to writing a book I've thought of, especially when they've actually done the research and I haven't. In this case, it's A Billion Wicked Thoughts. A pair of psychologists analyzed search engine queries related to porn and used them to construct an analysis of human sexual desire. Many of their results were things I'd been brewing in the back of my mind, so I am interested to see how my decidedly unscientific examination of porn compares.
And lastly, The Geeks Shall Inherit the Earth: Popularity, Quirk Theory, and Why Outsiders Thrive After High School. Answer: 'cause high school is stupid and has nothing to do with real life.

I'll get back to you after I've actually read them.

Elitist and Pretentious

2011-04-26T06:48:00.000-07:00

In this "You Must Read This" column on NPR.com, a book reviewer writes that she reads science fiction, confessing it as if that were an embarrassing admission. The self-proclaimed "literary novelist" thinks that reading sci-fi makes her a nerd in the company of middle school boys, but she's learned to accept her short-coming. Um, check the definition, hon. If you read enough of it, that might make you a geek, but you're already a nerd--and a pretentious one at that--for being someone who announces to the world that she makes a living writing about "serious things."

This attitude really rankles me because science fiction is an enormous category that contains a broad spectrum from brilliant, thought provoking speculative fiction to total schlock. But because it's "just" science fiction, it's not Literature, even if it deals with the most serious of human concerns, from racism and sexism to environmental catastrophe to the nature of religious experience, as in the book our "nerd" is reviewing for us. Star Trek may seem kitschy now, but it presents a utopian view of society in which sexism and racism, greed and mindless aggression have all been conquered. At its best, science fiction can help us to understand ourselves by re-contextualizing fundamental human problems so they can be turned over and examined and reevaluated. There may be explosions and monsters and aliens, but they just might be saying something about US.

Similarly, Stephen King has been writing that thoroughly disreputable category of "horror" for forty years--he calls himself "the literary equivalent of a Big Mac and fries"--but I read Pet Sematary when I was a child and it still haunts me, and no, not the gory, ugly parts. In a gut-wrenching and honest way, it addresses my deepest, most sickening fear of losing a child and the lengths to which one would go to get him back. Could there be anything more desperately human than being faced with death and doing everything you can to defy it, even when you know it's wrong? But because it moves into the fantastic, it isn't Literature.

Now, on to my real problem. I said for more than twenty years of my life that I'd never read a romance novel. This was the same kind of pretentious prejudice: romance novels aren't "serious" literature. Romance novels are mindless girlie trash, bodice ripper soft-core porn lite for women who can't confront their sexuality head-on. In my hopeless quest to be "w ell-read," I culled out the single largest category of paperback fiction based on sexist elitism. After all, who wants to be in the company of women?

And now I find myself writing something that could be a romance novel.

But I can't go that way because then nobody would take seriously the things I have to say about class and loneliness and loss, just like Captain Kirk and Gage.

It's All in My Head

2011-04-18T08:05:00.000-07:00

It takes me years to make friends. I spent over a year when my son was a baby deciding each week whether it would be the last time I went to his playgroup because I was just so uncomfortable with new people. I made one friend in two years among the moms at Antonio's first elementary school. I made one kinda sorta friend in nearly a year in Massachusetts. I have one friend after nearly a year in New York.

It's not shyness precisely. I can talk superficially with strangers with ease--the weather, the traffic, yarn. I just can't negotiate my way from acquaintance to friend. Mostly it's been OK. In California, I had enough friends around me to satisfy my modest need for social interaction, but I think it's becoming critical now. JL was teasing me about being on Facebook...again, and I had to turn to him and explain that it IS my social life now.

I've dealt with the loneliness with what is probably a common but unproductive response: withdrawing further into myself. I don't want to join the PTA and be on committees and deal with politics and procedures and school functions that I thought were stupid when I was in school, not to mention a bunch of women running their children around from one activity to another like taxi drivers. I don't want to volunteer in class with a bunch of loud children. I go to knitting once a month, but that hasn't resulted in any friendships--just something to do one Tuesday a month, which does not constitute a social life.

Instead I've written most of a novella in the last two months. This is good and bad. I feel an amazing sense of accomplishment given that I've spent my whole life believing I'm not creative. Sitting at my computer writing, I can ignore everything in my life that bothers me, but the lack of other input has me losing my already tenuous grasp of "reality". I wouldn't mind even that if I didn't have the pesky husband and children who need me to be truly present. I should be cleaning, gardening, doing construction work on the house, and being a responsive and involved wife and mother, not lost imagining the lives of people I invented.

What is to be done, indeed?

'cause I'm Looking for Something to Be Mad About?

2011-04-13T10:58:00.000-07:00

When I turned 21, I lived on the Southside of the Berkeley campus where either you were a professor or a student, so basically, I always got carded when I ordered a drink so that the establishments wouldn't risk losing their liquor licenses. This abruptly stopped when we moved to the South Bay when I was 25, and it was a little alarming. Did I suddenly start looking haggard? But I wrote it off to the more heterogeneous nature of the population away from a university and didn't freak out. (OK, apart from once in Hawaii where I upset a cute, young waiter by asking him pointedly how old I looked after he called me ma'am.)

It was hit and miss for a while, then it stopped pretty much altogether. I simply don't look under 30 any more, and that's only fair since I'm closer to 40 than 30 now.

Well it seems to have started again in what I can only assume is a wave of service professionals trying to make me feel good. It's not working. It makes me feel like I look so old that I could use some smoke being blown up my ass to get me through the day. I want to say, "Dude, just sell me the booze so I can drown out the sound of my body decaying."

But then I guess no one ever doubted that I'd end up a grouchy, crotchety old lady.

Maybe I'm Not So Dumb After All

2011-04-04T12:47:00.000-07:00

I took a Facebook quiz yesterday, the BBC Book List Challenge. It listed 100 famous books of which they bet the average person had only read six. I had finished 42 and started but not finished another 10. I have been planning to read another 15 or so. I only did two years of high school and I didn't study literature in college, so I think that on my own, forty-two is a pretty respectable number, not to mention being the answer to Life, the Universe, and Everything. (And yes, Hitchhiker's Guide was on the list.)

At my advanced age, I finally finished Adventures of Huckleberry Finn today, which, oddly, was not on the list, though The Adventures of Tom Sawyer was. I very much enjoyed most of it, but found myself drifting off toward the end, not caring for the part with Tom Sawyer and leading me to question whether I want to read Tom's own adventures. I was delighted to discover that I'm not alone. According to the Wikipedia:

Many subsequent critics, Ernest Hemingway among them, have deprecated the final chapters, claiming the book "devolves into little more than minstrel-show satire and broad comedy" after Jim is detained.

See, I may have actually learned something along the way. :-)

Happy Time (ding)

2011-04-03T07:50:00.000-07:00

I've been bitchy lately on the blog, so here's a happy thought:

I have tomato seedlings! Yay!

Food Is Not the Enemy

2011-03-12T12:08:00.000-08:00

Natural, organic, no GMOs, no rBST, no preservatives, peanut-free, gluten-free.

Borrowing from Susan Powter, STOP THE INSANITY!

The only food-related health problem running rampant is America is obesity. No harm has ever been shown from eating inorganic(?) foods or GMOs. No difference can be detected between the milk from cows treated with hormones or not. There has NOT been a rise in deaths from peanut allergies. And for god's sake people, stop attributing any and all uncomfortable symptoms of being alive to gluten intolerance.

I was raised by hippies, and I don't care for white bread. I actually do like vegetables and fresh fruit and "natural" cheeses. I used to buy Clover Stornetta milk in California because they tried to be nicer to their cows, and I'm all for being humane to animals that provide us with our food. For a while, I was OK with "organic" produce because it intuitively seemed like a good idea to avoid dumping chemicals into the groundwater, but having become a gardener and knowing that fruiting plants will not produce without fertilizer of some sort, I think the jury is still out on whether transporting industrial amounts of bat guano is actually better for the environment than petrochemical-based fertilizers.

And frankly, I've just become more contrary in the face of the insanely fretful women worried about the possible long-term effects of minute changes in our diet who have created a market for the most unnatural things: ultra-pasteurized "organic" milk with added DHA and Omega-3? Huh? Gluten-free vegan cookies? Really? "All Natural" TV dinners? Seriously? And the worst offender of all, "organic" baby formula. Are you shitting me?

You can't be healthy eating 2500-3500 calories a day of high calorie, low nutrient food and not exercising. This has been proven. Excess calories and low fitness lead to cardiovascular disease, diabetes, cancer, back and joint problems. Period. And we need to revisit our food supply chain to ensure that we don't get food poisoning from poor industrial hygiene, including "natural" unpasteurized juices and dairy products. But that is where the known dangers of food end.

We live in this obscenely polarized world with poor children grown fat with neglect and inactivity and rich kids being tortured with restrictive diets by their control freak mothers to treat their imagined allergies and mild to moderate behavioral problems.

Stop worrying about what our food might be doing to us. And stop attributing every little twinge, rash, bad mood, gassy afternoon, and tantrum to a food intolerance.

This Is NOT a Good Thing

2011-03-03T18:29:00.000-08:00

NPR is reporting, "More Young People Scorning Sex, Study Finds."

The CDC did a large survey of sexual behavior and determined that 27% of young people, defined as age 15-24, had never had a sexual encounter.

If it's true, this is not a good thing. (Safe) sex is a good thing, a healthy thing, a natural thing, a happy thing. We have mastered reproduction, we can prevent STDs. Adults should all be having sex, early and often in whatever way turns them on.

So it really bothers me that this decline in sex is portrayed as something to be applauded. I would hate to see unintended pregnancy or HIV rates rise, but one does NOT necessarily imply the other. I thought very clearly about protecting myself and my future before I had sex as a teen...and bought condoms!

Can we please let go of the Victorian views about sexuality and all just get some?

(The one amusing result for me is that men, on average, supposedly have nearly twice as many sexual partners as women over their lifetimes. There must be a few really tired women at the edge of that bell curve.)

The Double Edged Sword of Copyright, or

2011-02-26T12:59:00.000-08:00

Why I Love and Hate Seth MacFarlane

In case you haven't heard, I'm writing a romance novel. At least that's what I tell people because 1) I want to set some seriously low expectations and 2) I don't know how else to categorize it. It is actually an attempt at a comedic-dramatic novel with mature themes, but it may be that I'm a terrible writer and I won't be able to convey the messages very well and all that will come across is a pretentiously bad romance novel. The intrepid reader may judge when it's done.

But one of my biggest issues with the mechanics of writing is this. I want the couple in the book to come to know one another the way everyone I know gets together with people, through shared music, books, movies, television shows. In high school it was clearest: the Goth kids wore black and listened to The Cure, the metal heads wore (black) Metallica tee-shirts and watched Beavis and Butthead, the truly disaffected, uncategorizable kids like me wore black and did whatever it was that we did until we got to college and discovered grunge and flannel shirts.

But since it is a (cough, cough, blush) serious novel, I can't use all that stuff the way an episode of Family Guy can riff (rip?) off popular culture. Seth MacFarlane can quote, reference, play with, and steal anything he wants because what he does is satire, but I can't use the lines from songs that float unbidden into my character's head because it would violate copyright.

Perhaps I still place far too much importance on it, but I can think of few better ways to describe character than through taste in music, and I think it's particularly ironic in this age of increasingly fractured media that we as writers (yes, I'm obnoxious) are hindered in communicating our ideas by the very tool used to protect ours and others' intellectual property.

And Following Up...

2011-02-18T06:39:00.000-08:00

One of the headline videos right now is an AC360 story about a DC couple who were wrongly accused of child abuse and had their children taken away briefly.

It's a dreadful nightmare for the family, but I have to cynically wonder whether CNN is worried that if social services is too successful at protecting kids, the network won't have any more grotesque stories to publish.

CNN Should Get 20 Years

2011-02-18T06:21:00.000-08:00

I can't read cnn.com any more. They seem to have a bureau for digging up every case of cruel, exotic child abuse, kidnap, and murder and displaying it right alongside new about Egypt, President Obama, and Lindsey Lohan's legal troubles. Obese couple starves foster children in their care. Mom blinds toddler by taping eyes shut with duck tape. Mom kills teens because they were "mouthy." It's sick. Really. I cannot imagine how they justify presenting this as headline news.

But today, they topped themselves with an amazing act of hypocrisy and insincere outrage.

Here's what actually happened: a STUPID, TASTELESS MORON duped an elementary school into letting him video tape some kids listening to him play guitar, then he intercut the footage of the children listening with footage of him singing a different, sexually explicit song that was NOT taped in front of the kids. No child was molested. No children even heard the raunchy song. The worst thing that happened to the kids was having to listen to the guy play perfectly innocent (and probably crappy) children's music in the presence of their teacher. Nothing happened, except that, OMG, something tasteless ended up on YouTube.

But evidently the dumbshit was arrested and may get to spend 20 years labeled as a sex offender for making child pornography.

Now, tell me exactly how what he did is different from CNN's constant barrage of child abuse stories. Which is really more disgusting? A single sleazy guy singing by himself about groping happy imaginary children? Or a mainstream network pandering to people who are captivated by true stories of sex abuse, horrendous cruelty, and permanent harm to real children?

Valentine's Day

2011-02-12T13:27:00.000-08:00

I love October and the end of January and beginning of February because there are tons of pink things to see and buy.

But I hate Valentine's Day, NOT because it's a greeting card holiday whose whole purpose is to sell chocolate, flowers, and jewelry. I like chocolate, flowers, and jewelry, and I have no problem with a holiday to promote them, and if that's what it takes to make many men do ONE romantic thing a year, then Teleflora has my full endorsement for kicking their asses into doing it. And NOT because, at best, I can generally only hope to receive lingerie that I don't think is too ugly. I get lots of presents and considerations throughout the year, so the lack of a heart-shaped box of chocolates is something I can live with.

But I hate Valentine's Day because of my nemesis: compulsory education. Valentine's Day is a holiday for lovers, so WHY, OH, WHY are my first and third graders giving out Valentines???

I Think I Need a New Site Counter

2011-02-08T05:15:00.001-08:00

When someone can not only read but also comment on my blog and the counter registers zero visits for the week, I think it's time to look for a new service.

"Speaking as a Child of the 90s"

2011-02-08T04:52:00.000-08:00

My sister-in-law sent me this link to SFGate.com. Evidently, Larry Blake's was the victim of the same corporate thinking that sunk the GAP: trying to stay relevant and appeal to a young demographic. If they'd just stayed with me and my born-in-the-70s cohort, they'd still be open. So there.

I'm So Old, Old, Old

2011-02-05T08:14:00.000-08:00

My first novel is set in 2011, 'cause I like all the gadgets we have these days, but in the Berkeley of 2000 when I left it for good. (JL said to write what I know, so Berkeley is it.) I moved around a lot as a child, and Berkeley was the first geographical location that I considered to be "home" in that overdetermined emotional attachment kind of way. I lived on the Southside for nearly eight years. But home is no longer home.

Larry Blake's, my favorite bar in Berkeley, has closed its doors for good. The GAP at Bancroft and Telegraph, where I bought all of my clothes for four years, is closed. Cody's Books, the best bookstore I've ever shopped at, is closed. Raleigh's, my favorite pub, is closed. I think there's some Berkeley grad running the Google Maps application because many of the stores still show up there.

I know they say that Tower Records was killed by MP3s and Amazon killed Cody's. But why did Blake's close when Kip's (do you want a beer with that cockroach?) and Smart Alec's Intelligent (nasty) Food are still there? Why is Urban Outfitters still there when the GAP closed? (OK, I know the answer to that one--GAP clothes suck now.) But how can the Berkeley Hat Company and Jim the Taylor and Whelan's Cigar Store still be there? Annapurna, really?

This just sucks.

Blake's is definitely going into my novel.

I Should Be Working on My Novel

2011-02-01T13:46:00.001-08:00

My dad sent me this great link, and I'm feelin' it.

Writing is hard. And it takes a long time.

Who knew?

Update: Status Critical

2011-02-01T07:24:00.000-08:00

Jose is staying home, and he just used the last of the coffee, so none for tomorrow. Shit.

Stupid Winter

2011-02-01T04:55:00.000-08:00

We here in the Northeast are evidently expecting a "monster storm," "the mother of all storms," Stormapalooza to hammer us for the next 48 hours. Last week's Stormzilla missed us, sending a few flurries and not much else, so I was lulled into complacency, and I'm about to pay for it. The children are, too, but I'm not so worried about them. (Well, OK, they WILL be Stage 2 victims of this calamity. Read on.)

We will run out of milk tonight. 'sOK. We have yogurt and cheese and the kids like snacking on dry Lucky Charms (Now with Added Calcium!). So I don't think their bones will turn spongy or brittle by Friday.

However, we only have enough coffee for today and tomorrow, not Thursday. The Winter Storm Warning runs through Thursday morning at 7:00. It is impossible to overstate the seriousness of this problem.

So here are the alternatives:

Go without. Yeah, right. Not an option.
Bum coffee from neighbors. Requires going out into the snow and taking our chances with their taste in coffee. Would a few scoops of Folger's really stave off the withdrawal? Would it be worth the pain of drinking it?
My brother gave me a Peet's Coffee gift certificate for Christmas. Do they offer overnight shipment on a pound of coffee beans? How much does it cost? Compared to the deductible on my car insurance?
Hide in bed until I can stumble my way to Starbucks on Friday morning?

I solemnly swear that I will never ignore snow warnings again.

School "Work"

2011-01-24T13:23:00.000-08:00

My mother likes telling a story from my childhood: I came home from elementary school, slammed down some long-forgotten craft, and asked in a huff, "are they going to make me do these same stupid projects EVERY year?"

Evidently, they are. And I feel the same way about them now that I did then. Not good.

I have two children in elementary school, and we have to do dioramas, mobiles, collages, posters, commercials, involving coloring and drawing and painting and modeling. It's supposed to be the fun part, but I still don't care for it. I think the projects are just as stupid as I thought they were when I was eight, though I'm much better at doing them now. Finally, at 36, I am creative and imaginative enough for second grade. Woot! Woot!

And it *is* largely me doing them. Left to their own devices, children--at least MY children--can't do this crap any more than I could when I was in elementary school. This leaves me in the position of deciding how well I should do it to get a passing grade, but not so well that a normal child couldn't have done it. (In kindergarten, there was a particularly cynical father who went around the classroom snarking about how well the parents had done their projects.)

Fortunately, as with every other aspect of my life, the computer makes it easier and faster. Instead of searching through magazines (which we don't even subscribe to!) for pictures that kinda sorta convey the idea of what we sorta gotta show, I can download exactly the image I want, rescale it, print it, then put it on poster board to stand up in the diorama. Tsaketa!

How Knitting (and Twilight) Made Me a Writer

2011-01-23T12:57:00.000-08:00

I have a published record of my opinion of my own creativity. I have never thought of myself as creative, not since a kid on the bus in kindergarten laughed at my finger-painting and I failed to learn to play piano or guitar in high school.

All that's a-changin', and I have knitting and Twilight to thank.

Knitting is a shockingly simple activity. Cast on, knit, purl, bind off. All knitted objects are made from some combination of variations of those four movements. (And you can make a very simple knitted object with only knitting on, knit stitches, and binding off.) If knitting were any more complicated, I would probably have given up before I mastered it, much like my continuing inability to play music. But because the start-up investment, so-to-speak, was so low, I learned to knit. And in continuing to knit, I got better at it, learned how garments are constructed, how to adjust patterns to suit my needs and tastes, and finally, how to design patterns to create entirely new things.

I finally learned, in my early thirties, that you learn to create by copying until you understand the underlying principles of the discipline.

And so, when I read the Twilight saga and was appalled by the moral bankruptcy of the ending (ME, an atheist!), I built on my half-lifetime of reading fiction to mentally rewrite the last book to suit my own narrative sensibilities. (In case you wonder, I decided that instead of the freaky, mute, blood-sucking baby, Bella gives birth to a soul for Edward, his reward for denying his thirst while in the closest possible contact with his "singer". Thus he is able to become human again, and they can live their natural lives, grow old, and die together, souls intact.) To be sure, I read the whole thing because it does quite effectively evoke the trembling, shy hesitation of falling in love, and for a good romance, you need some obstacle to love, and one vampire, one human is at least as good as a Montague and a Capulet.

I decided I would try reading romance novels to enjoy that feeling, and I read Diana Gabaldon's Outlander and while there were parts I really enjoyed, I was again appalled by the choices the author made...and by the fact that the series stretches out to seven books when I thought that entirely too much happened in the first one. (Exactly how many times can one woman be saved from rape???)

So what I wanted was a pared down romance where not much happens and where ideas and books are an integral part of the courtship, but I have very little patience for shopping around, and so I started writing it myself in my head. And eventually I had enough of it fleshed out that I began writing on the computer.

All because I learned to knit.

I Take It All Back

2011-01-14T12:03:00.000-08:00

OK, not ALL of it, but a lot of it. Evidently, Amy Chua is just a mom, maybe even momzilla, but, as usual, it's the Wall Street Journal that's to blame for everything. Or at least for kicking up a shit-storm by intentionally taking out of context the excerpt from a book and titling the by-line such as to misrepresent the content of the book.

Because I Can Never Let Things Go...

2011-01-13T06:19:00.000-08:00

...and because the idiot was featured on CNN this morning, I must continue with my critique of "Chinese" mothers.

As a Yale professor, how did Dr. Chua find the time to spend six hours a day supervising her two daughters' music practice plus hours a day of extra school work? Yale must be a kick-back job. Or was someone else taking care of her kids while she was busy with more important things?

Why the fuck didn't her husband step in and tell her to shut the fuck up? To stop bullying and hurting his kids? Asshole.

How much abuse is acceptable? Verbal, clearly. Physical? I'm sure if you smack them around, they'll be less likely to refuse to practice. Threaten to break their toes as motivation, and they'll get that long division? And what's an empty threat worth, right? :-) Just askin' how far is too far.

Haven't these people ever heard of the carrot? Or are they so terrified of the stick that they can't imagine another way?

Apart from the flat-out abuse she is advocating, if it is indeed pervasive in China, this model of thinking and parenting is likely responsible for the fact that the last significant contribution to world culture that the Chinese made was printmaking--in the 8th Century. Not since antiquity have the Chinese truly innovated, and how could they be expected to when the entire focus of Chinese culture is backward-looking. Spend every minute honoring your ancestors by memorizing rote facts and finger motions? Please. Without a sense of self as valuable, without time to be bored and experiment and create, how can you expect true genius or innovation or even somewhat bland creativity? A billion and a half Chinese on Earth today and over four thousand years of recorded history that saw the birth of meritocracy, and they did not generate a Newton, a Galileo, a da Vinci, a Mendel, a Leeuwenhoek, a Tesla, an Edison, a Ford, a single Wright brother, a Salk, a Turing, a Steve Jobs. I think we can be certain that Barack Obama, the leader of the free world, was not called "garbage" on his path through childhood, and nobody could call him "complacent."

You have a billion and a half people who cling to useless and/or poisonous herbs to cure their illnesses, who abort female fetuses because they are worthless, who devalue children so much that they put lead paint into toys and poison into formula, whose acquiesce to a repressive state that denies them access to information the rest of the industrialized world can view with ease, and drives as much of the educated middle-class as can manage it to seek escape to America...where they can try to perpetuate the repression in their households here.

Mmmmm...give me more of that, please.

Somebody's Bullshitting Us

2011-01-11T14:45:00.000-08:00

My SIL posted a link to this article on Facebook and said she wasn't going to blog about it, so I'm going to. In a nutshell, it asserts that "Chinese" mothers are better than "Western" mothers because they push their children harder to excel because they believe in the children more and love them more.

Evidently, however, the hours spent doing math drills has not led them to understand that, no matter how hard they push their children, only one child will ever be the "best." And if being the best is the only acceptable outcome, that must leave 1,499,999,999 Chinese people who are "lazy," "stupid," "worthless," "disgraceful" "garbage" who should live in shame because they didn't work hard enough.

(It must also mean that going to the symphony in China must be a drag since there must only be a single first violinist and a single pianist because no Chinese mother would permit the shame of having a second violinist or a cellist or, heaven forbid, a trombone player in the family.)

As with most parenting advice, this is an upper-middle class ideal (and a stereotype) that very few people actually even attempt to follow. I have my doubts as to how "Chinese" it is anyway--I suspect this is an artifact of aggressively achievement-oriented, Western-worshiping Chinese transplants to America. How likely is it that a vast communist country of peasants has produced a pervasive, decidedly competitive model of parenting promoting Western goals?

To the extent that it is followed--and who hasn't known Asian kids who suffer some version of that childhood--however well it might work in the Chinese elite, it must have much worse consequences when migrated into a country where that behavior and that ideal is not the norm, and is, by many, considered to be borderline abuse. Many children who see how much easier their friends' lives are must come to resent the foreign model that places so much pressure on them compared to their classmates. And honestly to very little improvement in their lives, because no one but your mother will ever care that you were the best arithmetician in Mrs. Smith's fourth grade class of 1997 at Central Elementary. In fact, as clearly stated by this champion of "tiger mothers," the goal is the aggrandizement of the mother--uh, ancestors--who are allowed no other avenue for ambition.

Further, to say that children are "happy" to spend three hours a day practicing (Western) classical music pieces on the violin because at the end, IF they master the piece, they finally receive approval is a bad joke. If not learning the pieces quickly enough makes her "garbage," what must the poor child be who fails to master the concerto before soiling herself because she's not allowed to get up even to pee? How many of these children become professional musicians? More to the point, if the purpose is to make them "happy," how many of those children feel such pride and joy in their mastery of their instruments that they continue playing in college and into adulthood when there is no praise forthcoming from their "doting" mothers?

American children are falling behind in math and science compared to India and China, and that is certainly something to be addressed by setting and working toward higher standards for achievement--in math and science, not musty classical music--but verbal abuse and highly conditional love is not the answer.

Old School

2011-01-08T10:32:00.000-08:00

My utter indifference to my children's safety is the hallmark of my parenting.

That gem once flowed from my smart mouth. It's not in the least bit true, but sometimes I can't help but quip.

Lately however, I've been feeling like I care less for their safety than, well, every other mother around me cares for her kids' safety and well-being.

I send my kids down to the end of the driveway to wait for the school bus, and I don't go out there with them.
I send my children out to play in the cold, and I don't insist that they wear a coat. I make them take their coats to school AND put them on when the teachers say, but that's entirely so we don't get shit from the teachers.
They are allowed to play in the road.
I had them fully vaccinated on the CDC schedule...without pausing to worry about thimerosal or aluminum or autism or cancer or brain damage or sterility or their faces freezing that way or.... You get the picture.
OMG, they eat "processed" foods. Crackers and corn dogs and cookies, oh my.
I don't immediately go running when they fall and get hurt.
I let them watch, probably, 2 hours of TV a day, if you count half-watching with their dad before bedtime.
I let them see some PG-13 movies when they are only 6 and 8.
I let them play some T for Teen video games.
I don't drive them to nine different activities.
I don't volunteer at the school anymore.

I am beginning to feel really guilty about how little I seem to care about them. But it's just not in me to worry when the children, to all appearances and from all official reports from professionals, are doing very well. They are beautiful, they are doing well in school, they are at a healthy weight, they read, they play (reasonably) nicely together and with other children, they (mostly) eat their vegetables.

Is it simply my lack of imagination that doesn't dispose me to worry about what might happen? Is my trust misplaced when I say my anti-stoic children will come in when they're cold? Are they allergic to peanuts, and I JUST NEVER NOTICED?? Should I be worried about how video games might be misshaping their brains? About the high-fructose corn syrup in their Goldfish crackers destining them to obesity? About how cell phone towers and Wi-Fi might be giving them cancer? About cyber-bullies texting them evil messages if I got them a phone? About cyber-predators luring them away from home to be raped and killed? About how poorly-rounded (square?) and obese (that's a kind of round, right?) they will end up being from not being ferried around to interpretive dance, fencing, chess club, and Bible study? "Am I too fretful? Am I not fretful enough?"

I reject modern parents' concerns because they just don't make sense to me. We live in a safe world in a phenomenally safe neighborhood. We live in a quiet little suburban town in Upstate New York on a loop where the only traffic is the residents, most of whom have (or have had) kids. The human body and mind is so adaptable that if you take reasonably good care of it, and you're not tragically unlucky, you should be fine.

When I learned that you could raise a reasonably well-adjusted child without attachment parenting, I took up the aphorism that, "short of criminal abuse and neglect, kids usually turn out fine." Sadly, due to the stupid peer pressure that I'm having to resist, I'm having to say that about my own parenting style these days, which, much to my surprise, has begun to seem...old-fashioned. Old school 50s mothering. Now I just need a bridge club of like-minded mothers to sit and smoke with...

The Apocalypse May Be Upon Us

2011-01-05T15:00:00.000-08:00

IKEA sucks. That's right. You heard me say it. And here is my letter to IKEA Paramus:

You suck. Your online store doesn't carry your full product line and was out of stock of nearly everything I wanted to buy that you DO sell online, so I rented a truck and drove 300 miles roundtrip to godforsaken New Jersey to buy a sofa with slipcovers (along with nearly $4000 worth of other merchandise). When I got home I discovered that in addition to a manufacturing defect in the sofa that my husband had to manufacture a part to correct, the slipcover set was incomplete. After being assured that the missing covers would be sent to me, I was ignored for a week, then told they were out of stock and it would be a week before I got them (despite the website saying they were in stock), then I got a message saying I would have to return to the store to get them, then three unreturned phone calls later, I was told the miserly and process-bound "after sale department" absolutely will not send me replacements unless I first ship them the incomplete set.

This is totally antithetical to your highly-touted commitment to environmentalism and to customer satisfaction and shows your employees to have a complete lack of imaginative problem-solving. "Duh. The process says we gotta do dis. We can't do it no udder way."

Again, you suck.

Brand Identification

2010-12-27T11:31:00.000-08:00

When we bought my car, I kept getting surveys asking how I felt about my car and about Volkswagen in general. Would I describe it "economical," or "luxurious," or "stylish"? When we bought it, JL was apologetic that we couldn't afford another AUDI--that we had to get the cheap version of his A3--but I LOVE my car, and I even love the fact that it IS the cheaper version of his car. It may be that I am just lower class than he is, or that I'm four years younger, but I am behind him in growing up in brand loyalty. I don't want the luxury car yet. I like the "youthful" brand image of my VW, among other products.

Case in point, our big Christmas splurge this year was a trip to New York City, returning by way of the IKEA in Paramus, NJ. The running joke in our house is that we have cheap IKEA furniture so that we can buy expensive Sony and Apple electronics, but it's become something more than that for me. I'm not interested in paying a small fortune for a Tommy Hilfiger bedding set--I'm not impressed by the designer name. And I like the colorful, playful graphics of IKEA textiles. I have rowdy, careless small children, and why would I want to fret over dings in a $2,000 Ethan Allen dining table? (Not to mention that my Ektorp sofa, along with other iconic IKEA decor, is used in the highest-quality Hungarian porn.)

Companies don't pay huge sums to advertising and marketing people for nothing, and I am no better, no wiser, no less affected by brand image than anyone else, so here it is:

I am a Target (not WalMart!) shopper, a VW driver, an Apple user, a believer in life improvement by IKEA, a stila make-up wearer, and I would happily suffer the post-GAP downgrade to an Old Navy dresser if they just made jeans to fit around my fat butt and thighs.

This Isn't Quite What I Had in Mind

2010-12-13T19:34:00.000-08:00

You might not guess it from looking at me, but I run. I actually enjoy it, too, but I am part of the tiny minority of runners who don't want to run outside. I own a treadmill and an iPod that I dearly love, and I've covered many miles while never moving more than two feet.

The trouble is this: our new house has this funky stairway to the basement that's split in two with a landing in the middle. My treadmill will not make it down the switchback in the stairs. We can't find the instructions for taking it apart. So the treadmill's in the garage. Which is not really insulated very well. And it's 27 degrees outside. And only slightly warmer in the garage.

This means that when I run, it takes about 3/4 of a mile before I can slip my fingers out of my sleeves. I watch my breath plume out with each exhalation. The half cup of water in my sports bottle froze when I forgot it overnight.

I guess I should just be thankful that at least I'm not having to run in the sunlight.

Can You Say, "Ironic"?

2010-12-13T12:32:00.000-08:00

So I use the Nike+ app on my iPod while I'm running. It tracks your speed and distance, which you can upload to the Nike running website and compete in challenges. I have been in three challenges for modest distance goals for the last three months or so. The goal for all of the different time periods has been around 20-21 miles a week of running. That's not really a lot of running for serious runners, but it's a moderate challenge for me. I was in the top four for all of the challenges, and it was pretty close and a lot of fun. And then....

In one of the challenges, the leader up to then had run 192 miles over about three months, and I was in third place. (I would have been second, but Nike lost 10 miles of running, but that's just me whining.) Well, yesterday, some dickhead who had run 1300 miles over that same period joined just before the close and won the challenge.

That's like Usain Bolt showing up to a middle school track meet. Well, duh, he's going to win the trophy.

And come off looking like a totally pathetic loser who spends all his time running because he's too big an asshole for people in real life to endure.

I Survived...

2010-12-09T12:53:00.001-08:00

...the appointment season.

Five dentist appointments and two doctor appointments in two weeks. Ugh.

I hate going to the doctor and the dentist. I don't really enjoy taking my kids to the doctor or the dentist since Dr. Copeland left Kaiser and then we left Kaiser.

Going to the doctor is like a taking a test for which I haven't studied enough. It makes me neurotically crazy. I got a fever blister. The morning of Antonio's dentist appointment for his first fillings, I slipped going down the stairs and bruised my back and wrenched my shoulder. Then parking on the street outside the office, I scraped the (expensive) wheel of my car on the curb.

But it's over until June. If I can just force myself to floss maybe I'll feel better about it next time....

Why Would They Need to Know That?

2010-12-08T10:44:00.000-08:00

I am not a helicopter parent; my kids are just always with me. A subtle distinction, perhaps, but it's true. As such, I never made it a priority to teach them our phone number. When would they ever need to call home?

Well, I was just implicitly chided by Antonio's teacher because he didn't know his home phone number, and it took her half an hour to dig it up, and he missed gym class in the process.

In my defense:

He DID know my cell phone number, but evidently the crappy school phone system can't reach it. Of course it's not a valid New York phone number. It's got a Silicon Valley area code!
I put our home phone number on, like, 14 forms when I registered the kids for school! Why, for fuck's sake, would it take half an hour to find my number? It should be on the student information form under his last name in a file cabinet in the school office or, if they've entered the digital age, in a computer data base.

So if it's unnatural for my six-and eight-year-old to not know how to use a phone, at what age are other people's kids starting to call their friends and family?

I Came Out!

2010-12-05T10:50:00.001-08:00

In California the kids and I belonged to a small playgroup of kids their age. Somehow the other kids' birthday parties always seemed to be held on a Sunday, and even if Jose Luis had found great joy in hanging out with other people's children, he always had a soccer game on Sunday mornings. One occasional playgroup participant who didn't know better once asked me if Jose was deeply religious since she never saw him on Sundays. Naturally, I couldn't help but laugh out loud at the question. Only if the religion is soccer.

Last night I was invited to the movies for the first time with a group of moms here in New York. Afterward we were talking about a school assignment about family traditions and the subject of religion came up. One of the women said she hoped I wasn't offended by what she was about to say since she didn't know my religious affiliation. With great trepidation, I said I was an atheist. Surrounded by churches with town erected direction signs and traffic warnings, in the midst of "traditional" nuclear families with stay-at-home moms, it makes me nervous to admit it. I used to say we're just "not religious," but since I've been feeling particularly oppressed, I decided to just come out with it.

I don't believe in god, but on the other hand I'm inclusive and I'll observe almost any cultural family-oriented celebration that has a special food associated with it. (I'm not convinced about Ramadan because it involves fasting, which I'm against.) Latkes for Hanukah, pork buns for Chinese New Year, black-eyed peas for New Year, corned beef and cabbage for St. Patrick's day. I'm not Jewish, Chinese, Southern, or Irish, but bring on the seasonal foods, and I'll happily nod to the best parts of your culture. I just don't have to believe in your gods.

Fortunately, the woman in the car with me was about to bitch about Bible thumpers. This could be the beginning of a beautiful friendship. :-)

Troll Proof?

2010-12-02T15:07:00.000-08:00

So I tried to sign up for the Knit Picks knitting community, and my details must be approved by the administrator before I can post and thereby enter the contest for the $25 gift certificate.

Seriously? Whom are they trying to exclude? "Trolls," I hope.

And now the next question: will the admin check out my blog here and decide that I'm too obnoxious for free yarn? Eeek!

The Pressure's On Now

2010-11-29T13:23:00.000-08:00

My "business" cards came in the mail today, so now I really have to live up to my second title and write something:

Black Friday

2010-11-25T16:59:00.001-08:00

I love the holidays. I love peppermint Oreos and Candy Cane Kisses and stuffing and pumpkin pie and peppermint mochas and wreaths and garland and wrapping paper and The Nutcracker and How the Grinch Stole Christmas and the red Starbucks holiday cups and that sappy Folgers commercial where the big brother comes home from college for Christmas morning.

What I don't love is shopping.

I hate the very thought of Black Friday. Getting up before the sun to elbow my way to 75% off crap I don't need? No thank you. (Cyber monday is OK. Quite tempting, in fact, since Knit Picks is having their first Cyber Monday sale, which I can shop in my p.j.s, but again, it's nothing I need.)

So while I'm *not* out standing in the 26° darkness, as a public service, I'll provide a short list of things I don't need or want:

The electric cupcake maker--even if it IS pink, really?
Wireless wine bottle opener (when did they ever need wires?)
Electronic versions of time-tested games--exactly how is the Rubik's cube improved by adding batteries?
Fair isle mukluk slippers
Glenn Beck's Christmas book ('nuff said)
The Sunbeam™ hot water dispenser (with bowl!)
Anything made of velour
The Minwax car care kit
A $5 machine knit acrylic scarf and matching gloves--I really hope you all know me better than that by now
A scented candle--the gift that screams "I don't know you at all, but I am socially obligated to give you a present."

But I swear that if anybody sends me a Snuggie, I will seek you out and suffocate you with it. ;-)

First Snow Day 2010

2010-11-08T12:32:00.001-08:00

Maybe I Should Just Have a Twitter Feed...

2010-11-08T12:27:00.001-08:00

If your spouse left you for a homosexual relationship (or heck, for a hetero relationship if you're gay), are you the sort of person who would 1) wonder how you drove him/her to renounce your gender or 2) be comforted by the fact that there is really nothing you could have changed to keep him/her faithful?

Just something to ponder.

The Gift That Keeps on Giving

2010-10-26T05:52:00.001-07:00

I went more than ten years in my adult life without needing antibiotics. I got strep throat in graduate school and had to avail myself of the student health services clinic, then not a single illness that didn't get better with a couple of days of rest for ten years.

However, since the children started school, I've had bronchitis, pneumonia, and strep throat (twice). I've probably been saved from influenza because Kaiser recommended that the kids be vaccinated yearly, and if they had to get shots, I got them too out of solidarity.

Along with my daughter's newfound paranoia about fire safety and the dulcet sounds of recorder music, this is another thing I don't appreciate coming home from school.

Eating My Words

2010-10-22T15:13:00.000-07:00

I was opposed to the "Motor Voter" bill when I it was first floated because I thought that someone too lazy to register to vote shouldn't be allowed to choose who runs the government. Same with election day registration. I though, "get your ignorant lazy ass out and find and fill out a voter registration form. It's not hard."

Now that I've moved to New York state, I find that I have a problem. Neither the State of New York nor the Saratoga County Board of Electors sends me an election pamphlet. No sample ballot. No statements from the candidates for judgeships that I don't even think should be elected positions. Not even a notice of an upcoming election. Nothing. Zip. Zero. I'm beginning to feel like I'm lucky they sent me the single notice of my polling place that I nearly threw away, assuming it would be on my sample ballots.

Thank Al Gore for the Internet, I can at least download the 110 page document with *all* of the candidates for *all* of the elected positions in the entire state of New York so I can sift through it for the candidates in my district. And I can use the candidate list to google everybody to see what they have to say. If New York has a host of propositions and bond measures like California, I have no idea what they might be.

So this is going to be a lot more work than it ever was in California--work I can't even complain about since I should be an informed and involved voter with enough interest to research the issues and candidates.

Dammit. Maybe hypocrisy is a valid alternative after all....

Huh?

2010-09-02T05:44:00.000-07:00

These are the (many) moments when I consider home-schooling my children.

What do you do when the school policies show a total inability to analyze and solve a problem rationally and effectively?
What do you do when the superintendent of your kids' school system can't write?

In our first mailing from the school, we got a letter dictating what foods can be brought into Maggie's classroom because the school is pandering to the allergy fetish and ignobly trying to avoid a lawsuit. Ugh. Maggie gets to spend the year on a hypoallergenic diet, and at this rate, she will be in college before she can eat PB&J in public.

And we got our welcome letter from the superintendent. The bullshit quotient on the letter is through the roof. It begins:

I am always inspired this time of the year with a certain feeling of euphoria, a feeling of excitement that can only be engendered by knowing that in this new school year we once again hold the ability to foster the genius in every child.

I suddenly have less respect for Brown University because he gets a big FAIL on English usage. Apart from my snarky comments on the potential genius in every child, you can't hold an ability; a belief, by definition, cannot be irrefutable; a "pyramid of intervention options" is not the best configuration; 'integral' is sufficient without the modifier 'deeply'; and what exactly does it mean that "knowledge is increasingly changing"?

Good lord. I had to read some paragraphs three times to get the sense of what he was trying to say, and I got the impression that the school district sucks but they are trying to improve, as if the school that got a 9-out-of-10 rating on GreatSchools.org is actually in some inner city slum, serving a population of English-optional, at-risk borderline gang drop-outs.

Dude. Really? These are the people who are supposed to teach my children to read and write clearly and think critically?

Cranky, cranky, cranky.

Edgy as a Butter Knife

2010-07-16T07:54:00.000-07:00

I was flipping through a magazine a few weeks ago where I read an article about the new Broadway musical based on Green Day's American Idiot. The ironic fury of "Sieg heil to the President Gas Man," got mixed in with the pathetically earnest "God, I hope I get it! I hope I get it," and Green Day was suddenly a lot less cool.

Then I was at the mall a few weeks ago, and I could just hear "Like a Prayer" as I quickly passed through the JC Penny. It was "Like a Prayer," but somehow hollower and even cheesier than the original. I'm guessing it was a cover from the TV show Glee. I never thought much of Madonna, but suddenly she seemed marginally cooler by contrast: at least she was the first one to sing it.

High school musicals are a hopelessly square attempt to include as many kids as possible in a sanitized and safe framework for getting attention. They are creating nothing new, and the highly structured and "advised" format defies self-expression, subversion, or any possibility of art as I understand it. It is a great big "look at me, look at me" for kids with nothing to say, and it's extra pitiful that they are co-opting something that was (mildly) racy thirty years ago.

Finally, to put the stake through the rebel vampire heart of punk rock, I was skipping through Sirius radio the other day, and I heard the dance remix of a Green Day song. Let's hope they take the "21 Guns" and shoot their manager.

How's the Weather?

2010-07-15T14:13:00.000-07:00

Talking about the weather is the old standby for when you have nothing to say to people. Well, in California, it's really a joke because the weather hardly changes. On this coast, Back East here, ho boy, does it change, from so cold that a few moments could freeze your ears off to Holy Hell Batman, it's hot as Hades and wet as a monsoon.

We have been above average (high of 83° in July) all but three days this month, and the unseasonably hot weather here in New York is expected to continue for at least the next ten days. Even if I were willing to take the electricity hit and leave the pitifully inadequate air conditioner on all the time, the house pretty much bottoms out at 80°. Modern insulation and stagnant air outside mean that the inside of the house doesn't cool down overnight, even if the outside temperature gets down to a sticky 72° around sunrise.

For context, I used to hate it when the Northern California weatherman said it was going to be a "beautiful day in the Bay Area" at 83° with low humidity. I think 59° with a slight breeze is pretty much perfect weather. (At that temperature, humidity just isn't an issue because the air can't hold enough water to be uncomfortable.) It's what I've come to think of as "scarf weather," and as a knitter, that makes me really happy.

The current 87° and 53% relative humidity (with a cheerful "feels like 91°") is KILLING ME!!! I'm not going to make it to August, much less through it, so it's been good knowing you all.

My gravestone will say, "it wasn't the heat, it was the humidity."

Childhood Diplomacy

2010-07-05T09:08:00.001-07:00

We met some of the neighbor children. There are three little girls across the street: 5-year-old twins and a seven year old. Antonio and Maggie were happily playing with them until Antonio came running in and hid in his room crying. The girls told Antonio he shouldn't annoy their next door neighbors because there is a guy who has guns who tried to shoot them.

(As an aside, I have to think that this is pretty clear proof that Antonio knows the difference between fact and fiction. He has a love for violent movies, games, toy guns, weapons, explosions, and fighting that kinda creeps me out, but when faced with the possibility of a real gun, he was terrified.)

Seeing as how the mother lets the girls play in the front yard and cross the street without hesitation, I had my doubts as to the seriousness of this threat. I explained that there was probably some misunderstanding: that sometimes people have guns in their houses, but that doesn't necessarily make them scary, that we moved him to a safe place where he doesn't need to be afraid--while having to wonder if there is some survivalist whacko we should at least be aware of.

JL dutifully went across the street to ask the girls' father about it. Evidently the middle-school-aged boys, whom I've seen happily and non-threateningly playing ball in the street, have toy guns that fire little orange pellets, and that freaks out the girls. End of story. End of drama.

So we got to explain to Toño that, far from being in danger, he shouldn't annoy them...because if he makes friends instead, he might be able to play with them and their guns.

Housewarming Present

2010-07-02T07:55:00.001-07:00

I hate doing dishes by hand. I really hate it. But as stated below, the dishwasher in my new house is too nasty to put my dishes in, so I have a week of hand-washing before my housewarming present comes:

Eew.

2010-07-01T14:15:00.000-07:00

As I've mentioned before, I'm no clean freak, so it's really bad when my own house grosses me out.

I cleaned out our house in Massachusetts when we left. I cleaned everything: moldings, windows, floors, baseboards, stair railing, light switches, electrical outlets, bathrooms, kitchen, cabinets. My neighbor there texted me that she overheard the landlord on his cell telling someone that I left the house so clean that there was nothing they'd need to do to get it ready for the next tenants.

Not so much here.

No exaggeration, I've been in interstate gas station rest rooms cleaner than the bathrooms in my new house. I don't want to use my vacuum cleaner because I don't want its insides getting as filthy as this place would make it. The dishwasher would make my dishes dirtier. I wouldn't put my trash can under the kitchen sink because it's too nasty down there...for my trash can. There is garbage collected in the grill for the heater vent by the front door, as if it were an inner city storm gutter.

The previous owner lived here for three years, and I don't believe she cleaned anything. Ever. All I can think is that she had children trapped in this hell. How foul does a house need to get for CPS to take children away from their parent?

It took two days to clean the bathroom. The grout is permanently stained with mildew, but they are perfectly sterile mildew stains now. The caulk around the toilet base is old and cracked, which makes me worry about what's under there, but I can't do anything about it without replacing the toilet. The bottom of the tub is gray, but also nothing else to be done there. I had a cold when I attacked it, so at least my mucus was protecting me from the foulness and the noxious bleach fumes.

It's taken me four days to do the kitchen, and that was with help from JL, who cleaned the floor. The refrigerator and stove must be relatively new because they were surprisingly not-bad. Someone clearly attempted to clean them, though not with any real commitment. Not so the dishwasher or cabinets. Eeew.

The realtor mentioned something about the previous owner possibly stopping by to bring us flowers, but I don't want her to. How could I look her in the eyes and make polite conversation when all I can think is, "OMG, you are disgusting!" Some part of me wants a return to public shaming, publishing her name and particulars so people will be warned.

The neighbors have stopped by and they KNOW. Everyone is polite, pitying her train wreck of a life and slide from middle class prosperity, but the subtext is clear. "We hope you'll be less trashy than she was."

If nothing else, my previous landlord would recommend me. :-)

New Yorkers?

2010-06-30T14:50:00.000-07:00

My fabulous SIL reminded me of a cartoon comparing LA and NYC with the reversed speech and thought bubbles.

CA: Saying "Have a Nice Day!" Thinking: @#$% you
NYC: Saying "@#$% You" Thinking: "Have a nice day!"

Well, evidently upstate New Yorkers are a breed unto their own. Three houses worth of new neighbors mowed our lawn, whacked our weeds, and made us dinner, including disposable plates, cups, flat wear, napkins, sparkling water and grape juice, and homemade cookies.

I am feeling the love.

I have a lot of thank-you (Stash Down) knitting to do....

Last Blah(g) out of Massachusetts

2010-06-27T19:42:00.001-07:00

The packers come tomorrow. I'm (more or less) ready for them. I have my pile of stuff they can't pack. I have my bucket o' cleaning supplies and my trusty Dyson Ball for once they've emptied the place.

We spent only nine and a half months in Massachusetts. I'll say we left because of Scott Brown.

Is It Autumn Yet?

2010-06-23T08:38:00.000-07:00

When we moved here last September, a surprisingly surly agent at the car rental agency told me we got screwed moving from California to Massachusetts, "where the winters suck and the summers suck even more."

I really enjoyed last fall. And after all the dire warnings, the winter was disappointingly mild. The spring lasted about two days, as far as I can tell. We went suddenly from 40 degree days to sunny 70s through most of March, April, and May. (Except for the two days in mid-May when my plants froze. Damn stupid weather.) After the three months of cold, the warmth was actually pleasant, and the lightning storms are amazing.

Now, on June 23 I am already DONE with summer. Summer here does suck. It's not as hot here as California summers, but it is warm and *wet*. Nothing dries out by itself. There are mosquitos everywhere. And at least in California, you have the evenings to look forward to, when there is a 30 degree temperature drop that allows the house to cool down. Not so here. It's still in the mid-seventies at 11:00 at night, and our well-insulated house holds onto the heat it's accumulated through the day so that it's even warmer inside the house than out. The air outside is stagnant and anyway the windows in the house are not conducive to good cross ventilation. The air conditioning doesn't cool the upstairs, so I can't justify keeping it on, chugging away and adding to my carbon footprint for very little gain.

The one thing that has remained constant, though, is that people here also talk about how wonderful the warm weather is and how they hope it will stay this way forever.

Yuck. Come on September....

Goodbye, er, Whatever

2010-06-21T17:57:00.000-07:00

"...kindergarten's at an end.

Don't be sad, we do intend
To always be your special friend."

I had a shitty day.

In the nearly nine months I've lived here, I've made one friend, my neighbor. I know another handful of people to nod at and gripe about the weather, all from the kids' school.

Today was Antonio's last day at school, so we saw a lot of not-friends for the last time ever. Many of them didn't know we're going, so for them it was just the usual good morning or maybe a "have a great summer," but a few knew we are leaving and felt compelled to say something.

I wish they wouldn't have.

When we left California, it hurt. We left my whole family. We left the playgroup Antonio and Maggie had grown up with from infancy. We left friends we'd had for over a decade.

There is often something melancholy in finality, but this time is like a mockery of that heart-felt taking-leave. Yes, these nodding acquaintances were trying to be polite, wishing us well and good luck and good-bye, but somehow it's like those insincere moments when you say, "oh, yeah, we should get together sometime," except there's no chance and you both know it. Maybe, "it was nice NOT knowing you."

Why bother? Just let us slink away in the night.

Tonight on American Greed

2010-06-12T07:46:00.000-07:00

I would like to know who the Al Capone of real estate is. There simply MUST be some brilliant, innovative criminal mastermind who finessed and cajoled and bullied his agenda into English (and thereby American) law to allow him to be considered a professional and to do nearly no work for maximal profit.

To whit: a real estate agent's whole responsibility seems to be to host tours of strangers' houses for the benefit of other strangers--at his convenience. A mortgage broker arranges the mortgage. The title company handles the title search and coordinates the paperwork coming from the various parties. A lawyer (or more likely his paralegal) handles any other legal aspects of the transaction. A notary certifies the final signing. Despite having what seems to be an adversarial arrangement between agents for buyers and sellers, it is both the seller's AND buyer's agents best interest that the sale price of property be as high as possible. And on top of that, Freakonomics shows agents to be even lazier, doing a cost-benefit analysis that means even sellers are getting shafted.

This is a general complaint. I have specific complaints about our current realtor.

She showed us six houses and threw up her hands, saying that's representative of all that is available in our stated price range and if we want to bother to keep looking we'll have to raise our limit.
We put an offer on a house, which involved an admin watching JL sign standard legal forms.
The agent attended the inspection, sitting on the porch talking on the phone to a friend. She agreed that the house was filthy and that, while convention dictates that the house should be clean at transfer, clearly the seller's idea of clean does not match our own, but she didn't feel it important enough even to request having it professionally cleaned at the seller's, or seller's agent's, or even her own expense out of her commission.
Then she handed all matters over to others and waited for her check.
When the seller decided she couldn't meet the date she had set for close of escrow, it was not our agent who told us. It was the lawyer's paralegal.

Then, our agent couldn't be bothered to call us back! What the FUCK is the agent's responsibility here? How, exactly, is she "advocating" for us, as her boss's thank-you-for-your-business letter said she should? Why, exactly, does she deserve $10,000 for four hours of involvement with us? Because she passed a test and can use a GPS and a lockbox?

Again, who set up this scam?

Oh, yeah? Prove It!

2010-06-10T07:35:00.001-07:00

We're moving to upstate New York, to a town with good schools and a lovely library.

JL is buying a house. This (reasonably) requires that he prove he can afford the mortgage: credit history, W-2s, bank statements. He also had to explain any recent large deposits. When we're talking about a $350,000 house, I'm not sure how $2500 counts as a "large" unexplained deposit, but OK. Photocopy the pay stub, too, and mail it off.

We need to register the children for school. That requires proof of date of birth, health records, dental history, vaccination history, social security card (what, are they paying them to go to school?), proof of residency, and previous school records. Birth certificate, vaccination card, health certificate, dental records, driver license (mine, not theirs), contract to buy the house, utility bill, insurance bill, blah, blah, blah.

So in order to register them for school (and to get myself a library card), I need a driver license to prove my identity and Clifton Park residency. (I need one to drive anyway, so should be no biggie.)

But to get a driver license, I need to wait until July 22 because New York requires that your out-of-state license have been valid for at least six months to convert it to New York license, and Massachusetts issued my most recent license on January 22, after I submitted my name change. (Merry Christmas, JL.)

Additionally I need my social security card and some combination of my driver license, marriage license, credit cards, utility bills, health insurance card, college ID, Welfare card (?), blah, blah, blah, OR my passport to prove my name.

New York also requires a birth certificate or passport to prove my date of birth, and neither my birth certificate nor my passport name matches my current driver license name. The State Department already knows my odd history, so it's easier to renew and update my passport, which is about to expire anyway, than to try to explain at the DMV counter why my birth certificate name doesn't match, well, anything else.

So to sum up, I have to renew my passport in order to get a driver license to prove my identity in order to learn something, but when it comes to owning land, money talks and all I need is the cash.

The Cool Parents (or not)

2010-06-03T05:00:00.001-07:00

I definitely had The Cool Parents growing up. We could curse; we had no set bedtime; we skipped school to see movies the day they came out, including R-rated movies; we had no curfew; if we'd wanted blue hair and multiple piercings, we probably could have gotten them; we had no ban on sex or alcohol or drugs, though we had always to behave responsibly.*

This "permissive" parenting philosophy had the ironic (though possibly intended?) effect that we were better supervised than many of our friends. Ours was the house where everyone hung out--despite the fact that we lived in a tiny apartment with a mom present and everybody else lived in big houses that were empty during the day because both their parents had jobs. Home was a cool place to be, and I was there nearly all the time that I wasn't at school.

We have been experiencing a bit of this by virtue of our huge, unfenced yard. The neighborhood kids who are allowed to wander about come to our yard to play. A typical afternoon these days has six kids running laps around the house, playing baseball, fighting crime. I listen from inside for any conflicts or injuries, and I provide drinks to keep them going.

Especially when my kids become teenagers, I would like to have the kids at the house playing sports and video games and watching movies and hanging out...so that I can, unobtrusively and without prying, know what they are up to. Our new house has a big basement, and I aspire to be the Foremans.

I doubt that JL will sign on to the whole liberal package, so some compromise will be necessary. And it's going to require some work to convince him of the wisdom of exchanging some extra noise, food, and electricity for the sure knowledge of what ours and the neighbors' kids are doing and thinking, but I think it's well worth it.

I may never be as cool as my parents, but I can at least try.

*In my parents' defense, we had no unintended pregnancies, no STDs, no arrests, no DUI, no suspensions, no expulsions, no trips through substance abuse clinics, and indeed far less drinking and drugs than some of our friends, and both of us got into our colleges of choice.

I Am SO DONE...

2010-06-02T15:11:00.000-07:00

...with this school year.

For us, it started in mid-August in California, and they are finishing there tomorrow. We still have another two and a half weeks. Ugh.

I am really ready for the school year to be over, but that's only part of it. I am dying to seeing my new house, for the movers to come, for masking and prepping and painting and flooring. (I could totally skip the cleaning part, but that's not really an option.)

And I want to be done with all of that, too.

And I want it nooooowwwww....

Yes, Veruca.

Well, If That Don't Beat All

2010-05-29T10:29:00.000-07:00

The mother of the delightful child who taught Antonio a racist dirty limerick last February called the teacher to complain that Antonio was using foul language in front of her son.

OMG, Am I Getting THAT old?

2010-05-28T04:57:00.001-07:00

I got this email from the elementary school:

Hello Parents,

Silly bands are the latest fad for our students. Silly bands are elastic bands that are in the shape of animals, vehicles, foods, musical instruments etc... Our students have grown quite fond of these items and like to trade them with each other. These items are quite harmless; however these Silly Bands are beginning to become a distraction for students during instructional times. Due to this distraction we are respectfully asking that you have your child keep Silly Bands at home. Students who bring Silly Bands to school will be asked to keep them in their back packs. Thank you for your assistance.

Sincerely,

John ______/Principal

I had seen kids with little squishy bracelets and heard parents talking about them, but, as usual, I'm behind the times when it comes to fads. That's always been the case, so that is not the indication of my rapid march toward crotchety old age.

What's surprising is my approval of ban from the principal, and my appreciation for his mild tone. He says, yes, they are harmless, but they are a distraction during class, so please keep them home, and if kids don't, they will be told to put them away for home. He was polite in his request for help, and they are not confiscating them and returning them only directly to parents. (I can only hope that the teachers are equally respectful to the children in the enforcement of this ban.)

OMG, has becoming a parent made me side with The Man?

At least not entirely yet: I'd still be annoyed at having to turn my Guns N Roses t-shirt inside out in high school.

Health Care, or I Still Miss Kaiser

2010-05-25T10:34:00.000-07:00

It seems that, for the first time since college, I have strep throat.

First order of business: curse all children. And their parents, too, while I'm at it.

Now that that's taken care of, I have to decide what to do. If I were still in California, I would have called Kaiser on Friday afternoon when I started feeling crappy, gotten an urgent care appointment for Friday evening, gotten swabbed, picked up my prescription, and been home in time to settle down to the some NetFlix.

But no. I'm here. And worse than that, JL is in Albany at his new job, where our new health care is based. To save paper, which I'm ALL in favor of, GE and Blue Cross didn't print any of the health care information. They sent us cards and told us to refer to their intranet...which can only be accessed onsite.

Shit.

Can I just ignore it and get better? Sort of. A quick check of WebMD says that symptoms of strep will go away WITH OR WITHOUT TREATMENT in 3-5 days. Cool. Except that I would still be contagious for 2-3 weeks in addition to running the rare (but possible) risk of getting rheumatic fever and possible permanent heart damage.

Shit.

So I called to ask what I had to do to be seen in Massachusetts. The closest in-plan Urgent Care Center is in Rhode Island, an hour away.

Shit.

But the very sympathetic service rep said I could go to the doctor to whom I was assigned when I had Aetna. (You remember, last month.) So I call them. They, naturally, have no record of me since I never went there because I'm healthy. (And I'm developing a very deep hatred of doctors and health care. Constant Readers may recall the six phone calls required to get Antonio an unnecessary physical.)

Shit.

But they can transfer me to Registration and set me up as a patient so I can be seen. I get Registered, and the service rep says she can assign me to a personal care physician...in any of three towns 20 minutes away, NOT just down the street from me with the doctor I WAS assigned to last month. I don't need a personal physician in Christing Leominster(!?!?) for the next month that I'm in Massachusetts. I need ANY DOCTOR OR NURSE PRACTITIONER who can see me today and prescribe me $14 worth of penicillin.

Well then, she can transfer me to the urgent care clinic in Worcester, half an hour away. Which, the astute reader will notice, is NOT "in-plan" according to Blue Cross.

FUCK!

So I HAVE supposedly great health insurance that is nearly useless to me when I need it.

And I'm down to WalMart-style health care. I'm going to the CVS MinuteClinic, where you don't need an appointment (the essence of "urgent care" if I ever heard it), they tell you right upfront what they will charge, and I don't have to make ten phone calls begging permission to get some antibiotics.

Update: It was $10 for the penicillin.

There Are, Like, Plants 'n' Stuff

2010-05-24T08:09:00.000-07:00

Here is a pea flower:

And a bush tomato plant:

And some lettuce:

All grown by me from seeds. :-)

To Mulch or Not to Mulch

2010-05-23T11:26:00.000-07:00

I understand mulching around vegetables from a functional standpoint (preventing weeds, retaining moisture in the soil), but I still don't buy into it as an aesthetic choice. Dirt is not offensive. Blackened bark is not especially attractive, particularly since it just gets lighter when exposed to the elements.

Maybe it's like not appreciating a pretty woman unless she's wearing make-up. You know she made an effort?

Perhaps if I had hay or straw or something that would compost and become part of the soil....

$#*! I Write on my Blog

2010-05-21T07:44:00.000-07:00

Once upon a time, I had...er...something of a potty mouth. When the children came along, I cleaned up my language because, as my sister-in-law says, "it's all fun and games until somebody gets kicked out of preschool." This is not to say my fundamental feelings on 'profanity' have changed. They are words. They upset some people, and I try not to upset people, so I don't use them around people who might be upset by them.

Considering my authority issues, I simply did not want to face school officials about my children's language, so I made the arbitrary and hypocritical decision to refuse to teach my children THOSE words. Once they learn them, it's a free-for-all, but I will be able to point self-righteously to the school and Other People's Children for corrupting my dear innocent babes.

But I just read that CBS is developing a sitcom based on Shit My Dad Says, and naturally there are parents up in arms about the implicit approval of dreaded 'profanity'. Of course, my immediate reaction is a spring-loaded, "oh, fuck off," followed by what can be said on television: "oh, get over yourselves."

I cannot believe that some people are still so uptight about George Carlin's "Seven Words You Can Never Say on Television." We all piss and shit, roughly half of us have tits and a cunt, and if we're lucky, we get to fuck early and often. I recognize that there are situations where discussing these things is inappropriate: I had quite enough scatological conversations over food with my older brother and I think sexuality is largely a private matter. But the words themselves, unless used to be hurtful, should not have that kind of power.

All of this leads me to think that maybe I should have a little family meeting to foul the air up with "bad" language.

It bears further consideration.

Notoriety

2010-05-20T16:45:00.000-07:00

So I've had this blog thing for three and a half years. My three Constant Readers know who you are, and please know that you are much loved. Last year, I added a site counter to track you. I had a steady traffic of two visits a day for a year.

Then I published a knitting pattern, posted it to Ravelry (squee!), and behold, the deluge.

Suddenly, there was an explosion of traffic. Now it's leveled off to about 50-70 visits a day, mostly through knittingpatterncentral.com, mostly my pattern with no meandering on the site.

It's amazing to see the world map with far-flung dots representing actual people in the world reading my oddments of thoughts. I guess if I were more entertaining (and more diligent), I could accumulate a larger following, though not a better one. :-)

Fingers Crossed

2010-05-18T06:54:00.000-07:00

So we are in contract for a new house and another move.

Our previous real estate experience was a bit rocky, so I feel a little superstitious about saying it's actually going to be our house, but the sale had better go through because the movers are scheduled for June 29.

A Mover's Dream

2010-05-12T14:41:00.001-07:00

A representative of the moving company came today to assess the damag--uh, our stuff. They need to know how much stuff we have in order to plan for packing, loading, and shipping it. He was chatty and pleasant. He shared moving stories with me--horror stories about hoarders and an eyebrow-raiser about a guy who hadn't yet told his wife they were moving when the movers called to arrange the details.

And like the movers before him, he told me my husband is a lucky man who should appreciate me. Evidently, despite my tons of stuff they'll have to carry, movers like me. I had to wonder whom they usually deal with that boring old me seems so great, and this is what I came up with:

The Kind of People who can afford full service movers--the companies who pack everything for you, move it, then put it back where you want it, and damn the cost--are not usually flexible, easy going, laid back women with a sense of humor. I can imagine uptight, nervous women who want to dramatize and over-complicate their lives by fretting over the work someone else will have to do. If I had to pack everything myself, I'd be shitting a brick. As it is, I figure that they are professional movers who know how not to break a big TV or the china, and even if they do, it's insured. (Though in the case of my china, it's not precisely replaceable thanks to the demise of Waterford Wedgwood, may it rest in peace.)

So I'll get rid of some more stuff in the next six weeks, they'll pack the rest, and things will be fine. Is that so odd?

Who Knew?

2010-05-09T12:03:00.001-07:00

The threats worked! This is not how a two month old tomato seedling should look, but they have four more leaves than they did last week. :-)

What? Another hobby?

Humbug?

"It's alive!"

*sigh*

and fie, for shame

I Should Be Noveling

Dude, Did I Really Just See That?

NaNo Kismet

NaNoWriMo Kick-Off

November's Adventure

Well, That Didn't Go Well

What Advertising Says About You

Feminism on the Playground

Insanely Great

Guilt by Association

Shameless Self-Promotion (or not)

OK, OK, You've Got My Attention

It's Not Your Pain You're Wallowing In

English, Please...

Macs vs. PCs

Crafting Classes

Gardening Successes and Failures

Note to Self

Q: What's Your Worst Trait? A: My smart mouth?

Exactly How Much Did You Hear?

Maggie's Blog Post

How Did We Ever Survive? (Warning: Offensive content)

Kudos

The Tribulations of Motherhood

Disappointments and Delights

The Master of Ugliness

Happy Birthday to Me

Graduation Day

OMG, Maybe I'm Not Cut Out for This

Dream Job

Actual Conversation

Update on Blacklisting

Just Call Me Joy

Inappropriate?

Book That I Intend to Read

Elitist and Pretentious

It's All in My Head

'cause I'm Looking for Something to Be Mad About?

Maybe I'm Not So Dumb After All

Happy Time (ding)

Food Is Not the Enemy

This Is NOT a Good Thing

The Double Edged Sword of Copyright, or

And Following Up...

CNN Should Get 20 Years

Valentine's Day

I Think I Need a New Site Counter

"Speaking as a Child of the 90s"

I'm So Old, Old, Old

I Should Be Working on My Novel

Update: Status Critical

Stupid Winter

School "Work"

How Knitting (and Twilight) Made Me a Writer

I Take It All Back

Because I Can Never Let Things Go...

Somebody's Bullshitting Us

Old School

The Apocalypse May Be Upon Us

Brand Identification

This Isn't Quite What I Had in Mind

Can You Say, "Ironic"?

I Survived...

Why Would They Need to Know That?

I Came Out!

Troll Proof?

The Pressure's On Now

Black Friday

First Snow Day 2010

Maybe I Should Just Have a Twitter Feed...

The Gift That Keeps on Giving

Eating My Words

Huh?

Edgy as a Butter Knife

How's the Weather?

sigh