The Autodidactic Society

pssst

2012-02-10T21:52:00.000-08:00

I promise you that I love my family. Love them. Would stop a bullet for them. Challenge trains to push them to safety. I wouldn't trade any of them for any amount of treasure.

But.

If I don't get some alone time soon everybody's gonna be visiting me in the loony bin.

For the last ten days to two weeks, everybody has been sniping at everybody else in every single combination you can think of. Constantly. Spouse has been on vacation so he's been helping out enormously (thank you spouse!) but the non-stop warfare has worn me thin. That last little nerve has been scraped raw and everyone has broken out the tap shoes to dance on it.

There isn't a single room in this house I can go into that doesn't already have somebody in it. Usually somebody who wants something, or two to three someones who need mediation. If there isn't someone in that room there will be soon, because I have to call them in to pick up the mess they've left behind. The mess they didn't think to pick up because they were "only leaving the room for a moment" three hours ago. And then they glare at me as if I did something wrong by insisting on a behavioral standard that has only been in place since the day they were hatched.

There isn't anything I can do without being interrupted constantly by a steady stream of people who need something from me. There isn't any time to recharge. There is only constant need from people who think that I never need down time, never need quiet, never need to be left alone, never need to be looked after, never have needs of my own. Ever.

Spouse thinks I should just ignore the smaller stuff. Everything would get better if I just didn't let it get to me. And he's probably right about some of the atmospherics. Unfortunately I have learned through bitter experience that if I don't stop some of the screeching at a lower level I will lose complete control of my sanity when it (inevitably) gets to the higher pitches. He can ignore it with equanimity. I cannot. Not fair, perhaps, but that's life. What it means in reality is that he emerges from his video game to find a smoldering wreck of a wife who's just been handling things as patiently as possible until she's ready to throw dishes through walls. Not that I ever have. Thrown dishes, I mean. I know who gets to clean that mess up.

There isn't any solution. There is no place in this house or on our property that I can go that has an explicit "Leave Me Alone" signal to it. If I try there's an inevitable parade of people who need reassurance that everything is all right, that everything is going to be okay, that the keep-away sign doesn't really apply to them, and that I really still love them, don't I? There isn't any money to go any place else for a day, or a weekend, or even a few hours and just forget that I have all of these responsibilities laid on my shoulders. There isn't any money for sheer wanton retail therapy. I've been staring at a new gardening toy (defined as a toy by its complete lack of necessity) for months now. I won't get it. It isn't as if it runs into hundreds of dollars. I could probably get it and all of its accessories for maybe $80, including shipping and handling. We just don't have it. If I really want to spend irresponsibly it has to be for something that the children need and there isn't any other way of getting it other than robbing Peter to pay Paul.

If I can't have the money we need to hold body and soul together, and I can't get the job we need to get that money, then damn all, I need down time to make peace with what I lack.

Place Holders

2012-02-05T08:49:00.000-08:00

I like writing great big long posts. Since few people other than myself actually read them I get to indulge in all sorts of nonsense. It is all by its lonesome, quite wonderful.

The long posts, however, take long times to write. And there are days when I don't have the time to write all of what's in my head into a post. There are also days when, horror of horrors, I don't actually have a lot I want to say. Nevertheless, I still want to write something each and every day, or even each and every other day. I need to build momentum. I need to built a habit. Damn it, I need to write. So I've got place holders. Random musings. Short comments. Occasionally wailing (don't knock it, it has kept me out of the headlines more than once).

So, the Place Holders for Superbowl Sunday (and more importantly, DBS's birthday):

I have to make a birthday cake for DBS. Okay, I don't really need to need to, but he's a good guy and deserves some recognition around here. But I'm not going to bake a full one, neither he nor I nor Banshees need to be eating birthday cake for days. I'm going to bake a glorified cupcake that serves 5 and spread it with cream cheese icing and we'll all love it and it will go away.

I need to make salsa before the game. Technically I already did, but that was two days ago and despite making about three quarts of the stuff Friday it's all gone now. I suspect the scientific term for what happened was that it was completely inhaled by the other four members of the household, despite having a tad too much cilantro and having gone a couple of serranos too far. So, more serranos, more cilantro, more tomatoes, good grief did I really run us out of lime? I also need to make more hummus and chop up some dipping veggies. I love potato chips and sour cream dips, but considering that I need to lose 110 pounds and I need to grow Banshees in such a way that they never get to the same point, the traditional chips'n'dip needs to be quietly sidelined. We're still going to overeat today, but I figure that it's going to have a lower overall calorie count and be more nutritious. And I have those walking exercise dvds that are slowly and in fits and starts becoming a part of everyday life. As much as I'd like to pull a 180 on my lifestyle it isn't going to happen. Only slow and steady and incremental changes have any chance at all of lasting forever, so slow and steady and incremental it is. Homemade pizza and hummus and veggies and salsa and homemade bread and corn chips (okay, the corn chips aren't the healthiest choice, but baby steps, baby steps) instead of a commercial pizza and potato chips and sour cream dip and soda for Superbowls. Gentle exercise every day instead of no exercise at all.

Yesterday I managed to lure in (okay, I mentioned and they all yelped enthusiastically) a friend and his children to my incipient D&D universe. Friend has played before and sounds like he's DM'd his share of games, so I hope he's patient with my stumbling about. My mantra is that it's supposed to be fun, and we'll just roll with that. So now, with luck, we've got a monthly D&D meeting. Yayy. I supposed MB is going to make me have weekly meets as well with just the Banshees and DBS. I draw the line at nightly. At least, I hope I do. We're just going to have to see.

And lastly, I hope it's as good a game as the last time these two teams met in the superbowl and I hope it has the same ending.

Oh goody. It looks like MB is finally done with the kitchen so I can start food prep. I'm hungry, need breakfast!

Random Resolutions

2012-01-26T12:16:00.000-08:00

No more how-to books. I have more than enough for what I want to do, and I don't have the time or energy for new hobbies. New books do not equate new skills.

No more excuses. I know I'm going to look ridiculous dancing around to that fitness dvd, and I'm going to know that until I realize I can breathe better for every single day I look ridiculous. It's a fair trade.

The back yard is not going to turn into a garden on its own and all the new toys in the world won't budge it an inch closer to completion. Nor is the bird housing going to miraculously appear where it's supposed to, complete with a magically sprouting bow, unless I put some (okay, a lot of) sweat equity in. And the front yard is going to look gawdsawful until me, myself, and I get off of our collective rumps and get out there.

Time to get back into formal schooling. We all feel better (despite the moaning and groaning) when we're doing something every day. It feels less random and more like the goal we've got in mind is achievable.

I promise to buy myself a new bit of clothing every time I lose ten pounds. T-shirts and jeans don't count.

I promise to buy myself a gardening toy each time I achieve a major gardening goal. It doesn't have to be a big toy, but it has to be a significant goal.

I promise that I am going to write something, anything, every day until I get enough steam to write the books I've been promising myself for 30 years.

I promise that I'm going to start all of this after park day, and after I get done DM'ing the tavern brawl I promised the Banshees. So say it will be about --

Right. Now.

No More Excuses.

The Story I'm Sticking To

2012-01-16T22:55:00.000-08:00

I'm going to say that it's all MB's fault, or I would if I weren't reminded of the fact that the 90% being off in his own fantasy land comes from my side of the family, and the 10% laser-intensity focus comes from his dad. MB has developed a rather interesting habit, one that I think is going to do very well for him if I don't do something rash out of sheer exasperation. He is very persistent when he wants something. And I don't mean this in the I'm gonna nag Mom until she gives in or sells me for organ donation sort of way. I mean this in the I'm going to actually do my chores and then remind her every minute of every morning, noon, and night that I'm realllllly interested in doing something and she's my only teacher.

It takes way more time to describe it than it does to be effective. Because I really can't say no to a kid that really wants to learn something. Like knit socks. Or write for long stretches of time. Or, may all the universe hear and have pity, go on a Dungeons and Dragons campaign.

Now, D&D has been around the periphery of the family for a fairly long time. A good friend who has been adventuring since about 30 seconds after Gary Gygax invented the game has offered to lend me books, lent me a cd, and sent me some pretty nifty links that I managed to multiply. After an initial wave of interest, the Banshees went back to their usual pastimes of ignoring chores, baiting each other unmercifully, and attempting to will the idea of formal schooling out of existence. And that's how events stood until about four days ago. I swear on my own life I don't really know how the conversation got started, but I know how it ended: With three Banshees deciding that D&D sounded like a wonderful idea and couldn't we all get started, like, yesterday?

How, exactly, did I let myself get backed into Dungeon Mastering? The last time I tried it I was absolutely lousy. Of course, the last time I tried it I was also an uptight 20-year-old who was trying to run the least imaginative, most buttoned-down campaign in the history of the game. It was a very predictable disaster. Worse, I was never much of a gamer even before that, preferring to invent my worlds wholesale on paper (and then with pixels) rather than have to deal with dice and other people. But I'm the grown up and I'm the only one who has even the faintest inkling of what has to get done, so here I am, doing it.

First, I put to the vote the idea of taking a week or two to research versus just starting as soon as we can and learning as we go along. Unanimous vote for adventuring on the fly. Fair enough. I poked around the links both borrowed and researched and came up with a working plan. Oooh, monsters! Wow, there's the rules list! And I cannot tell you how giddy I was when I found a first-level module; I'm all for inventing my own but I'd like to offer the Banshees an opportunity to have the same characters at the end of the campaign as they did at the beginning. Somebody else's writing will be better for that, for now. I did look at buying the starting triumvirate, the DM guide, the Player's Handbook, and the Monster Manual (version 3.5, nobody I've talked to likes 4 at all), but the $100 that's going to cost has to go towards actually feeding real, live Banshees. We're just going to have to cobble as we go.

Second, I told the Banshees that because I have no idea of what I'm doing, they were just going to have to put up with moments of suddenly glowing rock formations or mysteriously illuminated trees, or just some shaft of light pouring out of the heavens and a voice announcing that This Is How It Will Be From Now On, which is the DM's way of saying that she finally located the relevant rule governing this particular convention. Banshees are so far pretty cool with that whole idea.

And lastly, at least for now, everything is on hold until I can get my hands on some polyhedral dice. I can't do anything about pit traps or collapsing barrel vaults or tiny monstrous spiders (sorry, the concept of a jumbo shrimp arachnid has been making me break out into spontaneous giggles all day) until I've got the polyhedrals and a whole lot more research under my belt. I know what the d6 do, and I'm pretty sure of the d20 and the d10, but for the Life of Brian I cannot remember what a d4 or d12 are for. I swear I've given more thought to this than most of the research papers I've had to write over the years.

As long as I'm researching or otherwise paving the way, life is peaceful. Ish. But the moment it looks like I'm flagging, MB appears at my right elbow and lets me know with that quiet and polite and inexorable persistence, that this is really very important to him. So I show him what I've been doing, perhaps teach him the difference between a Rogue and a Raven, and send him on his way with only the faintest twinge of guilt over preparing to send my mildly math-phobic children into a pretty math-intensive game.

They only think they invented sneaky.

BTW, addendum

2012-01-13T14:42:00.000-08:00

Mentioned gaming to the Banshees. They're all in favor. And while it may not seem so on the surface, it's all Jeff's fault. Mainly because he provided me beaucoup resources last year, so I'm only half as lost as I normally am.

Now all I need are dice, paper, a couple of books, and a post-archaeological dig kitchen table.

BTW

2012-01-11T20:15:00.000-08:00

Okay, short one here. I want to mention a couple of things.

One: Pandora + Dropkick Murphys =

Two: Dione, this is all your fault.

Okay, wasn't expecting that

2012-01-11T17:59:00.000-08:00

In the middle of deciding what to clear and clean and get rid of first, chance cast my eyes at my ancient mariner of a computer, a Dell that's just a year younger than my 11-year-old. It has been a trooper, slogging along year after year with only one major meltdown (Mistake Edition crossed with a very bad vintage of Norton) but after Windows 2000 was installed instead this computer has been solid as a small mountain. And that's even after I decided to dual-boot the system to Linux/Windows 2K (Linux dominant) after deciding that I would never put Vista on any system in my system for any reason in the known and any possible unknown variants of the universe. No Vista + can't afford Apple = Linux variant Ubuntu. Love Ubuntu. Love it. I rate just above rocks when it comes to computer geekdom and Ubuntu has been very forgiving of that.

Time wears on us all, however, and the Dell is showing its age along with some predictable wear and tear. I'm not sure exactly why the computer screen is in perpetual, just-barely-noticeable waver mode. I'm not entirely certain the power supply is going to last too much longer. It's still stable enough that I can get it to turn on and I can probably get most of the data and I've known that I needed to do that for the better part of a year now, but it has been spending its days on a table, all hooked up and gathering dust. The night before last I finally got the impetus to poke the power button and start assigning files to the usb stick or to eternity's dustbin. It's been a pretty easy task so far. After all, the absence of these files hasn't exactly been earth-shattering for the last ten or eleven months. So there I was, tap-tapping at the keys like a dyspeptic raven, thinking that if I worked at this diligently I could scrap the hard drive and dispose of the other bits and pieces in about a week, when I realized that I wasn't exactly extracting data without an audience. Banshees. I was surrounded by Banshees, drawn by the eerie glow of the monitor, utterly fascinated.

"Mom," one finally said, "Can we play with this?"

Um. Okay. Just not tonight. Tomorrow?

"Cool."

Believe me, these kids have memories longer than the proverbial tail of time. They have internal clocks they set to some mysterious algorhythm. Sometime around o'dark thirty the next morning MB appeared at my right elbow. "Can I play with the computer now?"

So I set up an Open Office word document and told him to have at it. And he did.

Then EB and LB woke up and after half a morning's patience (a titanic effort in itself) asked for their turns. It got to the point where I needed a crowbar to pry them off of the keyboard long enough to get chores done. They showed each other how to Save and when to use Save As. Fights broke out over whose turn it was to play with their stories. I had to resort to the old stand-by: Pull out the timer and everybody gets a 30-minute turn.

Do you know how many tufts of hair I have pulled out trying to get these children to write? They have the most fascinating stories going on in their minds, but getting them to put that down on paper has been one of those epic battles the ancient Greeks used to shake their heads over. I guarantee Ulysses would have headed home to Penelope a lot sooner if he'd been charged with getting a trio of wayward Banshees to write something, anything, down. Turns out I was using the wrong tools. All I needed was a hugely outdated computer with some free office software and about 10 years of don't touch Mom's computer.

Changing my internet diet

2012-01-10T21:59:00.000-08:00

Last night was one of those nights. One of those nights where it was downright blissful, instead of blisteringly annoying, to be up at 1:30 a.m. and just puttering around not doing a heck of a lot of anything. One of those nights where I have one of those multi-threaded thought patterns running in the background of my brain, sometimes running parallel, sometimes intersecting, sometimes flattening out into a broad ribbon of perfectly coalesced concepts.

Part of it was just reveling in the silence. I'm a solitary person by nature, but that pretty much went by the wayside when I had as many children in as many years as I did. DBS and I can be solitary or together when it's just the two of us, but there's no way of being alone anywhere in this house as long as more than one person is awake. So here I was, with hours and hours all alone, all because the Banshees fell asleep at their appointed hour without too much battle, and the worn out spouse had long since surrendered to slumber himself. There was just me, slightly ditzy from the latest cold virus, my silence, and my thoughts.

One thread was spinning itself out of the deeply seated need to get my house in order. There's nothing figurative about that; the yard is a mess, the house is a mess, we're overcluttered and underorganized and we didn't get one trick-or-treater at Halloween because I guarantee you the yard looked entirely too well-disheveled for comfort. There's spooky, and then there is the threat of the grape vines actually swallowing somebody whole spooky. The yard needs to be in order because, well, because I always knew that someday it was going to be important to me and someday just bit me on the rear. It left an itchy bump in my psyche, something that must be exorcised, and the only way to do it is - O dear me - is to actually go out there and do it myself. To finally convince my inner being that fell swoops and grandiose gestures are all well and good, but it's going to be the monthly, weekly, daily routines that actually tame this yard so I can make of it what I wish. Personally, I want the front yard to be a lovely pasture for the geese and the ducks. The geese go after greenery with such passion - I really wish I liked my salads as much. DBS won't let me do much more than that, no tomato trellises, no raised beds of peppers, not so much as even a tiny plethora of Musque du Provence pumpkin vines. Still, the back yard is fairly sizable, I'm sure I could throw a couple of squash plants back there. The MdP has been especially fascinating to me since I bought a 20-pound specimen of it a year ago. So dusty looking on the outside, so very orange on the inside, and so very tasty as a pumpkin pie. Oh yeah. I need to get the birds properly housed (and yes, I know I've been saying that for a while now) and I need to get our Survival Garden going in style.

Another strand was plying itself together out of two different thoughts. One, the house and our desperate need to get decluttered and organized: Two, the Banshees and I need space and structure to really do well with the homeschooling.

I fought for a long, long time to get the house organized and then, a couple of years ago, it hit me that this goal would not and could not be obtained as long as we had all of this stuff. I've never been taught how to throw something away. I've always felt lousy about getting rid of something that was useful, or could be useful, or might be repurposed somehow. I even bargained a little -- hey, if I just gather this stuff together and put it on Freecycle or take it down to second-hand store -- that'll be all right, right? But sad truths need facing now and again; taking it to charity or giving it away is only going to work in this household after we've gotten rid of a whole lot of things that we don't use, or can't use, or can't find to use. So during the Christmas season I told the Banshees that there was no sense in ignoring the issue, some of the objects in our house were going to go into the dumpster because we just need to get out from under it in any way we can, even if it isn't very pretty and offends our odd sense of thrift.

Yes, it's lovely that we have all of the art supplies. What good do they do anybody if I can't keep the table clear long enough for them to be used? What good is that old computer if I can't set it up where the Banshees can use it? These kids are ready to grab at any learning and absorb it through sheer osmosis; how do I get in front of that if I'm behind in everything else that matters?

And come to think of it, why haven't I finished National Novel Writer's Month (50,000 words in 30 days, I love November!) in so many years? I'll never be Stephen King but I can write any amount of wordage in a short period of time, so why haven't I?

Why haven't I written on any of my blogs in more than a year?

That is when, of course, all of those lovely little threads curled around each other and turned into a lovely pellucid pattern.

Too much Facebook time.

Oh, I spend far too much time on the internet by any measure. I love my political blogs and news outlets, and most of my friends and relatives know by now that all they need to do is tickle me under the nose with an interesting research problem and I'll come back to them in a few minutes/hours/days with the issue researched down to the furthest code on its DNA strand. I love research. Adore it. Did I ever mention that Connections was one of my favorite series?

But I let myself be pickled by Facebook. I'd cycle back -- are my crops done? Has anybody responded to my post? What funny poster has my brother come up with today? Who knew Sulu was so hilariously ornery? Cycle out to a political blog, come back, go figure out who's selling Shetland sheep or Shetland fleece or cobweb weight Merino 2-ply (I have a shawl that I'm planning that's going to take at least two years to knit, I need to have yarn I can get along with!), come back to see what's going on in the town square of Facebook. Obviously, I like hanging out there. Also obvious, but harder for me to see (and believe me, there are none so blind as those who just won't see) I was using this for every excuse under the sun for not getting everything that I really needed to do, done.

I have a lot of objectives that I'd really like to achieve. But I'm not going to get anywhere if I do nothing but hang out in the ether all day. The weeds don't pull themselves, they just get brown and sere and glower sullenly at me. The Banshees do teach themselves, but they need their resource center to be a little more, ah, shall we say present? Honestly, they may not be getting the public school edition of education, but I've found myself hurling sources of knowledge into the melee and ducking while they pounce on it like starving wolverines. They're avid, they're ready, and I'd better have a lot of supplies on hand if I want to survive this. (SO looking forward to teaching more advanced maths. And archaeology as it applies to cleaning of bedrooms.) And the words, the words will not write themselves. I'm not going to get better at wordsmithing if I'm not working at it. Do, or do not do. There is no try... as Yoda was so fond of saying. I have books in me. I need to let them out.

So, if you're here because you've missed me on Facebook, these are my few reasons for spending less time at the public square. I miss you too, but there are some things I need to work on, and here is where I'm likely to work on them.

not dead. yet, anyway

2010-02-28T20:33:00.000-08:00

lengthier posts to follow, natch. it's been some pretty rough going over the last 12 months or so.

Dad had open heart surgery last February. He kept telling me he had the biggest, ugliest mother hen in the whole wide world (big, I cannot dispute. My brother is 6'4" and has to tip the scale at 350+ pounds right now.) My brother would giggle over making sure Dad ate his broccoli.

Dad's younger brother had a heart attack. He survived, although scaring the willies out of everyone around him. My uncle's wife (I think the closest thing we have to a saint in this family) had a heart attack and broke both wrists when she fell. She's still recovering from that.

My Dad's oldest sister died in September.

Dad died in October.

Dad's next oldest sister has been informally diagnosed with some form of elderly dementia -- Alzheimer's does run in the family. It's of dubious comfort to know that it tends to hit us in our 70's. Her husband, one of the sharpest individuals I've had the pleasure to know and the honor to be related to, is dying. It's a matter of weeks, not months at this point.

Stop this merry-go-round, I want to get off.

Me, I have only two major goals this year. I may accomplish other things, but these two I want to have done before 2010 comes to a close: I want to get rid of all of the clutter that's stifling my home, and I want to lose 100 pounds. Neither will allow me to live one hour longer than my appointed time, but accomplishing them will make the time I have left so much more fun. I want my children to remember projects accomplished, not piles of junk. I want them to remember me as an active, not passive, participant in life.

It's a mountain. It's the Himalayas. I'm going to climb this the way my Dad always told me to climb mountains: one step at a time.

Starting Now.

the wrong side of the nerve endings

2009-08-21T21:51:00.000-07:00

I'm feeling awful and small and skinless today. Things affect me that shouldn't and normally don't, and I have to put in a lot of effort to tell the echo-y script in my head to shut up, shut down, go away. It makes me tired and I'm already unhappy. But...

The Banshees worked on their own set of comic books today. Not reading them -- that's my job -- but drawing them and working out the scripts. This is entirely their idea and while the subject matter isn't exactly what I'd pick out, what the heck. This is their project, not mine, and their enthusiasm is the exact sort of contagious I need to be around. Roughly three weeks ago I sat all of them down at the kitchen table and said, "We're going to start on your writing." Why?! Because your spelling, grammar, and penmanship is atrocious, that's why. And because 24/7 exposure to them has taught me the warning signs, I took off my glasses and gave every child their very own individually-tailored hairy eyeball while I posed this question: "Do you believe that I can make you do this?" There was a flurry of nods and Yes Moms. "Then let's cut out the the 6 hours to 2 weeks of protest, because that's a lot of time and effort to put into a battle that you're destined to lose anyway, and just. get. this. done."

I'd be lying if I said they didn't give me some resistance, but for once they seemed to believe that compliance was the only viable option. So they started writing, and except for a couple of hiccups at the beginning of this exercise, I saw no evidence of their brains being empty of any creative idea whatsoever. I remember being so frustrated as a child when my mother made me write my dutiful little paragraphs. I didn't know what to say and my head, usually full of all sorts of maybes, what-ifs, and what-could-bes, felt like as if it had been filled with sand. Dull, grey/beige/dusty sand. There doesn't seem to be anything like that for the Banshees. In fact, LB didn't have any of the same reservations about the process that her siblings had. She wanted to write, wanted it so badly she started writing what she thought the words should look like. That's what finally propelled me into the penmanship wars. LB reminds me of a coworker I had once, of whom it was said that a foreman needed to get him lined out correctly at the beginning of a job or else there would be a lot of work to be redone. LB and my former coworker are highly intelligent, very motivated, and most of the time their instincts about how to proceed are the right ones -- but all it takes is that one time they get the wrong end of the concept. Spelling is certainly one of those, "Let's get her lined out correctly" sort of jobs.

There was the skirmish of the alternate lines. I wanted them to write one every other line; they considered that a horrendous waste of space. It took the better part of an afternoon to convince them that 1. I had my reasons; 2. they were good reasons; and 3. even if they didn't agree with those reasons they needed to ask themselves whether or not they thought I could make them do it. So far number 3 is my most persuasive number, but they're slowly learning my reasons and to appreciate the logic behind them. The Banshees' penmanship is, quite frankly, just awful, and I need the room of the alternate line to correct spelling and grammar. The penmanship is something I'm still working on finding a solution for. I'm sure that it includes lots and lots of practice; I'm more uncertain where the programming my computer in Linux fits in with things.

(In a nutshell, here's how the Linux tangent works: Banshees need penmanship practice --> need penmanship font with outlines, arrows, whatever it takes to get them to trace the proper shape at the proper size with the proper spacing, etc. --> such fonts are available on the web, even down to the solid upper/dashed middle/solid bottom lines that I remember so fondly from my grade-school days --> but they only appear to work with Mac or PC and usually only PC. There has to be a way of getting these fonts to play nice with Ubuntu-form Linux. Which is how I ended up with an Ubuntu Bible and a friend who is telling me that it's probably just how I've got my X-environment configured. Now I have to translate that from geek to English, because I'm still just a proto-geek and don't speak the langage well at all.)

While the Banshees are still more likely to spend the afternoon drawing endlessly or trying to cadge more television time out of me, or trying yet another variant on the infinitely entertaining game of poke the sibling, more and more often the notebooks come out and words are patiently scribed onto a page. Mom, how do you spell 'there'. "Give me a sentence." There once was a knight.... "Okay, t h e r e." I just wanted to make sure, because I remember you told us there were three words that sounded alike but had different spellings and meanings. Oh kid, I could kiss you. There aren't any more major battles about fixing spelling or grammatical errors since the War of Mid-August, when I explained that I didn't care if they erased and rewrote or transcribed the entire piece with the revisions in place but that the right words and the right grammar were going to happen. I've introduced the concept of spelling lists and we've dug into Kathryn Stout's Natural Speller without too many incidents.

This is my first foray into structured schooling and I'm rather astonished that we all have the patience for it. But if I had to venture a guess, I'd say that at this point we're all ready for the slight formality this venture brings. This is also my first real, concrete evidence that this teaching 'em at home business is going to work out all right after all. Up until now, they've pretty much taught themselves or each other -- that's the only thing that can account for LB being able to read -- but I've never worn my Formal Instruction hat with any comfort. Now I know I can, and that they'll learn, and that Life, The Universe, And Everything won't suddenly end from the shock of it all.

I Don't Think He Got The Memo

2009-07-12T17:21:00.000-07:00

Children need help with all sorts of areas that involve comprehension. Some need work on reading comprehension. Some need help with math comprehension. I'm dealing with a Banshee who desperately needs a crash course in reality comprehension.

To wit: understanding contract law.

Now I know this doesn't sound like standard curriculum for a nearly-nine-year-old but believe me, I have my reasons. They all know, to one degree or another, that there aren't going to be allowances in this family. If they want walking around money, they are going to have to earn it. This has led to a series of very hare-brained schemes that were close-on to 100% wishful thinking -- goodness knows that I love those snippets of crayon-smeared typing paper, but I don't think a passing motorist will stop and cough up $5 for one. Neither do I think that hastily pulled up flowers stuck in a paper towel will net much moolah, I don't care how cute my children are. MB has taken wishful thinking to whole new levels lately, however. I asked him to go get the mail yesterday, he came back and asked for a mail-gathering fee. He got 15 minutes of the basics of contract law: offer, acceptance, consideration -- and learned a new word: Unilaterally. As in: he doesn't get to impose a contract unilaterally. He got another 15 minutes on family law, at least as it runs under my roof: he doesn't get paid for family business. Family business includes but is not limited to: making beds, doing laundry, folding laundry, washing dishes, picking up after themselves, and minding the ducks. Oh yes, and under the picking up after yourselves clause is the clearly delineated subsection of clear your place at the table. Because we're sort of catch-as-catch-can mealwise during the day, the rules have evolved to: If you're hungry, go feed yourself -- but pick up and wash after. Simple, right?

They. Don't. Do. It.

Normally this is a mild frustration, akin to having your fingernails pulled out millimeter by millimeter. The hard part of parenting is not sex ed, it isn't driver training, it isn't dragging them kicking and screaming through algebra or dangling participles, it's the deadly repetitive nature of having to say the same things several hundred times a day. That, along with the Tribble-like nature of dishes, dirty clothes, and toys on the living room floor, accounts for a good 73% of my current state of insanity. (13% finances, 7% spouse, 11% ducks and I already know that's more than 100% but that goes hand in hand with the "it's been that sort of week today" moments I get.)

MB has been very very very consistent today with leaving his dishes on the table, despite being told (mumble mumble darn I've run out of fingers) several times that he needs to take care of it. Now. I've been trying to cut back on the screaming, yelling, ranting, raving, frothing at the mouth, and other habits that the Banshees find highly entertaining but that are otherwise sort of useless as behavior-modifications go. Removing favorite toys and grounding doesn't work, as well as being sort of akin to hitting a fly with a Cadillac anyway. But weeding the front yard works. So far it's had 100% success rate. This will change eventually, but as long as it's effective whoo-hoo! I'm going for it.

So MB and I did the dirty-dish-dance again today and at the end of it, he got sentenced to yardwork. He did the yardwork, came inside and said, "I think that's worth $5." What for? "For the weeding, of course."

Here come our old friends, family law and contract law. I explained to him that weeding the yard was the price he had to pay for ignoring a family rule. And I defined unilateral again and pointed out that if he dredged up the old I'm entitled we were going to go back to ranting and raving and hours-long lectures again AND he'd still have to do the yardwork without pay.

I'm in big trouble if he ever figures out that he could clean the entire yard down to the dirt for pay before he breaks a serious rule.

2009-06-07T12:46:00.000-07:00

Yorick, nearly 2 months old and almost out of his baby fuzz.

Charlene Browne, International Chick of Mystery...

One of two hatchery's choice chicks.

Getting them to hold still for photos can be difficult....

Dear Abby and Ann Landers, the Buckeye chicks. They just seem to have that inquisitive beak and beady eye

I think these are Cuckoo Marans. I only ordered one Cuckoo, but the other could be the other "hatchery's choice" chick.

The Welsummers. Seen from the top they've got chipmunk stripes down their backs.

Also hazarding a guess as to identity; I ordered 5 Wyandottes and there are five of these, so....

Buff Orpingtons. Pretty -- and not going to be mine, but I suspect I can arrange visitation!

The new clothesline, although I didn't actually HAVE clothesline on it at this point.

HouseGoose

While I'm rummaging for the camera...

2009-06-07T11:28:00.000-07:00

I'm also reflecting that too much of what I'm exposed to right now is getting me down, and I need to cut back on the doom'n'gloom reading to balance events out. To wit: the relationship with the neighbor kids across the street is turning somewhat toxic, so it looks like there won't be too many playdates between them and the Banshees anymore. Agh. (That whole situation triggers my Almighty Judgment Complex, something that I try very, very hard to stuff in a small hole and fumigate to mitigate -- but it insists on finding escape routes and never really goes away.) I hate conflict. I hate it. It may be a lovely chance to teach the Banshees about which situations they can handle and which ones I have a right to insist on adult intervention on, but I still loathe, despise, and would do almost anything (except neglect the Banshees) to get out of dealing with conflict.

An acquaintance has recently decided to get out of an organization she's been with for just over three ages of a long-lived cat, and she's done it with a dazzling fireworks display. Which is worrisome; temper or not the woman's got the patience of Job and integrity up the wazoo so if she says there's something wrong there is something wrong. It appears she's gone into heavy seclusion. I'm going to miss her. It makes me question my ties with the organization and how deeply I want to be involved with it -- of course, the frustrating part is everybody who knows the true and bloody details is barred by a confidentiality agreement from discussing those details. It might not be a big deal, exposed to the clear light of day, but since it's never going to be out in the open it's going to be twice as big as Godzilla and very much uglier in the back of my admittedly fertile and febrile imagination.

Good friends are getting divorced. That ALWAYS sucks, even if it's the only viable solution.

The economy sucks, the political situation sucks, airline travel sucks -- especially if your plane doesn't stay in one piece -- and lately I've been reminded constantly that there are loud, vociferous, and violent people who believe that they can do my thinking for me much better than I could ever hope to. You see, the laws of the United States of America don't apply to them as long as they have their firm belief that God alone holds them righteous and a good supply of ammunition to back it up.

I need to take pictures of fluffy feathery ping-pong balls. I need to post a photo of the not-quite-two-month-old gosling with the ducks he's very nearly larger than already. I need to admire the annoying wild mustard in the front yard; it has a tap-root that goes down to New Zealand but it surely is pretty when it blooms. The bills are paid and there's money left over and for once I'm not being stupid about spending it. I need to hold the Banshees close and know that right here, right now, they are all safe and sound.

Going Postal

2009-06-02T20:21:00.000-07:00

Yesterday I received a call from My Pet Chicken; two of the chicks I'd ordered hadn't hatched out as scheduled so they wanted to know what I wanted as a substitute. "We have Aurucaunas [it might have been Americaunas; she distinctly said 'Easter Eggers' but both have been known by that title], Welsummers..." I said, "Welsummers, I want the Welsummers." She said, "I do also have some Cuckoo Marans..." I replied that I reallllly wanted the Welsummers, that those were the birds I'd wanted when I'd done my order modification but theyhadn't been available. I guess everything works out the way it should on occasion. Yayy! So I settled down and waited. And I knew that there was no way in the world they were going to get here today, but I still got up at 6:30 a.m. to wait for the telephone call from the post office. No call, phooey, but expected.

And then at about ten minutes to 2 p.m., I get a call. From the post office. Chicks are here! Yayyyy! I have to wait for DBS to get home so I can run off, but his running around didn't take very long, so at 2:30 I was at the post office to pick up my peeping, cheeping box.

Except that they didn't have it there. The woman behind the counter said that the back room boys had told her it had gone out for delivery. And I said to myself, Whiskey Tango Foxtrot?! (Internet lingo is getting pretty rife AND ripe around here.) She repeated that it had gone out for delivery and would I like to talk to a supervisor? I most certainly would, thankyouverymuch. It's June in the High Desert; it gets hot. The thought of day-old chicks sweltering in the back of a delivery jeep made the hair on the back of my neck raise up and catch fire. The supervisor comes out and I say that someone had called me to tell me that my chicks were here and that I had said that I was coming to get them and yet they had gone out for delivery?? How in the heck had that happened and fergoodness' sake, why? He took my name and address and, once he had determined that I didn't know the name of the gentleman who had called me, got the attitude of "I don't have to help you so I'm not going to be helpful. But I'll go look for the form of the thing." He came back and said that there were no packages waiting for me. I said I wanted to know how the heck this had happened. I told him that I had had live birds shipped to me before through this branch and I had never had them go out to be delivered to my home address, I had always been called to pick them up at the post office. He said, "Live birds? You mean chicks? I thought you said checks," and promptly went back to look again...and he found them this time. ThankyouThankyouThankyou. But the ordeal wasn't quite over, although the rest of it is not quite as dramatic. I told the lady that the supervisor turned me over to that I had to open the package in the office in the presence of a postal employee in case any of the birds were dead. She got it into her head that I would somehow think that dead birds were the post office's fault. No, I said, I need to do it this was so that the breeder has an independent witness to show that I hadn't killed the bird -- that if there's a dead bird on delivery, I needed to fill out a postal form and that way the breeder would know I wasn't trying to pull a fast one. "Well," she said in a fretful, near-snippy tone, "You can't fill out forms here anymore. You have to go home and do that online." Oy. And what if I don't have a computer hooked to the internet? Why in the merry name of the ghost of customer service long-dead do businesses have to make things harder for their customers? I love online service, I really, really do, but some things need to be handled in person -- and not everybody is hooked into the internet.

Still, the chicks are here and they are adorable. I'm still trying to figure out who's who in this melange; the original order was for 1 Chantecler, 1 Cuckoo Maran, 3 Buckeyes, 3 Buff Orpingtons, and 2 random brown egg layers. The modified order was as above, plus 5 Wyandottes, I believe Golden Laced but now I don't have anything saying just which variety. What I got was 1 Buckeye and the Chantecler replaced because they just didn't hatch out to order (but yayy! I got Welsummers for replacments!) and the rest of the order is the same. But the coloration of the five Wyandottes looks to be like Cuckoo Maran, and I have two birds that have the racing stripes of the Wyandottes. I think I've spotted the two Buckeyes and the Buff Orpingtons are unmistakeably blond...does anybody else think I'm going to be up half the night googling chick pics and racing back to the brooding area to see if I can recognize someone? The Welsummers were easy to pick out; they're striped like auburn-headed chipmunks. We'll have a couple of months to get things sorted out; I'm brooding everybody until they're feathered in and can go to their permanent homes. It was always my contention that people could claim they wanted this or that breed, but when the birds got done feathering all bets were off. Except that I know exactly what I want and I've got it: one Welsummer and one Buckeye. This oughta be interesting!

Pics tomorrow, just before I go haring off to build that shelter that was supposed to have been done last week .

pssst

2009-05-05T07:59:00.000-07:00

I'm going to be very brief. I'm here today because I'm trying to get something out of my system. That something is a desk, a little desk, a desk that I have had my eye on forever and three days but could never bring myself to spend the money on. It's on sale today. It's in the clearance bin, which means that when this sale is over it is gone and it isn't coming back. And we just got paid....

but I can't afford it. I really can't afford it. Even if I have the cash right now and the keys to the piggy bank, I can't afford the slip in sanity that it would take for me to go get that thing right now. The cash is here right now, but it is going to be needed for something important later and I can't keep thinking that just this immediate gratification is going to be okay somehow. That's how the spouse and I got into this mess (yes, we're both afflicted, just with different interests.)

So thank goodness for blogs. Even if no one on the face of the earth ever read this thing, writing it all down helped bring that insanity back under leash. I'm going to go review my credit card statements now just to remind myself of how bad it can get when I'm not using my brains for more than ear spacers.

life bites like a rabid goose

2009-04-24T19:55:00.001-07:00

Who knew that having the septic tank pumped out would be the highlight of the day?

Goodness knows it needed it; the house is about 20 years old and there's no record at all of the septic system even being thought at seriously, much less cleared out. We've only been here 12 years (more than enough time for the place to be tapped twice, but we were busy. And broke.) but the previous tenant lost the house to foreclosure, so we never got to meet them to ask. We bought the house at an auction, which meant we got the place as is, no inspection, no nothing, just the fact that an insurance company was willing to give us a policy on the place to reassure us that the place was actually livable. Given what was found today I'm willing to bet we're the first people to unearth the thing since it was put in.

And oh, what an adventure...and not so stinky as I thought it would be, though there would be no mistaking it for roses. EB did everything but dig the hole for the gentleman running the truck and she hung on his every word. I should get so much attention from the kid. She had a blast. I got lectured about how I'm not supposed to let the tank get this overrun but it was a lecture I'd fully earned. I provided iced tea and duck eggs and we talked welding while he raked out the muck. He got done, I paid the bill, and heaved a sigh of relief because even I could tell from the level in the tank that we would have been having big trouble in a month or two if we'd put this off any longer.

After that there was a running battle with MB who has decided that indoors is the perfect place to host the 100-yard dash, even if you do have to run up and down hallways and occasionally crash into people and furniture. I found a handful of pepperoni slices in the trash -- infuriating since we'd already discovered pepperoni slices in the washing machine, a sure sign that someone had stashed them in their pants' pockets and forgot to retrieve them. EB copped to it; much lecturing ensued. Massive frustration on the part of the parent who knows from bitter experience that the lecture went in one ear and out the other without so much as a detour into brain matter.

Then EB got a letter from my dad. This was in response to a letter she'd sent him, asking when and if he'd ever visit us again. He lives three states away so visits have always been rare. His reply was that he was in pretty poor health and getting old so that it was unlikely that he'd ever make it out our way again, but that it was always possible that we would visit him, he just didn't know when. That was extremely depressing; we are on the thin edge of constantly broke because of past stupid spending decisions. We're climbing out, but it's going to take years before we could afford to visit my father. I had to confront the likelihood that I'll never get to see my father again and I have to say that it hurt all the way through.

But -- suck though it may, life must go on and dinner must be thought about. I decided to get in the kitchen and throw together something for the Banshees and DBS when he finally got home from work. I got as far as getting the gravy started when LB starts weeping and wailing and carrying on in her room. This is a common occurrence; she uses this same howl when she doesn't get her way and when she stubs her toe. We've had the talk about screaming only when there's actual hurt, because otherwise the day is going to come when she is desperately going to need someone to show up and nobody will because everybody thinks that she's just cranky again. Leaving the gravy on at a high heat I go storming down the hall, declaiming as I go that if there isn't blood this time there darned well will be by the time I get done with her.

Hey, I have to hand it to her; this time, there was blood. Lots of it. Because head-wounds tend to bleed like the body's giving up its last drop. She had been bouncing on the bed -- just like I'd told her hundreds of times NOT to do because she could fall and HURT herself -- when she fell and hit her head against the footboard and cut it open. Not enough to enjoy a trip to the emergency room, but enough to leave a scar and certainly enough to bleed all over herself, her clothes, and the carpet. All of the supplies that I got the last time she did something like this but that I'd hoped never to use? MIA. The lot of them. I found them after I'd cleaned her up, disinfected her, and slapped a bandaid on. When DBS came home I told him I was setting up an emergency kit just for this kid, that it was going to be the size of a good sized mechanic's toolbox, and that I was keeping it under the bed where I could find it when I needed it. He nodded sapiently and handed me a Dr Pepper. I told him that much more of this and I was going to take up drinking as a serious hobby. He said that I was already doing that. I think that he was implying that any more serious and I'd have to set up a still, but I could never do that. For one thing, they're illegal unless you do some serious licensing. I can't even afford to go visit my dad!

Crystal, if you've made it this far you know why I didn't show up today. Abject apologies.

Oh yes, for the it isn't life or death but it happens often enough to make Mom spit 10-penny nails topper, some thus-far-unidentified Banshee has been taking wet laundry from the washing machine and putting it in the non-operational dryer. They know it's non-operational because it hasn't worked for quite some time and they're the ones who told me it had died to begin with. I can only assume this goes under either the I'll get back to it later or Mom will never find this or otherwise figure it out. When do the logic circuits get installed? I can hardly wait.

In the meantime, I'll have another Dr Pepper. Make it a double.

Does Bloody Exhausted Ring A Bell?

2009-04-19T20:40:00.000-07:00

Pictures are coming, Tammy. I promise. I swear I took some, and I even think I know where the camera went to but oh my goodness have I come down with a case of tired.

I would do yard work for three straight days in a row. Without being coerced by a love note from the county, no less. And I'm about as in shape for a homo sapien as Jabba the Hut, so yanking fencing around and rearranging protesting quackers is bound to take its toll...and we won't mention (much) about all of the brush and the dead tree limbs that I've been trying to clear, dismember, and toss in the nearest empty trash receptacle. Muscles that I forgot I even had are protesting.

It's just that...I got tired of other things, much more tired of them than I could possibly be of yard work. Or house work. And no, I'm not going to send you my fingerprints to prove I'm not a pod person, you're just going to have to take my word for it. I don't want to be Jabba forever, and while I know I'll never have the bod of an 18-year-old again, I should realllllly like to have the body of a moderately in-shape 42-year-old. I also have a yard and a house that are both suffering from me being very busy with Other Things for the last decade. Couple that with the fact that my treadmill has died an ignominious death and I have the perfect Homeschooling Workout For The Mad(asincrazy)SAHM. Clear the brush, arrange the quackers, and both dig and plant a Victory Garden. In this case, if I get to eat anything at all from my efforts that will be victory enough.

The ducks had to be rearranged for safety's sake; the drake:duck ratio finally caught up with me and showed its ugly face. If I didn't want to lose any ducks to the drakes' predations, the drakes had to get bachelors' quarters. Well, they're in their new digs and they are NOT happy about it. Neither are several of the ducks, who apparently had favorites in the newly-cordoned off group. It's sort of like Lysistrata for the Anas set.

Now I'm going to clear out the bathtub, which, since it's the only place that's big enough to clean brewing equipment is currently full of carboys. Then I'm going to gently boil myself and go to bed. Tomorrow is going to arrive far too early....

oh dear...

2009-04-08T21:22:00.000-07:00

It really is no wonder that my nearest and dearest snicker slightly hysterically whenever I proffer the notion that I'm "slowing down" or trying to "simplify" my life. I'm trying to whittle the duck flock down to a more manageable number and what do I do.

Yup. I bid on American Buff goose eggs. And won. Mind you, it's a pre-sale and if the ladies don't produce then I have one less thing to explain to the husband...and you are quite right if you think I haven't yet had the courage to tell him.

Oh yes, and there's the matter of the 15 chicks that are going to land, peeping and squeaking, on our doorstep come June 3rd or so -- but he knows about that, and I can correctly lay all of the blame on him for that adventure since it was all his idea. Okay, he wanted two and his eyebrows tried to crawl down the back of his collar when I told him how many were on order, but he did calm down when I explained that I was just central booking for several families who wanted just two or three chickens. He was less mollified when I said I was also central brooding agency until everybody's feathered in. I guess having a heat lamp and successfully raising mumblemumble ducks qualifies me as the resident expert.

The ducks are producing nearly to capacity. I have 24 and get between 19 and 22 eggs a day. A day. No, we can't eat all of them. I've been able to sell a small amount and there are a whole bunch of friends of friends who are happily singing my praises over the eggs I've been giving away just so I don't have to throw them out. It can't last; more than a few of these ladies are going to have to go into the stew pot. This still cracks DBS up -- not the imminent demise, but because their demise is anything BUT imminent. I've lost more to attrition than I have to the axe. It's hard, messy work that I'm lousy and painfully slow at. And I really don't want to do it at all. You'd think that it would curb my enthusiasm somewhat, but you'd be wrong. I'm eyeballing Welsummer chicken hatching eggs and trying to find a good source for Trout Runner duck hatching eggs, since TBA is a Trout drake and I'd like to find him a good match.

I'm still looking for the Halloween peach tree. Anybody out there got some good leads?

The first hoop house went up a couple of days ago. It's got more sway in it than a herd of camels but you can only fault the jig-operator and not the jig itself. The table I'm using to bend the top-rail is not level, not plumb, and I doubt very much if there's a right angle anywhere in its vicinity. I was really hoping to hold out until I could get a better table but the dryer went out and the clothesline became the only viable option. Since I have a lot of laundry to do every single day, the solitary clothesline that I put up 12 years ago is no longer enough. Also, since we're too broke to pay attention, getting any sort of traditionally constructed clothesline is just not an option. But I do have all of this 1 3/8" top rail hanging around the back yard...in utter desperation I quickly bent and put together three hoops and connected them. Oh man. I have got to get pictures up. This is exhibit number one about how not to do just about everything connected with one of these projects. On the other hand, it isn't going to fall over in a wind-storm, so it's perfect for what I need it to do. Friday I have to string the actual line and by then it might have stopped raining. (Yes, the universe does have a sense of humor. I don't know if it's trying to teach me something or just have a good giggle at my expense.)

Tonight I have to boil about 80 eggs and very early tomorrow I have to color said eggs for the egg-hunt that's being hosted at the park by my local homeschooling group. Oh yes, and since it's a pot-luck I also have to cook a whole bunch of food. It's a good thing I brew coffee strong enough to float horseshoes; I really don't think I'm going to have time to sleep tonight.

Slow down. heh. I'm trying.

Just In Case

2009-03-03T22:28:00.000-08:00

Just in case you were wondering why y'all weren't invited to the funeral, I'm still alive and kicking. Here's a quick update:

I've pretty much recovered from surgery. Yay!! And I'd almost gotten over that dirty rotten awful virus I picked up at the beginning of the year when the Banshees decided to bring a new one into the house. Ye cats, life with children is not fair. This one is far worse than the last batch; it starts with fevers and aches and evolves into a full-on head cold that evidently makes MB feel like he's drowning. MB and LB have it and I rather suspect EB and I are not far behind. DBS never catches these things...I'd say that's unfair, but that leaves one person who can go get children's Tylenol when we run out. He came back with Dr. Pepper too. Can you blame me for falling in love with this man?

I spent today making three different batches of broth: veggie, beef, and chicken. And since there are a lot of us I dragged out the big pots and made BIG batches. When I looked up at the end of it all I'd spent nearly all of an 8 hour day cutting veggies and adjusting simmers, all while cleaning the kitchen in preparation for the upcoming storm and directing Banshees in various stages of health into chores suitable for those various stages. DBS thought I was pushing myself into a worse illness than I'd have if I just sat down and let it wash over me, but I pointed out that while this is not my first rodeo, it will be the first one I can remember that would be fully stocked so I don't have to cook while dying. I made bread today. I made lots of bread. Between that and the soup stock and the presliced veggies and the pounds of loose tea that I've stockpiled, we are so ready for this. (I did, however, forget to request the pallet of ultra-soft tissue we're going to need. Nobody's perfect.)

The ironic part is that I'm expecting a shipment of essential and fragrance oils tomorrow, part of which is supposed to go into sample batches this weekend. That's a hard task to take up when you don't have an olfactory system that works right! I either dose by recommended weight or I delay until I can actually smell what I'm doing. Gah. On the bright side, the lip balm mix that eases chapped lips also soothes chapped noses. All of the Banshees have their own supply now. They're happy about that but I think they'd trade it all and maybe even me for half a week if they could get a good night's sleep.

All of this drama is jump-starting my dormant soap-interests -- and yes, Marti, I blame you entirely :)) -- so my Etsy shop will probably be up and running again in a couple of weeks. A few lip balms, one or two (dozen) sample-sized soaps, some soap sculptures...I just love this stuff. I just wish I could get more people to buy it so I could keep my saponification habit going.

I need to get into California's guide to what children should know at various ages, just to see where we stack up. I'd say woefully behind, especially LB who at 6 1/2 isn't reading as fluently as her siblings were at that age. I wish I could say I'm not panicking about that, but the world is what it is and my psyche is what IT is and I can't help it. She's bright and curious and she lives in a library, so I doubt very much if she's going to hit the double-digit age bracket still functionally illiterate...but I worry. It's part of the job description. On the bright side, the older Banshees are teaching themselves multiplication and they aren't kvetching about it like they normally would. Yayyyy! They're also learning, sort of without knowing they're learning it, that certain patterns just have to be memorized and sometimes there's no getting around the drudgery of it. In this case the drudgery is the multiplication tables, but they're figuring out for themselves that having that sort of knowledge memorized makes the rest of the work a lot easier. Oh really, yayyyyy! The part I love is that they don't have the beaten down look of quietly suffering incomprehension that I had at that age. I didn't understand a lot of math until I was a lot older and had my own private aha moments; I just knew I had to jump through these hoops to make the adults around me happy. EB is beginning to think of math as fun and she actually understands it. Oh, hip hip hoooooray. I'm so proud of all of them.

Duck, Here Comes Another Year!

2009-01-08T21:47:00.001-08:00

With all due reverence to the best of all poets, Ogden Nash.

I spent the last month of 2008 recuperating from surgery. I spent the first week of 2009 recovering from a nasty cold. Alas, there is symmetry (Babylon 5, if you geeks thought that sounded familiar.) Yes, I suppose things could be much worse, but can we pace things a little better from now on?

I've also been playing the current favorite game -- that is, trying to figure out just how far down this financial rabbit hole goes -- and giggling in one of those pitches that usually gets people packed off to padded rooms. For better or worse DBS is used to it by now and doesn't flinch as much. Some of that mad chortling comes from hearing financial gurus declare that we are now in a recession and that we've been in one for a little over a year. File that one under "Slow Learners", if you will. My family wasn't paying close enough attention to declare recession or non-recession over the last 12 months, but I will say this: when gas hit $4.59 per gallon in my neck of the woods, we started buckling down for hard times.

It was a revelation, just how close to the financial edge we were really living. Suddenly, all of those bills that we were just paying couldn't be met anymore because that money needed to go into the gas tank. That was the bad news. The good news is that I finally had that nervous breakdown that I so richly deserved and had put off for so long. And before you start looking in earnest for the guys with the large butterfly nets, it's a good thing because I finally broke down that last wall of communication between DBS and myself about finances. I kept trying to pinch and stretch and make do with that thin little last dime, and he had no idea that things were even remotely that tight. It isn't as if he had been extravagently spending hither and yon -- with three children and one income, extravagent is hard to manage if you're even remotely responsible -- but at last he understood why I was agitated, morose, moody, quick-tempered, and generally not my sweet and near-saintly self.

Habits are hard to change, but easier when a marriage has finally faced and accepted the stark truth of a situation. When our drier died, he understood why I didn't immediately go out and get another one with whatever cash or credit we could scrape together. It was easier to let go of the convenience store habit with its dollar here, five dollars there financial syphon. It became easier to say no and hear no because the truth is that here and now, we can't afford it no matter what it might be. No, I'm not going to get to do that computer build that I've wanted to do for so long. No, we aren't going to be able to keep all of the ducks, cute as they are. No, if we get a tax return it cannot be spent on just any old thing; it has to be used to retire the debt that's slowly strangling us. And no, that debt cannot be allowed to return.

Yes, car maintenance is not an option. These cars have to last us as long as we can stretch them out. Yes, the garden is going to get planted this year. Eventually the drier will be an option because even in a desert there are the occasional rainy days, but yes the clothes-line is about to make a reentrance into our lives. Yes, we're going to get used to extra sweaters in the winter.

He didn't even flinch when I hauled out The Tightwad's Gazette and said that there were a couple of items I'd like to show him. He hasn't agreed to anything yet, but at least he's considering the possibilities.

One of the ideas that the Gazette proposes is that of balance; my idea of tightwaddery is not going to be the same as yours. Different people need different balances to stay sane and healthy. I'm not giving up my internet connection. I gave up cable t.v. but Netflix is still hanging in there. I might not buy another movie dvd for a long time, but The Teaching Company still has delicious sales on educational dvds that I can save up for. I gave up buying yarn only because my stash is large enough to have avalanche zones -- but look at the hours of entertainment I'm getting while knitting gifts out of that! I'm working on a blanket right now (belated Xmas gift) and a Faroe shawl (getting an early start on NEXT Xmas.) We're starting small and working our way into what will make us happy, healthy, functional, and most importantly, not so harried.

Hopefully we'll be able to translate this all into good lessons for the Banshees too. This is the practical world of math and money and time coupled with the ability to delay gratification -- or rather, to understand that gratification comes in many forms, and having money in the bank to cover emergencies can feel much, much better than splurging it all on a new toy. Hopefully they'll listen better than I did.

Bent, Folded, Spindled, & Perforated

2008-12-13T21:22:00.000-08:00

In other words, if this is routine surgery without any complications whatsoever, I realllllllly do not want to mess with any other sort.

I'm recovering well, thank you, and that pesky little organ that was making life so difficult has probably been incinerated by now, gallstones and all. Much to my dismay and occasional amusement, I've found that I really don't spend all of my days loafing around on the couch or websurfing. Those are the amusements I allow myself when I'm done cooking, cleaning, cleaning, cooking, feeding ducks, feeding children, doing laundry, figuring out a cheap and effective indoor clothesline when the dryer fails and it looks like it's going to be doing a rendition of Noah's Return outside, waging feeble warfare on the mounds of paperwork that pop up like well-fed Tribbles, and trying to manage a scaled-down version of Christmas that's going to make everybody happy without bankrupting the already cashless. (Hint: lots of cooking, sewing, knitting, and crocheting.) Much to DBS's amusement and exasperation I tried to get back in the swing of things the day after my surgery, the result of which was me flat on my back for a couple of hours, napping away. And I slept all the day after that. Do I learn? No, because yesterday I decided it was time for me to start cooking and cleaning and cleaning and cooking again...and I developed a fever and a large spot of exhaustion. After 18 years DBS knows I'll only gnaw through duct tape should he try to employ it, so gentle exasperation and constant reminders that he's home to take care of me and maybe I should let him....? are just about the only weaponry he's got. He uses it with surprising effectiveness. He got to string the emergency clothesline in the garage, bless his heart, and he's been swinging around my 50 pound bags of duck feed without complaint. He usually enlists a Banshee on rotating basis to collect eggs in the morning and he corrals escapee ducks with enthusiasm. I still have to cook every once in a while but he's been doing the dishes. Unfortunately he has to go back to work tomorrow, but fortunately I'll be able to hobble along without him for at least a shift. We've got plenty of leftovers and the only cooking I HAVE to do is gingerbread cookies. And maybe brioche. As well as maybe sugar cookies and peanut butter cookies and....

Well, geez, it IS Christmas!

We're spending Christmas Eve with relatives, and on Boxing Day relatives are supposed to come here. Christmas Day is just for DBS, Banshees, and me, toasty in pjs and absolutely content that we do not have to travel anywhere for anybody for any reason. We get to stay home and enjoy the heck out of each other. I may have to declare an internet-free day -- DBS and I both have serious addictions -- but otherwise I look forward to watching the Banshees enjoy the gifts their doting relatives have bestowed upon them, the Santa surprises, and the stuff they've crafted for each other this month. Then I'm going to retire to the kitchen for the Christmas feast: roast duck this year, I think, but the rest of the menu is still open. I need more ideas for vegetables other than potatoes. Hm.

Tomorrow has a very simple, loose, and open plan, despite what my cooking intentions might be. I have to a. get up, b. let ducks out of Chez Quackers, c. feed children, d. do laundry, e. knit. Knit a lot. I have the rest of a sweater and an entire blanket to knit before December 25th. It's possible. I can sharpen a couple of broom handles and use Very Thick Yarn for the blanket and be done before it's possible for me to panic too much. Really.

Next year I'm planning this whole crisis thing better.

If It's Friday Then It Must Be....

2008-10-11T07:40:00.001-07:00

There's a mossy old joke that originated with the traveling tours that promised to visit X amount of countries in as many days as whatever the original X was. Of course such itineraries are bound to produce a little exhaustion-induced confusion, so it's no surprise that one woman turned to her traveling companion and asked just where the heck they were. Her friend consulted the guidebook and said, "It's Wednesday, so this must be France!"

I have days like that without ever leaving my own tiny geographical area. Heck, I have had days like that without ever leaving the house -- they were particularly plentiful when I had three children in diapers. We won't even go into that infamous Lost Weekend when everybody came down with a rotovirus, except to mention that the children were considerate enough to time their active bouts of illness with the exact schedule of the washing machine. At this hazy remove I can't remember if they got sick just before or after the dryer buzzer went off, but the timing was nothing short of uncanny. DBS and I didn't sleep for 48 hours. I didn't know I was capable of heroics like that before I had children.

This week we were catching up on immunization shots and physicals and I managed to schedule the children on the same day, although at two hour intervals. I figured we'd go in, get the first one done and over with, have lunch and then get the other two done. Everybody has "Go Bags" stocked with books, stuffed animals, and knitting so I can enforce some sort of recreation on a child the minute they mutter, moan, or wail "I'm bo-o-o-o-o-o-ored!" No, this isn't my first rodeo. Why do you ask? Anyway, I love my pediatrician. We get Banshee #1 in and she asks the nurse if it would be possible to get the preliminary requirements of the physical out of the way so our return trip would be that much quicker. That almost immediately morphed into: "Let's get them all out of the way at once!" Now imagine three wiggly, giggly children, one oversized Momma Bear (that's me!) and one petite pediatrician all stuffed into one itty bitty examining room.

Now, part of the reason we were doing physicals in the first place is because of some paperwork I have to keep in my homeschool files. Yes, I could do the waiver but what the heck -- I wanted to see if everybody was healthy enough to run around the front yard, and if there were any underlying issues I hadn't caught. As long as we're at the doctor's anyway we might as well get a couple of i's dotted and t's crossed, no? So the doctor asks what school the Banshees attend and I tell her the name of our private school, and EB pipes up (very proudly, I've taught that gal well) that we're homeschooled.

Okay, I'd be lying if I said that didn't curl my toes a little. We aren't doing anything illegal but a concerned medical practitioner can make a bit of trouble if they get the wrong idea, and a small room with three wiggly children isn't my idea of the best place to gently educate someone as to California private school law. Fortunately she took it all in stride, which is good, because wrangling Banshees in tight corners under deadlines tends to get me focused on just that -- which means I sound like an utter idiot on just about every other subject. We did clear up the misapprehension that I was filing the medical papers with the school district. She looked very confused when I said I didn't have to, but I gave her the short-hand version (I run a private school and the paperwork is something the state wants) and that cleared things up. Now, the state doesn't require that I file anything but the Private School Affidavit, but under the private school statutes there are a few things I do have to keep on hand in my own filing cabinets. Check one more of those thingies off after this week.

I took everybody out for lunch as a special treat, then we had to go back and do a little routine labwork. Note, the girls have turned into Screaming Meemies over shots and bloodwork, but the boy found it all very fascinating. I'm making DBS take them all the next time...mainly because I have a very twisted sense of humor and I'd really like to see how he'd handle it. (Probably very well, because he's a good father. But I'd likely need to serve him up a double-helping of one of my stronger homebrews when he got home.)

We finally get home from our odyssey and I make -- I do not request, I do not ask, I do not suggest, I make the Banshees run around in the front yard for a couple of hours. I don't quite lock the front door on them, but every time they come in I tell them to go back out unless they happened to be dying of dehydration in front of my very eyes. They had just spent about 7 hours either cooped up in the car, the doctor's office, the lab area, or a restaurant. That much coiled energy concentrated in three small bodies is going to trigger an event of some sort, usually of a Catastrophic Nature (go ahead, ask me how I know.) I curled up in a ball on the living room floor and tried to breathe deeply. Thank goodness we don't have to do this again for a few years.

I'm Just Here To Stock The Refrigerator

2008-09-26T23:29:00.000-07:00

Okay, and maybe wash dishes and take an occasional run with the vacuum cleaner. Also included in the house-spouse package is a fully-functional and frequently eccentric cook. But teacher? I think I just threw that towel completely in. LB, who just turned 6, has become a reader. Oh, she's not up to Pride and Prejudice quite yet. In fact, she's still inclined to put in what she thinks ought to be there instead of what is actually printed on the page. But even so...she hasn't just memorized what Mom says when we get to particular pages. When she stumbles over familiar words in unfamilar places, it's because she doesn't quite yet have confidence that her identification is right, but I can see that tentative i.d. take place. And today she pulled out long-dormant flash-cards and began quizzing me on them. (It usually goes like this: "What's this one, Mom? Well, how is it spelled? B. E. D. How do the letters sound? Beh-eh-dd...bed!!" Followed by much jumping around and excited squealing.)

I am well and truly flummoxed, but in a good way. I've been thinking for well over a year that I really needed to sit down and teach this child how to read. I'd gotten books at CHN's Expo; I faithfully collected Dr. Seuss; I pulled out my childhood Matt-the-Rat books; I even bought Dick and Jane and ever once in a while I'd vow to have formal lessons and set reading times. Well, anyone who knows me knows that schedules and I don't even exist in the same material plane. We read together when we have time, but I swear that my instruction for this child has been minimal and nearly all at her pace. Which is, by the way, slow enough to make glaciers take note.

So when I bounce into the living room a couple of days ago, ready to spit fire because once again every Banshee in the house has decided to Ignore Their Chores despite being reminded about them, oh, every thirty seconds -- I'm not quite annoyed enough to miss that LB is holding her precious Dick and Jane book as if she really wants to stash it under the couch in a hurry but she's too far away for that option. Hm. That's the look EB gets when I catch her reading two hours after she's been put to bed for the evening. As soon as LB figures out that I'm not mad mad anymore, she curls up on the couch and quite happily rips through three or four Dick and Jane adventures.

My baby is reading. Reading!! Naturally I had to call my father and have her read to him. He's proud of her and he's proud of me, and he's a really good sport and a very patient man.

I'm still marveling. It's a miracle. Possibly all the more so because the older two Banshees learned how to read at a public school and I never really connected with what happened there. I faithfully performed all of the rituals that the public school wanted me to, helped to fill out endless worksheets and coloring sheets and cutting-out-only-to-glue-back projects. They spent whole weeks on letters and then simple words, learning to adore their never-wrong teachers while simultaneously figuring out that I was an eevil person better to be avoided before I inflicted more homework. I came away from the whole experience firmly convinced that giving kindergartners hours of homework and pretending that it's no big deal and that the endless piles of paper shouldn't take that long to do, is truly a horrendous practice that should be abolished as soon as humanly possible. These are five year olds, for goodness' sake, they aren't cramming for the entrance exam to Harvard.

And yet, in the back of my mind, I was always convinced that nobody could learn how to read without these elaborate and endless exercises. Learning how to read was the result of a rigid schedule and insistent routine. I just knew I was failing my youngest child because I couldn't make myself do to her what was done to her brother and sister. I can be a miserable person to live with; I really don't want to be a miserable teacher to deal with. It was so easy to put off formal education; there was always one more episode of Judge Judy to watch, after all, and a magazine article to work on -- oh yes, and that math worksheet site that the Banshees would beg for every so often -- and the brush-clearing to work on, not to mention the soap batches to cook up, or that NaNoWriMo is coming up again. There is always something to do around here, even if it does look suspiciously like inspecting the inside of my eyelids for cracks.

I've resisted the term Unschooler forever and three days now, mostly because what I do is done out of sheer laziness, but I think that I may have become one without realizing that was what was happening. As a household we're filled to the top with learning opportunities, but unless it's very important that they learn something right now (which doesn't happen as often as you might think) I don't try to stuff any education down their throats. They get curious, they ask me, I say I haven't the foggiest notion, they ask me to Google it. I get asked if they can play with the human brain before breakfast (my Dad got them one of those models that has detachable organs. What can I say? It came in very handy when EB asked where the stomach goes on a human being.) MB catches ants on a piece of tape so EB can look at them with her new microscope (Dad again.) I've had to threaten to take the lightbulbs out of their rooms and hide all of the flashlights since they insist on reading well past midnight when they aren't supposed to.

Yes, they have days when they conspire to drive me crazy. There are days when I consider re-researching Ebay's policy on selling children at auction. There are days where the only reason we all make it in one piece to the other end is because they're in the living room rotting their brains out with endless Disney dvd's and whatnot, and I'm in the back room knitting to one of my court shows. I suspect that every family has those days, no matter where any member happens to be educated or employed. I'm just grateful that I know how to knit, and that the door locks.

And then there are the days when I walk into a room and my 6-year-old rattles off the book she's taught herself how to read. Those are the days when I just cannot manage to get my feet back onto the ground, no matter how hard I might try.

What Happens When I'm Not Paying Attention

2008-09-23T13:10:00.001-07:00

LB teaches herself how to read.

Yikes.

About That Schedule Thingy...

2008-09-07T20:52:00.001-07:00

Actually, the schedule thingy is working out pretty well, thankyouverymuch. It isn't perfect and we're falling off of the wagon often enough to need bungee cords, but what the heck. It's a start

Fer instance -- and I have at least one friend who understands this very, very well --the kitchen is clean. Not perfect clean, not eat-off-the-counters-clean, not yet, but clean as in there is not one dirty dish in the entire room and it's been like that for days. DAYS.

I can't tell you how much that means to me. Me, who, I kid you not, once went more than a year without having all of my dishes done at the same time. Granted, I'd just birthed three children in four years and I guarantee you that messes up your brain like nobody's business, much less your housework. But still. Progress, little itsy bitsy progress is being made and it's actually staying made. I impress myself.

When I started laying out The Schedule I knew things were going to have to get switched and swatched and swapped around. Since we weren't doing anything in any sort of order, I maintain that it's bloody well impossible to figure out what the natural order is supposed to be before you dive in and start creating it. So clearing out the dining room got bumped to just after morning dishes (natch!) and just before picking up the living room. And I had to postpone the whole thing for a couple of hours because everybody but my preternaturally diurnal boy is sleeping in later than I realized. Whee! (He should be, I know he should be, I can tell by the shadows under his eyes that MB needs sleep, but the boy's eyes fly open when the sun hits his windows and there's nothing that can be done about that. I can a. spike his morning milk, b. put blackout curtains up, c. move his room to the sunset side of the house, or d. adjust the schedule to fit this child's rhythms better. A. is ethically questionable and probably illegal, B. requires sewing and we haven't gotten as far as reorganizing my sewing cabinet yet, C. is impossible unless I want to give up the master bedroom (and the spouse would object even if I didn't), so D. looks like the winner. I swear, when they all graduate into the big wide world and have apartments and lives of their own, I'm sleeping for a week. Then I'm going to get up, fix a big breakfast, clean the dishes, and go back to sleep for another week.

Whew.

Having the kitchen clean has sort of naturally lead to having the dining room table cleared off -- we've had more meals together as a family this week that I can remember in a long, long time. And I've found the paper mache materials, so goodness' knows what sort of trouble we're going to get into next week. Probably not too much, considering that I haven't cleared my desk yet and that's where the balloons are (first project is going to be wrapping wet, gooey, sticky strips of newspaper around a balloon in an effort to make a small piggy bank. Yes, I know, but the point is not to have a functioning bank, it's to have fun.)

We've been getting rid of books to the point where our local library cringes deeply when they see us coming. We don't just have a stray bag or two of books, we have bins and bins and bins of books that have come up short in the must-have-them competitions. I don't like getting rid of books, it goes against every instinct that I have -- BUT -- there are 5 people living a fairly small house. Something's going to have to go, and as I'm fond of telling the children, some 15 or 16 hours of labor (distributed among three births) and no painkillers...I'm not giving them up for anything.

The anesthesia-free births were not my idea, thanks. I hate pain, I'm allergic to pain, I don't want to feel pain if I don't have to. Unfortunately, circumstances conspired against me. Ladies, those of you who do natural childbirth willingly -- y'all deserve the Congressional Medal of Honor.

But giving up the books has proven less painful than I believed it was going to be. There's something about having room to move, space to set projects down in, open shelving to put things back on -- ooh, I get tingling feelings up and down my spine. We'll never be spartan around here, but The Schedule has been a wonderful idea.

Let's hope I can keep going with it!

In Lieu of Everything Else I Have to Do

2008-08-30T15:46:00.000-07:00

I have in-laws coming tomorrow and a house that looks like it ought to be condemned. I'm too old for all-nighters but it looks like I've signed up for yet another one.

Oh yeah. And I have a tie that I need to knit before tomorrow.

All of this pales beside the horrible and unavoidable conclusion that I came to earlier today:

I have to get on a schedule. I have to. Because apparently MB desperately needs his every footstep dogged until he gets impulse control (yeah, wasn't that the thing that powered the Enterprise? It makes even more sense when you realize that this tyke does everything at warp 10.) So in between frantic knitting and sewing (oh yeah, promised a knitting bag too) and cleaning, I have to put up a schedule that the two of us can keep. EB and LB are just going to have to go along for the ride.

Worser and worser: MB is a morning person. So this schedule is going to have to start on his time and I'm going to have to be there to supervise. I mean, I'm actually going to have to be conscious. Life is unfair.

On the other hand, maybe this will get the house clean. Finally. Because if this doesn't do it, it's time to call Niecy.

I've had one of those months today

2008-07-30T22:09:00.000-07:00

Or to be more honest, there's been a bunch of little things that have conspired over the last few days to drive me right round the bend.

There was the feed store incident. Possibly incidentS, depending on whether you choose to view it as a series of bad decisions or one major CF that extended for the better part of a month.

Mind you, up until recently I realllllly loved this feed store. Here I was, ordering tons of exotic foodstuffs for a bunch of backyard quackers and these people never turned a hair. I could put up with the occasional misstep between the people working the counter and the people in the back lot who actually knew what was going on. And dealing with a woman with an IQ lower than my chrysanthemums was actually kinda cute for a while. Anybody over the age of 22 could have seen that this was going way too well, right?

Right.

Well, I didn't see it coming and I probably should have. Heck, one of my friends and fellow duck-wranglers stepped all of about once into the place and decided to buy her feed elsewhere. At the end of June I dropped by and ordered a couple of bags of the usual, expecting to pick them up the next week in the usual manner. Come next week and the feed isn't there. I'm not unduly worried because I always keep a bit on hand for emergencies, and I was assured up, down, and sideways that there had been just a teensy error and that the feed would be coming in the next week. Yah, sure, and remind me never to step up for a friendly game of three-card-Monty either. But I bought it...er, at least I was trying to . I wasn't terribly happy; my reserves were wearing thin and I was going to have to put the ducks on a feed they weren't ready for, but hey, the friendly people at the feed store said that it was just an oversight. How bad could it be?

It didn't arrive yet again. This is when the infamous word "Minimum" first cropped up -- as in, "We have a minimum amount we have to order from the distributor" -- but the food was going to be in within a very short time. Trust us. The woman at the counter even promised, cross her heart and hope to die, that she would order it personally....next week. So it would be there the following Friday. Before her order date had rolled around I was out of everything I could in good conscience feed a duck, so I came in a couple of days early looking for a substitute to tide me through. It isn't a good sign when the person who told you just five days earlier that she would personally order that feed for you and that it would most certainly be in fairly soon gets a panicked look on her face when you walk in the door. It seems that there was more to this "Minimum Order" than met the eye; evidently they needed to order three pallets' worth of feed at one swell foop or they couldn't order at all and, for the kicker, they only had two pallets' worth of order right then. But, but, but, she hastened to say, she was going to try to stretch that and get the order in Tuesday and if she couldn't she would call to say there was a problem.

Yeah, I know I should have gone to another supplier at this point. But I really wanted to give them the benefit of the doubt, ya know? I'm a grade-a, boiled in the wool sucker for that sort of thing. I didn't get a call. I called back Friday, got Ms. Dumber Than A Chrysanthemum who asked me to call back in 15 minutes so she could go check. And the telephone stayed busy for more than the next hour....

At this point even I am beginning to get suspicious. So I tromp my weary bones down there and find a bright and chipper woman behind the counter that I've never seen before, who announces in cheerful tones that the order had gone out late the last Tuesday and so it wouldn't be in for another week. She was very astonished when my voice dropped a couple of decibels and about half an octave (it does that when I see red) when I announced in NO uncertain terms that they had just lost a customer. Ms. DTAC was handling another customer and she seemed to think that I was out of line for being just a wee bit irate so she replied in an irritable, what is YOUR problem voice that the order had gone out late and that it would be here next FRIDAY. Um. Yeah. And what are the ducks supposed to eat in the meantime, lady, cake? After all of my care and planning and research and a couple of months of feeding them what I've determined to be the best I can feed them, the whole shebang has been whammied by a bunch of people who can't find their backsides with both hands and a map. I've been feeding them chicken scratch, turkey crumbles, and in desperate moments, cat food. I'm sure most of them will be just fine but that isn't the point.

So yes, I did go find another supplier. They're farther away and more expensive, but I'll put up with a lot for a reliable source. I also found a back-up supplier just in case. My learning curve may be a bit steep, I could be called a tad slow, but I do learn eventually.

But I worry, especially now. One of my Silver Appleyards, a heavy-weight breed, has gone lame on one leg. He has a swollen joint that is starting to balloon into a swollen leg, and I wonder if this would have happened if he'd gotten the right nutrition at the right time. I don't think I would have been so stressed if these ducks were over six months old; that's pretty much as grown a duck as you're going to get. It's just because they do grow so quickly and have so many thing to develop in such a short time that this situation has gotten under my skin. A couple of the other heavy breed ducks are showing a little wobbly on their pins. It could be that this is just a condition endemic to the bigger bodied ducks; it could be that the Appleyard somehow got injured and is just not recovering the way he should be. Either which way, I've got a hard decision to make here soon if he doesn't start improving.

***

Did I mention that the more I deal with Windows the more I love Linux? Even though I'm pig-ignorant of even the Linux basics? A little while ago my favorite anti-virus software announced an upgrade. I've never had a problem with this company before, so I go ahead and upgrade. Only it won't work. It suggests that maybe I need to update my windows software, so okay, I do that even though I haven't in forever and three days because every time I do I have problems forever with the things little and large the update manages to screw up. The anti-virus still refuses to work -- it's now suggesting that it can't play friendly with a couple of other programs I have -- and a couple of days ago I realized that the Windows update removed my financial program. Gone. I can see the files, I can even find traces of links on the computer, but I cannot, cannot get the program to run. Windows giggles coyly and says that I can't get there from here. In fact, there doesn't really exist. Agh.

Since I only use the program as a glorified checkbook balancer, I wondered if there was anything out there that would work as a patch until I got my new system (ha! considering the current financial situation) put together and running. Well whaddaya know, financial freeware. It's double-entry, which takes some getting used to, and since all my backups are worthless (something about the computer seeing but not seeing my former financial program) I'm having to type each and every financial transaction I can find...but you know, I could get used to it. I'm still going to have to spend the next two months faithfully glued to a monitor to figure out every glitch and gotcha -- but hey, that's how I learned most of what I know about computers and the internet to begin with.

But O for the day when I'm finally confident enough to ditch windows altogether. I am going to party so hard DBS is going to nickname me Britney.

Whereupon I Pick Up My Jaw Once Again

2008-07-06T13:16:00.001-07:00

Really, when you ignore children's education as much as I do then the general expectation is that they're going to grow up dumb as earthworms. I'll admit to being a mom who uses the Visual Lobotomy for a little peace and quiet to get other things done. When the Banshees howl that they're bored, I tell them that they have four choices: Reading, Writing, Math, or Laundry. I got a lot of laundry out of that before they wised up. (I've sinced added "Running Like Fiends Around the Front Yard i.e. P.E. They aren't naive enough to go for the weeding-as-fun routine.)

So when did EB turn into a voracious bookworm? We live together, don't you think I would have noticed that going on under my nose? MB's obsession with history (as long as it's Titanic's history), geology (as long as it's a volcano or a black smoker), and the Solar System is phenomenal (Got Black Holes? No? Darn!). LB is still unable to read but appears to be making a bid for Family Bard. Or possibly author for soap operas. Sometimes the boundaries are a little fuzzy.

No, no, no! They aren't supposed to be this...well, well-educated. They're supposed to have the IQ of a philodendron.

Of course, then it hits me: my initial philosophy of teacher as facilitator as opposed to prison guard is working out just fine and the doubts that I'm having are just the internal scripts left over from my public school experience. I gathered together the resources and had the wisdom or the infinite degree of addled luck to let them be bored out of their noggins every once in a while. The Banshees aren't picking it up in the linear fashion that I did, but it's trickling into their brainpans nonetheless. I feel all puffed up with pride and infinitely humble all at the same time. My kids. Wow.

I could kill for chocolate; willing to maim for naked barley

2008-06-27T22:15:00.000-07:00

And thank goodness there are laws against such things, for I am a law-abiding citizen. Or at least I've managed to fake it pretty well over the years.

It's amazing that I've gotten very little done today and still manage to be utterly exhausted at the end of it. I've got the temporary duck enclosure up for the Big Ducks (ungrateful wretches) and the little ducks and the TubDucks are now out in the greenhouse. I came to the unwilling conclusion that the temporary enclosure can't be an overnighter because I really have no way of making it secure. I've been assured that there are owls in the area and I know that there are coyotes...not that the greenhouse could keep out a coyote when it couldn't keep out the ex-dog, but I'd like to discourage where I can. So until Duck Row (why do I keep wanting to type Duck Row Records?) is done, I'm going to be transporting 13 very unhappy and uncooperative Quackers from greenhouse to enclosure and back again. And I will report right now that an unhappy Quacker is a very loud quacker, unless it's a drake. In an unscientific poll, it appears that our Cayuga drake is still very much in residence (there was some doubt after the earlier fatality).

Sir Edmund Hilary is getting very fat and also very opinionated; it appears that SEH is almost certainly a white runner and most def'nitly female. Ghiradelli (the chocolate runner, of course) is a shy duck but also a quacker so there we are, two female runners and three undeclared. TBA is coloring up nicely but I don't know enough about the various duck colors to declare for one side or the other and the duck's voice hasn't broken either. Every other day I change my mind about whether I'm going to be the proud owner of a drake or a duck -- and let's face it, folks, TBA is hands-down my all-time favorite. Spoiled rotten wretch AND the duck knows it. Still, of all of the feathered critters in the back yard, the runners have been nominated Most Likely to Die of Old Age.

To my dismay, I'm learning the hard way that close quarters can lead to complications. Some of the ducks appear to be almost bow-legged, some severely so. I'm hoping that larger quarters will undo some of that damage but it's a very faint, slight hope. None of the runners are affected, thank goodness, but damn, I hate learning from the school of hard knocks. It's not fair on the critters involved. It could also be that large-breed ducks are prone to this sort of thing; the smaller the duck in the affected population, the less likely they are to be affected, and of course the runners are the lightest breed I've got.

The Saxony and Silver Appleyards are tanks. Huge, and the oldest aren't even a month old. I can just imagine what they're going to look like in November, full-feathered and market-weight (cue Jurassic Park theme). The Cayugas are developing their famous green-over-black sheen and the ungrateful, feral beasts are gorgeous. The Khaki Campbells and Golden Hybrids are virtually indistinguishable except for size and a slight difference in bill coloration (okay, I've officially gone round the bend...I can tell them apart by the tips of their bills??)

Of course, all of the Banshees want their very own ducks. I have told each and every one of them that they would have to earn the duck with extra chores around the house, that they'd have to earn the feed as well, and that they would be expected to help keep the duck areas clean and build the cages for their individual ducks. LB is too young to wrap her brain around the subject and EB hasn't shown that much interest in the work aspect, but MB was very much on-board. He got up first thing in the morning to help clear the back yard and just couldn't do enough. Now, if the boy wants a duck that bad, I'm willing to let him earn it -- but I did feel honor-bound to inform him that a duck can live up to twelve years and that once it was his, he was responsible for it for as long as it lived. Once he added up how old he would be if the duck actually lived that long, his enthusiasm dimmed just a bit. Actually I'm impressed with the outcome, since so many people can't wrap their brains around that bit of logic. I know I wasn't prepared for a cat to live for nearly two decades, but here she is, deaf and wobbly and still very affectionate. I figured it was worth the effort to drum it into somebody's skull that sometimes pets can live for a very long time. It's why I'll never get a tortoise or a parrot, thanks very much.

Right now I'm content to have the ducks as my hobby with the Banshees along for the observational opportunities. As with every other thing I've ever done with the Banshees in tow, I don't know how much they're going to learn; I'm not even sure exactly what they're going to learn. Sometimes you can be 100% sure that you're showing them one thing and then find out much later that they saw something completely different. It just works that way. I know when my mother raised poultry way back when, she would probably have bet that I would never, ever follow in her footsteps. Ever. And yet here I am with children and household and poultry and incipient vegetable garden, among other things.

There are differences. I, for one, will never raise snails. Life is too short to pursue the wily gastropod. Head cheese is not on my menu of to-do items (although mozzarella is a possibility). She never had a loom or a spinning wheel. I make soap and brew beer (okay, I should brew beer. I have everything required to brew except for maybe time.) She may have been a rough carpenter but she was way ahead of my skill set with a skill saw -- on the other hand, I'm a better welder. She drew well, painted well, cast bronze -- I need considerable help just to draw a straight line. Still, the crux of the matter may well be how she chased her dreams. Nothing (except for Calculus) seemed impossible to her, given enough time and effort. We had our issues and our disagreements and far too many things were left unresolved between us, but this is one attribute she passed along that I am grateful for: We never quit learning because there is always something new to learn. Oh, how I hope I can pass that on to her grandchildren.

It's Too Early In The Morning To Run Screaming Into The Night

2008-06-20T10:26:00.000-07:00

We've gotten our annual love-letter from the county and now have about a month to get rid of the brush. The good news? DBS has finally figured out that maybe, just maybe, weeding early and often might stave such love notes off and that he is now miraculously available to do this once a week. I checked fingerprints. He's definitely not a pod person....

To be fair to the man, he's never been a yard-work person. He still thinks we ought to put a heavy kill-all-growing-things poison on the back-yard or, failing that, just put down asphalt. He reluctantly agreed that 1. we have growing things, i.e. Banshees, and poison probably isn't the best thing to start generously strewing around and 2. asphalt is prohibitively expensive with the back yard as large as it is. Besides, now we have ducks and they don't do any better on the blacktop than the Banshees do. It's just one of those things. (Besides which, there's reason number 3, otherwise known as these "solutions" wouldn't make Mom happy, and we all know that if Momma ain't happy, ain't nobody happy. Also just one of those things.) Several things have conspired against him -- one of which is that busting his rump once a year is not his favorite pastime. We are finally reaching the point where we know know that we really can't afford outside distractions anymore and he's the type that likes to stay busy. The fact that whenever a parent blinks, a child grows six inches is also a factor. Did I also mention that we have done the Bohemian, ignore-it-all-and-let-time-figure-it-out method of housework/yardwork to the point of utter exhaustion and we're in the mood for matching towels...that we can find??

Oh yes, and let's not forget the $5 gas and the staple food prices that have tripled in the last six months. As if we could.

So the ducks that I asked for in order to have something to feed perfectly good tomato worms to are starting to sound like an interesting proposition. And the garden that I've been promising myself for the last twelve years might actually become a viable option. I might be able to swing that pressure canner for Christmas, if I'm realllllly lucky. DBS has stopped growling when I start shopping for real estate that we can't afford, because he knows I'm basically looking for a small homestead in an area where I don't have to worry about getting a permit for the livestock. (Did I mention that I've been looking at miniature cows? Everybody has a dream; mine involves miniature Jerseys.) All of this adds up to something that I have been wanting forever and just about three days: a family that is beginning to look inward for the ingenuity to keep themselves busy and entertained instead of outward to (rather expensive) distractions. My dream is to spend several hours in the garden poking at the green beans, or tending ducks, or painting the house....just about anything other than wasting that time staring at a screen. I've already threatened the ducks with Tolstoy. They appear to be unimpressed. Maybe they know something I don't!

The Storm Before The Calm Before The Really BIG Storm

2008-06-12T21:43:00.000-07:00

As I write I'm listening to the final rustlings of our latest hatch. Two weeks ago we had 15 viable Saxony eggs; yesterday 7 hatched out. Today there are two more to add, for a total of 9, and a couple more that have broken shell and will probably hatch today for a grand total of 11. Of the four that haven't pipped, two were actively trying to break the inside membrane (gotta love that candler!) and two were...well, they weren't viable anymore. It happens. I'm still deciding whether to help the unpipped eggs hatch out, but my rule thus far has been that they need to at least crack the shell before I do midwifery. I'll candle again today to see if they've at least broken through the membrane and we'll just have to see from there. By the end of today we are going to have all of the ducks that we're going to get this year, and more than we genuinely need.

11 Saxony, hatched onsite
9 Saxony from Holderreads
2 White Runners from Holderreads
4 Silver Appleyards hatched onsite
2 Indian Runners hatched onsite
3 Chocolate Runners from Metzer
9 Cayuga from Metzer
3 Golden Hybrid from Metzer
2 Khaki Campbells from Metzer
-----------
45 ducks
- 1 Cayuga (died of unknown causes)
- 1 Chocolate Runner (drowned)
- 1 Chocolate Runner (sold to friend)
------------
42 ducks on premises. As in, right now.

For the love of little green apples, what was I thinking?? Thank goodness there are too many of them to name, otherwise I'd be in real trouble! So far only a relative handful have been handed monikers, and only the Indian Runner ducks have been labeled Untouchables. Of all of the ducks so far, the Indian Runners have the most personality. They chatter constantly and they're insatiably curious -- which sort of means they fit into the rest of the household just fine. I haven't gotten the courage to sex any of them yet; here's hoping for majority female.

The Banshees have decided that the 4H thing looks sort of interesting, so I'm going to have to get off of my own tail-feathers and get proactive about it all. DBS still thinks the ducklings are cute but is starting to get this glazed look in his eye. And everybody has decided that if a duck goes to the chopping block, only Mom is heartless enough to go through with it. Of course that means I get stuck with plucking duty too, but such is life. I know down makes great fill; I wonder if feathers can be composted....

DBS is going on vacation here in a couple of days and we're going to spend the first part of it getting permanent duck housing put together. He's probably going to spend the rest of it with his feet up, ice tea in hand, while I go about clearing brush and (finally) breaking ground for the garden.

Personally, I'm finding that the ducks are wonderful motivators. My master bath, which has been an impromptu nursery for newly arrived and just-hatched duckies, has been cleaned of more than the top layer of grime for the first time in ages. Gradual dust and mayhem I can handle; duck dust and mayhem on top of everything else is way too much. My back yard is getting shaped and played in because I have to be out there at least a couple of times a day to check on the web-toes. I may get that garden in this year after all.

Just A Reminder

2008-06-09T10:48:00.001-07:00

Cute fuzzy ducklings don't stay small forever. In fact, they don't stay small for very long!

Sir Edmund Hilary, left, hatched May 25, 2008

Ferdinand, right, hatched June 3, 2008

That's just 9 days' difference, folks!

Hmmm.

2008-06-06T20:35:00.000-07:00

I have been told it's mean, evil, and not-nice to be so quiet on my blogs. People worry about me. (Heck, I worry about me, and I know what's going on!)

Ahem. I have spent the week wondering where in the merry name of all distracted universes the time keeps going to. I wake up. I go to bed. In between there's generally 12 to 18 hours of something going on, but I'll be double-jiggered if I can always remember what it was. Written down in black and white pixelations it just doesn't look that impressive. Wake up. Wander into the kitchen. Try to figure out what to feed Banshees that doesn't involve A. cooking or B. cleaning or C. cleaning, cooking, and then cleaning again. Give up and go for option C. Put TubDucks in the tub. Clean out the Saxony bin. Check on the outdoor ducks to make sure they have clean water, lots of food, and oh yeah, count heads to make sure everybody made it through the night. Interlaced between all of this moments of "Quit doing th-- I said quit doing that! A dozen times! WHY ARE YOU STILL DOING IT??

I don't know.

Well, QUIT. IT. PLEASE.

Turn the Saxony eggs in the incubator and wonder if obsessive observation will get the pitifully few remaining Appleyard eggs to hatch. (It won't, but that has never stopped me.)

Catch up on the internet news, including my multiple email addresses. Realize that I have an issue due very very shortly and No Authors. None. Well, one, but he submitted early and I would run off with him for that alone but his wife and my husband and our collected offspring probably wouldn't understand. And I'm probably not his type anyway.

Go play with the ducks.

Untangle Banshees who are using sophisticated logic techniques for situations that are highly illogical. Wonder if drinking is still an option. Decide that yes, it is, but only if I'm drinking unsweetened ice tea so concentrated it could fill my ink catridges without anybody noticing the difference.

Go play with ducks again. Let the Banshees play with the older ducklings. Wonder why lunchtime went by without me noticing it or fixing anything for it. Well, the offspring aren't complaining (that's what the full fruit bowl is for and the sliced home-made bread over there on the counter. And they know how to get into the vegetables in a pinch. They aren't going hungry, just waiting for me to notice that nothing hot has gone into their maws for a while now.) Fix food, wonder if I should call it lunch or dinner or just nourishment at this point.

Spend more time on the internet researching washing machine options. A. repair, B. replace, C. replace and figure out how to dismantle the old machine in as destructive a manner as possible. A will cost nearly as much as B and DBS won't let me consider C. Something about zoning restrictions. Pah.

quit doing that I told you a thousand and one times that you are NOT supposed to bop your sister with a pillow because she doesn't want to watch the same movie you want to watch and have seen if I must remind you at least 8 times over the last two days. she's entitled to a turn and I'm entitled to a rest and I TOLD YOU NOT TO DO THAT ANYMORE

Watch as LB comes into the room completely oblivious to my presence, stop, plop her book down, try to spell and sound out several words, and then pick the book up and wander off, blissfully satisfied that she's worked something out. Figure out fractions with EB with the aid of a cookbook. Figure out that the reason MB can't recount any incident with any accuracy (or indeed, at all) is because he needs to re-enact the scene in his head and sometimes with his body before he can remember it. Melissa is right; this is a kinesthetic child. He'll probably have to learn his fractions while bouncing on a pogo stick. Decide that a pogo stick is better than bungee cords. Decide that I'm thrilled to finally notice that he needs to be physical when he's remembering and I'm also the world's most incompetent mother not to have noticed it before. Here's hoping children are as resilient as everyone tells me they can be.

Decide that frontloading washing machine from the local dings'n'dents shop will be just perfect. We just won't be able to drive any further than the end of the driveway for a couple of months. Oh well, that gives us time to get used to the bicycles.

Tell the gentleman (term very loosely used) from the cable company that YES I know I'm cutting off the cable t.v. and WHY is because I can't afford it anymore and by anymore I mean under any circumstances you care to name unless you are offering it to me for free. Repeat this three times and then threaten to get very very irritated. Goodbye and have a good day to you too, buddy. I am keeping the internet connection because I need the internet connection, but we do not now and never have needed needed the television set. It's a pacifier, it's a brain sucker, I lose entire days to it, and yes I'm going to miss it enormously. Feeding the children and keeping the lights on is more important than whether we get to see another rerun of whatever it is we seem to be watching right now, though. Gas = $4.32 a gallon. 50# flour = $34 when it used to be $14. Cable =/= necessary, thanks very much.

Run all over the middle part of my very large county, because if I'm going to waste the gas to get to the middle part of my very large county, I'm going to do as many errands as is humanly possible so I don't have to come out again to the middle part of my very large county. But at least everything that needed to get done has gotten done and the Banshees have new pairs of shoes to show for it all.

Now I have to get all of the Banshees to bed because, after all, I only announced that they would have to go to bed at 9 p.m. half an hour ago and nobody could be expected to remember or heed that. And after that I've got to fix the toilet -- again -- but at least it's a very old, very familiar, and very cheap fix that generally stays in place for a few years.

And I'm going to ignore doing dishes tonight in favor of egg-watch, because two of the Appleyards have finally decided to pip their eggs and announce their intentions of joining the world. Sleep? Should. Probably won't.

Tomorrow we do all of this (or something incredibly like it) all over again.

I should be skinnier than I am.

Oh, Yeah. THAT'S Why I Hate Software Updates

2008-06-01T18:36:00.000-07:00

And for the record, I'm not talking about my Ubuntu Linux setup. It has its own issues, but updating and erasing links like nobody's business is not one of them.

Oh yeah, and a special thanks to the new version of the virus protection that refuses to update, scan, or uninstall itself. It's been swell. Really.

I'm going to spend the next goodness knows how long trying to remember url's and proper blog titles and I'm going to have to do it sober because good parents don't let their Banshees see them fold under frustration...and even if I wait until they go to bed, hacking this computer to pieces and holding the screaming, squealing bits of shattered hard drive up to really powerful magnets is something I want to remember in the morning.

I don't know exactly how one becomes a computer geek -- I rather suspect that suffering the slings and arrows of outrageous software is part of it -- but when I figure it out, I'm coming down with a case of full-throated Wagnerian Valkyrie-Geek-on-Steroids.

Also known as: the more I deal with Microsoft, the more I love Linux.

Dinner and Mashed Potatoes

2008-05-27T17:53:00.001-07:00

I told the Banshees that I was going to name the new ducklings Dinner and Mashed Potatoes. They seemed to think that those were inappropriate appellations, I can't for the life of me think why. So, for the record, they are now known as Sir Edmund Hilary and To Be Announced, TBA for short.

Left: TBA, Right: Sir Edmund Hilary

Sir Edmund may or may not be accurately named, genderly-speaking, but temperamentally it's dead on. I've never known a duck so determined to get to the top of things and he/she is very nearly as curious as a mongoose. TBA is much more laid-back.

For the record, Sir Edmund is the duckling pictured in the cup and among the eggs , and the duckling that EB is holding is TBA. They're even cuter in person.

But I still think we should have named them Dinner and Mashed Potatoes.....

A Thumping! A Bumping! A Wild Alive Scratching!

2008-05-26T14:44:00.001-07:00

"My egg!" shouted Horton. "My EGG! WHY, IT'S HATCHING!"

Of course, I was out ordering duck food and buying bedding so I missed the whole thing! But that's all right, the Banshees and DBS got to see it all. I may have to tie anchors on them before a strong wind blows them away on their cloud of bliss....

What A Difference A Day Makes

2008-05-26T07:19:00.000-07:00

24 little hours....

Almost There

2008-05-25T21:12:00.000-07:00

On occasion a duck will hatch and still not have absorbed all of the egg yolk. (This can be due to too high a temperature or an over-eager midwife. Poor Quacker.) When this happens, you're supposed to keep the duck as still as possible and as humid as possible. Hence, measuring cup and wet paper towels and tucked back in the incubator as soon as the photo op was finished. This one is now out of the measuring cup and the rest of the egg but its belly button is still a bit distended. I'll rest a lot better when everything is where its supposed to be.

Egg Number 2 is a-rockin' and a-rollin' and we're expecting great things tomorrow. I get the funniest feeling that this one is going to be a dark duck, which is cool -- it's LIVE duck that I'm really rooting for.

The hatching of Egg Number 1 was marred by the loss of one of the Cayugas. We don't really know what happened, but given the set of symptoms we're worried about the rest of the Quackers. It could have been a bit of moldy feed and a particularly vulnerable duck, or it could be a contagious disease and the possibility of losing the whole flock. Now I'm nibbling the other set of fingernails up to the elbow. If everybody is still healthy in seven days I'll let out the breath that I'm holding right now.

More pics tomorrow if Hatchling Number 1 has continued breathing and will hold still long enough. They're called runners for a reason, folks!

Guess I Won't Be Getting Sleep Tonight

2008-05-24T22:50:00.000-07:00

Day 28

2008-05-24T06:31:00.000-07:00

Okay. The timeline for hatching ducks is 28 days. Give or take a day or two. I just have to keep repeating this to myself and save the liquid depressant celebration for later, after they are well out of the shell.

But come on, already.

This really is no lesson to impart to the children, staring obsessively at a styrofoam box while picking incessantly at my nails. You're in there, I think, I know you're in there and I'd love to help. Just crack the [expletive(s) deleted] shell and I'm on it.

Okay, I'll wait until it's clear you're not going to make it on your own.

For all of you purists out there who insist that ducks get out of their calcium cages themselves I'm going to point out that I'm going to ignore you. Don't bother telling me that I would be doing the absolutely worst thing possible. These are going to belong to a backyard flock, it doesn't matter if they're less than perfect. I'll also point out that I have midwifed ducklings before -- granted I was twelve or thirteen at the time, but the operations were successful and the poultry all thrived until Mom put them in the stewpot. It can be done. Some of the tidbits I've pulled off of the web in the last six weeks leads me to believe that a perfectly healthy duck or chick might not make it out of the egg because of less than perfect incubation. And darn it, I can't stand to think that a thin (to me) bit of shell is all that stands between life and death. Especially since I've already lost so may otherwise viable eggs to my less-than-perfect home-made incubator. These runners are the last of 13 eggs (6 Appleyard, 7 Runner) that went into that system; I'm going to fight tooth and nail to see that they have a decent chance.

There are highlights to leaven the anxiety. There is some very busy pecking away at the inside of the shell; all I have to do is hold it up to my ear to hear those changes. A couple of days a go it was peck..........peck..........................peck. Today it's like a little featherweight jackhammer in there. I want out, I want out! And there's an addition: peeping. Every once in a while I hear little tiny chirps.

I candled the whole incubated lot yesterday since we're far enough along to see some sort of growth on all of the eggs. I had to throw out 13 of the 36 I had in there, including one that had started to develop but then the shell got cracked. You couldn't see it without a strong light on it. There were one or two that were iffy-looking but I saved them anyway on GP. Because, as luck would have it, when I was candling the two runner eggs that I thought were dead...turns out one of them isn't. Granted, the egg isn't in optimal shape. It has much more airspace on the inside than it should, but that critter is making a go of it. Tap, tap, taptaptaptaptap. I want out!!

28 days. It's a guideline, not set in stone.

Agh.

Chewing Fingernails Up To The Elbow

2008-05-21T23:46:00.000-07:00

I have but one viable runner duck egg. I've been using my nifty new candler on it, that's how I know it's still viable.

Yesterday I could see the duckling moving a little.

This morning it was a very active little wriggler.

This evening it had pierced the inner mebrane, a necessary first step for breaking out of the egg.

I'm hoping tomorrow it will manage to get a beak out of the shell.

Oh yeah. And I'm a nervous wreck.

Did I mention that hatching can take days?? I think I'm going to pull out that dog-eared copy of Good Omens, pull out a chair next to the incubator, and make like an expectant father.

Pics to follow if I'm not shaking too hard to get good ones.

Alas, still just 24 hours long

2008-05-18T19:33:00.000-07:00

We didn't get to the fair.

I haven't done a lick of housework.

Park day was accomplished and we've all decided to shift it two hours earlier next Sunday because it has become the High Desert's usual imitation-of-eternal-damnation-on-a-skillet hot.

And

The most Important Part, of course

The Banshees have their very own bicycles. Whee!

One Cloud is Often Lonely

2008-05-18T09:20:00.000-07:00

To quote Richard Adams, of Watership Down Fame. It sounds a lot better than omygodomygodomygodomygod....

Which may be translated, by those who have known me for any length of time, as stuffing 48 hours-into-24 again.

Today, DBS's one day off this week, we have 1. bicycle shopping, 2. park day, 3. possibly the county fair, and 4. more housecleaning. Of course DBS won't be participating in at least two of those events but the Banshees and I will be. Tomorrow morning I will roll over and eye the ringing alarm with much disfavor. I won't be able to ignore it because of the cheeping, squeaking, peeping crew in the bathroom. They're like babies everywhere; they do nothing but eat and sleep and make noises and messes and demand attention. Also like babies everywhere, they're utterly adorable even when up to their eyeballs in the latest round of mischief. However, unlike the Banshees, these little quackers are getting thrown out of the house next week when they start to get stinky. I'll get my bathroom back!

I have a confession to make: I actually bought a smidgeon of curriculum last week. Specifically, I bought Saxon math for homeschoolers. Right now I'm poking at it gingerly with a long, long stick, hoping it doesn't blow up on me or bite me or something equally unpleasant. It's a fairly pricey bit of work but I finally came to the conclusion that I need a bit of structure when it comes to teaching math and the Banshees will just have to lump it. Yes, they're miserable right now, moping and whining "Mom, can we have math now? How about now? Now?? Please? You said...."

Some days it just isn't worth chewing through the restraints.

reducks

2008-05-16T18:44:00.001-07:00

I ordered 15 ducks. I got 15 ducks, but it appears that the order was skewed just a little -- I got 9 Cayugas instead of 8 (their famous extra in case of fatality). Obviously I was missing something else somewhere.

Based on body configuration, that Chocolate Runner evidently is not a Chocolate Runner. So they're sending me a Chocolate Runner and a Surprise Duck breed TBA next week. Wheee! I love surprise packages! I'm just going to be a little worried until they get here safely: there's a reason why most hatcheries will send no fewer than 10 at a time.

A friend loaned me the 4H poultry package. I like the looks of it and if I can persuade the Banshees that it's a good idea (and if they believe me) then we might be joining up. I like the idea of showing the ducks off. Even if we don't officially join I may just have them run through the program anyway -- there's a lot to learn there, and I'm evil, mean, and sneaky when it comes to getting knowledge into tiny craniums.

I also learned from the horse's mouth, as it were, that I cannot bring a cow onto the property unless I have an educational permit. When I had the dog shot and tagged I asked Animal Control about backyard bovines. Evidently there are 'agricultural' zones in our fair city that don't require any sort of permits, but I'm in a special license zone. If we ever get around to being able to afford that cow I'll start investigating what hoops I have to go through to get the permit. Considering the price tag on Buttercup and Barbeque though, it will be at least 15 years and another property before I can even begin to think about affording them.

Ducks: The Sequel

2008-05-14T18:29:00.000-07:00

You knew I wasn't going to able to leave this alone, right? I was getting used to the pitter patter of webbed feet, the cheeping and the peeping and the red light of the brooder lamp turning our bathroom into something like an extra from Amityville Horror: the (poultry) Obsession. So I called Metzer Farms and groveled. (Actually, I didn't need to grovel much; the ducks I wanted were either in wide demand or the amount I wanted was so small that the extras could come my way.) Without further ado, let's meet the new flock.

In The Tub

Fifteen ducks. Fifteen. Yes, I need my head examined.

Cayuga

One of the new Cayugas: 6 females, 1 male, 1 undecided.

Golden Hybrid 300 Four of these little ladies.

Queen Bess, Chocolate Runner

Just one, and she already has The Royal Attitude

Khaki Campbell

Aristophanes (not pictured) and Lysistrata

And shall I mention that I finally found a place that would sell me White Runners? Because they have a minimum order of 10 and the White Runners are for the spouse, who doesn't care whether they're male or female, I ordered 2 of his ducks and 8 Saxony ducks. I'm hoping that I get at least one female with the group so I can start a breeding bunch there. Big duck, the Saxony. I know they have big eggs.

How do I know the Saxony can produce humongous eggs? Umm....

Well. The home-made incubator didn't do too well with the temperature regulation. I'm sure that it would have if I could have been there 24-hours a day to keep careful watch, but I have three children and a spouse and a large parcel of land, not to mention the other projects that keep me busy (and shall we throw in the fact that I do need sleep every once in a while??), so the temperature swings on that critter got very wild and wide. I'm trying to save the four remaining runner eggs, but the original Silver Appleyard eggs are toast. They're supposed to hatch out this weekend and I can't bring myself to bury them before then, but come Monday morning they're gone.

Which brings me to my DBS's dental visit last week. He sat next to a woman who was knitting, something he happens to know something about because he's married to a woman who knits. Obsessively. He asked her what she was knitting, she said "A scarf," and he said that his wife knitted too and she was working on a shawl. In the course of the conversation he mentioned that his wife was raising ducks, and she said, "How interesting. I know a couple of women who are raising ducks!" She told him that she raised llamas, that she spun the fiber and used the yarn for items that she sold on Etsy. He said that was great! And by the way, his wife also had an Etsy shop that she might have heard of -- MadWoman Soaps.

Whereupon she looked at him and said, "Stephanie...you're Stephanie's husband?!?"

Hello, Marti. Forgive me for butchering at least part of that story, I'm sure.

Marti in her infinite generousity gifted us with an incubator and I promptly set about filling it up with eggs. First, the four surviving runner eggs. I don't know if they're going to make it but they were only in my incubator for a week, so there's a chance. Then there were the 13 Silver Appleyards I ordered to make up for the ones that I have a sneaking suspicion I've lost. And then I went absolutely barking mad and ordered some Saxony eggs. I won 12 at an Ebay auction and the woman sent me 19. WOW. If I'm counting correctly that's 36 potential ducks. If I get a 60% successful hatch that's 21-22 new ducks.

(We shall respectfully pause while the author runs around the computer area like a headless bit of poultry.)

Well. There will be a bit of culling going on here come Thanksgiving. I will send the offspring and DBS to the mom-in-law's and promptly become very, very sick. But I shall also be up to my freezer-top in roast duck and in these days of rising food costs, that's no small thing.

It Doesn't Get Grimmer Than This

2008-05-07T21:42:00.000-07:00

Today our dog ripped the greenhouse netting to shreds, pulled the ducklings out from under the wire netting, and mauled them to death. It was hard enough finding the pitiful little bodies. It was worse when the children demanded to see them. How do you hide one of the more bitter realities of life from your babies? Should you even try? The dog was being a dog; the protection that I thought was adequate was not. I chose not to hide the consequences from them; I didn't see how I could, given all that needed to be done to deal with the situation.

How do you deal with a child's heartbreak when they realize that Mommy can't sprinkle magic dust and make everything all better? My five-year-old still seems to think everything is going to be all right in the morning. My seven-year-old is angry with the dog. My 8-year-old wants everything to be a nightmare she can wake up from. Oh my darling dearest heart, would that it could be so.

My husband made an executive decision on his way home after hearing the news. He called his mother up and our dog now has a new home. My MIL thinks of this canine as her first grandchild, so it will be a good home, probably better than this one in many respects.

I feel awful. I feel awful that I didn't protect those ducklings better, that I wasn't there to rescue them. I feel awful that we're getting rid of the dog, who has been with us for so long and really is a good dog. I feel horrendously guilty for feeling glad that we're getting rid of the dog. Conflicted is not even the beginning of this feeling. Some time in the night the tears will finally come and I will weep the ending to this terrible, terrible day.

Other Events That Cause Moms to Run Screaming Into the Night

2008-05-06T07:22:00.000-07:00

When I candled last night to make sure that all of the remaining eggs were okay, it turned out that they weren't. I still have a couple of Silver Appleyards that are just (pardon the pun) ducky, but the rest of the eggs have quit developing and are getting very dark. I'm going to candle again tonight and if there isn't any movement, deep-six the unfortunates. Bah. Those temperature swings were bound to take their toll but I was hoping down through my toenails that they wouldn't. I also had to get rid of a runner duck egg that simply wasn't developing; that's not nearly as heartbreaking as having to make the call on something that had already shown potential. Some of the runner ducks are showing development but I couldn't detect heartbeat. I'm gritting my teeth and hoping that at least one duck out of the dozen I've been cultivating manages to hatch out. I don't want to be posting that "And Then There Were None" piece. I also accept that Mama Nature, while resilient, is a tough, unsentimental anthropomorphic personification who is willing to throw in the towel when circumstances demand it. I, however, am terribly sentimental and not at all tough. Hatch, darn it.

I wonder what the going rate on kidneys is? Because trading one for one of these:

is beginning to sound very appealing.

Candling: An Important Point

2008-05-04T20:25:00.001-07:00

Candle your eggs.

Candle ALL of your eggs.

I didn't candle the runner duck eggs. The suspicious looking one that I was going to candle tonight blew up before I could. The smell is not insignificant, but I've had three babies -- I am comfortable with my ability to handle the smell. It's the bacteria load that's been put on the remaining (hopefully) still-viable eggs that's got me chewing fingernails up to my elbow.

St. Vidicon, meet St. Francis. You think you guys can work together on this one?

For Colleen, Because I Said I Would

2008-05-04T15:34:00.001-07:00

And for Bobbi, Because She Asked

The repurposed greenhouse with its new tenants....

Khaki Campbell duckling

Cayuga duckling

10 Reasons Why I Love the United States Postal Service

2008-05-03T08:41:00.000-07:00

They called me Tuesday to pick up a box of peeping, squeaking ducklings that had been shipped out Monday. All of them healthy, happy, and not terribly sure about the strange woman who chirped at them all the way home.

A breeding pair of Khaki Campbells. 8 Cayugas -- 6 females, one male, and an extra that hasn't declared itself yet. (The hatcheries sometimes ship an extra in case of mailing mortality.)

Since they aren't feathered yet and it's still cold in these parts (newly-hatched quackers need about 90 degree temperature to feel comfy), they're spending the nights in a Rubbermaid storage bin and their days in my tub under the cosy red light of a brooding lamp. They've grown like weeds in the last few days and their tail feathers are starting to come in.

The last parts for my hoop house have also come in; no excuses now, I have to build that duck run.

Monday. Today I have a field trip to CalEarth that is part of a birthday party for a friend of the Banshees. Sunday I have park day with another friend of the Banshees. Monday I ship Banshees off to a babysitter (who happens to be the mother of two of the Banshees' friends) and I get a few blissful hours where I can concentrate utterly and wholely on a project.

Yeah. Homeschoolers. Unsocialized. Totally.

Adventures in Candling, part 2

2008-05-03T08:37:00.000-07:00

Like an over-anxious grand-mama I've been hovering. This morning I candled and stared at the dark mass, wondering if it was a duck or if the poor egg had been stressed past the point of viability.

Movement. Is it a heartbeat? A duckling turning over in it's sleep?

It's a little webbed foot, actively swimming in the heart of its shell.

Wow.

And Now For Something Completely Different

2008-04-28T07:55:00.000-07:00

It's quiet.

That's an elusive quality in this household. I'm enjoying it. I'm hoping to enjoy it for a while but I'm sure the universe and Murphy will conspire against me and MB will coming chirping down the hallway in a minute, entirely too energetic for this time of day. But it has been quiet for a little while, at least. I could get used to this.

I've had to set the alarm clock (horrors!) to 5:30 a.m. every day in order to turn the duck eggs. The Banshees have been staying up later and later these days; last night they didn't get into bed until a quarter to 10. The lovely, albeit unintended, side effect is that they're starting (finally!) to sleep in of a morning and I have all of this wonderful, wonderful stillness going on. I could so get used to this.

In fact, I may have to go out of my way to keep cultivating it. One of the difficult things about being a stay at home AND homeschooling Mom of three is getting any down time, any down time at all. This deprivation can and has lead to all sorts of stress issues with the current Mom in charge and I've been wondering rather desperately how to get Me time in a household that doesn't have an extra minute to squeeze anything out of. Then I do a stupid thing like bid for hatching eggs, the winning of which absolutely and unequivocally means that I have to get up early in the morning -- and I find this unexpected peace on my doorstep. I'm not a morning person. I'm not, I'm not, I'm not.

But for this, I'm going to try very hard to be one.

I'm going to try very hard to keep the kitchen spotless, so when I get up in the morning I can throw together a cup of tea without waking anybody up.

I'm going to keep the knitting by the reading couch, so I can have an hour or two of uninterrupted work on the Bridal Faroe (I don't have a bride in mind and may never, considering the learning curve and its aftereffect, but the thing is Big, and the perfect shade of cream, and it looks lacy despite being plain ol' garter stitch, and more than one knitter has asked me about my friends' and family's current wedding schedules when they see it.)

I can do the quiet little chores that always seem to go to the wayside when attempting to keep three Banshees awake, alive, and aware.

One of them appears to be awake now (LB, wow, I would have lost that office pool!) so I'll have to go now. But oh, it's been a lovely couple of hours.

Whereupon One Homeschooling Mother Tears Her Hair Out and Runs Screaming Into the Night

2008-04-26T23:51:00.000-07:00

Or something like that.

Keeping a steady temperature on this little modified icebox of mine is turning out to be a bit of beggardly headache. It wants to go high, it wants to go low. It only wants to stay at a steady 99 degrees if I am actively staring at the thermometer. The minute I don't it strays anywhere from 95-105 degrees and I start another set of gray hairs. And I shouldn't do that, because the Banshees aren't going to have any of the fun of turning me completely snow-white when they hit adolescence -- a treat that my parents have earned, even if the Banshees have not.

Oh yes. I got more hatching eggs today; I bid on five and the woman generously sent me seven runner duck eggs. I was hoping I could call the color since she advertised having white runners, but there's nothing in the fine print that says the bidder gets to choose, so I'm hoping that one of the hatchees of this batch is a nice, snowy white. I'm not planning on telling the Dear Beleaguered Spouse about this...I can trust that y'all can keep a secret?

But this is The Last Batch, because summer is coming and we don't have working a.c.. It's hard enough keeping a steady temp without taking on a scorching ambient temp as well. It's just as well since I really do need to get into The Wilderness and carve out a duck run/tomato patch. I'm getting day-old ducklings next week and they're going to need to go somewhere to keep them out from under the dog's feet.

It's been fun watching the Banshees' faces light up when they're told that something warm and feathery and alive might come out of this little egg, and seeing their reactions when they glimpse the inside of the egg during candling. All those little bitty blood veins running hither and yon, and DBS swears that if you look closely enough you can see the tiny avian heart beating. We're hoping to get usable pictures tomorrow, knock wood. One week down, three more to go for the Silver Appleyards.

I still have to wait.

Aghhhhh.

Adventures in Candling

2008-04-23T22:12:00.000-07:00

Take:
1 bright flashlight
1 egg that's been in an incubator at just about four days
1 overanxious, hovering, inexperienced midwife
mix gently in a darkened room.

Wow, those look like blood vessels....!

DBS really does think I've lost my marbles, but the Banshees ooohed and ahhed and thought this was the coolest event in the whole wide world. I wasn't supposed to do this until Sunday, but you know how things get! I can hardly wait. But I have to. Another 3 1/2 weeks.

AGHHHH.

Incubator

2008-04-21T00:38:00.000-07:00

Bleh

2008-04-17T19:53:00.000-07:00

I was going to write something incredibly insightful and witty. I have about three drafts' worth of insightful and witty in the can. It just isn't working out; I get to the sixth paragraph and feel defeated because none of them are worth a tinker's dam and surely not worth any of you wasting your time on.

I figured it out today (or rather, dear beleagured spouse figured it out. He's brilliant that way.)

I.

am.

stressed.

and I'm afraid it's of the "completely whacked out of her head" variety. My friends tell me it's because I try to put 48 hours into the average 24, but that's not it. Lots of people raise children, keep a picked up house (note that I'm not going for immaculate. I'm going for being able to see carpet again), have a yard that won't lose a peck of peeved pygmies, run a newsletter, crochet, knit, spin, repair floor looms, brew beer, make soap, keep up with 52 varieties of tomato (not a typo: I really did write 52 varieties of tomato), raise citrus trees -- in the high desert, where winter temps routinely dip below citrus-killing temperatures -- and do battle with a fence-eating grape vine. Not to mention the times when I squeeze in teaching fractions and phonetics to various momentarily-still offspring.

Dear beleagured spouse points out that I just built an incubator for the duck eggs that are arriving tomorrow, so add junior electrician and all-around handyman to the list. And the fence. I need to rebuild part of the fence. We won't even mention the tomato house/duck run that I'm architeching in those spare few moments I manage to cadge now and then.

I mean, people do this all of the time and manage to do it well. What's wrong with me?

As you value your existence, do not attempt to answer that.

Sometimes They Remind Me

2008-02-09T14:49:00.000-08:00

Let's face it. One of the top five reasons for me, personally, to be homeschooling could charitably be called laziness. I've never figured out why learning is supposed to be a difficult process. I know that my years in public school had me convinced that learning was equivalent to sweating blood, having night terrors, or being audited by the I.R.S. ...but in the 20+ years (and never mind how many + years there might be!) I sort of figured out differently. What I know, I mean what I really know know, is stuff that I learned myself. This was knowledge that I went after like a shark in a feeding frenzy, or stalked with the patience of someone who enjoys watching rocks grow. Test me on anything I was taught in high school and I might come up dismal; test me on what I taught myself and the rodeo is on.

Still, I have those days. Those days when I wake up and realize that all my children do, all day long, is watch the Science/History/AllDayEveryDayScooby Channel, or poke around in the back yard, or read books that feature dancing rabbits. I have the almost irresistable impulse to sharpen a slew of pencils, sit them all down at the kitchen table at 8 a.m., and teach them calculus. That I myself have never taken calculus and that the Banshees are still in the single digit age realm should be clues numbers one and two that my panic has caused me to be semi-delusional. I panic and I have not now, nor have I ever been, a good thinker under such situations.

Now, let's introduce you to MB. That's the middle child, the one I swear would be on half a dozen medications for ADHD if I'd left him in public school. He's outgoing and energetic and in the last six months or so has taken his native story-telling abilities to new heights. When he gets into a subject, he gets into it with spelunking gear in hand. He's going to dig and delve and immerse himself in his current interest. He bites into it and gets lockjaw. (I will go on record here that it's all from his father's side of the family. I certainly never display these characteristics. Just ignore what I said in the opening paragraph. I get interested to an obsessive degree; my spouse gets interested to a degree that would have most OCD patients shaking their heads.) What's interesting about MB, however, is that he will then follow you around the house and pour out everything that he's just processed. Constantly. For days. And he never seems to breathe. It isn't always accurate but he's doing a credible job for his age. We first noticed this when he latched onto the story of the Titanic; he now has books and models and a dvd about Titanic and won't pass up an opportunity to learn something new about that boat. (Yes, we do have a multiplicity of doting grandparents. How could you tell?) He lectures about not only the Titanic but Britanic and Olympic as well. (If you didn't know Titanic had sister-ships, now you do. Did you also know that there was a passenger on Titanic that was working aboard the Britanic when it sank?)

MB studies stars and galaxies and has nightmares about black holes swallowing up the solar system. (Yes, we've told him this is unlikely. Now we need to get back up sources -- but if you're going to teach someone to question experts, they're going to start with the nearest ones.) Today he rushed into the room, breathlessly spewing everything he'd just learned about volcanoes. Without breathing. Finally I asked him if we were going to have to get him as much material on geology as he's got on Titanic. I think I can safely interpret the reaction as "Yes, yes, a thousand times yes!" I told him that we would have to test drive a few books from the library, and that some of them were likely to be books written for grown ups. Did he, I inquired politely, feel up to the task of tackling grow-up books? Yes, he said, bouncing. Okay, I said. And then, as he turned to leave the room, he started humming the theme from Superman.

Signs and Portents

2008-02-07T21:27:00.000-08:00

My spouse, poor man, has learned over the years that sometimes seeking shelter and riding out the storm is the only way to survive. Despite all propaganda, it isn't necessarily when I'm moody or irritable. Moody and irritable he understands and can handle. Usually all it takes is a large bag of chocolate and a litte alone time. He knows about wanting alone time and huge chunks of dark chocolate'n'blueberry bark. He lives with the Banshees too. He knows. It's my enthusiasms he dreads.

It's the days when I want to dig up the entire back yard and plant every variety of tomato in the Tomato Grower's Supply catalog (and believe me, that's quite a few.)

It's when I want to tear the fence down and replace it during one of his rare vacations. (It would be perfect! He gets to watch the kids while I do basic maintenance. What isn't to like?)

It's when I decide that the megalithic greenhouse that I'm dreaming of is just a tad on the small side, and while we're at it, let's add a larger heater as well.

It's when I opine that I need $$,$$$ to start a business. I like making soap. A lot. And I've had my eyes on this gear forever.

It's when I latch on to the monolithic dome website like a radioactive leech and start trying to teach myself architecture, layout, and interior design all in a single afternoon.

These are all signs of the impending apocalypse as far as my beloved spouse is concerned. I know I'm not going to get to do half of these things. Heck, my drawing alone is enough to teach me heaping amounts of humility. My mother could draw. I can weld. They're different skill sets and I despair that I'm ever going to get spatial relations down (on the other hand, I did teach myself to knit. It took me 25 years, but I did it!) I'm not going to get to plow the back forty with three small children on the property, not without chaining them to something large and heavy, a practice CPS actively discourages. And I know, because I handle the family finances, that $$ on soap gear is stretching it, much less !$$,$$$. I know it, and he knows it, but somehow he just can't relax about it.

Perhaps it's because I can't stop talking about it. My dh is a practical man; when he develops an enthusiasm he researches viability. If he can't do it, he develops a different enthusiasm. Me, I learn for the sake of learning. So it's unlikely I'll ever have the resources to pull together a coherent and cohesive monolithic dome drawing, let alone ever have the cash to build it. I'm going to know exactly how to put one together anyway. Just 'cause it's neat. And just because I have never known just what knowledge is going to come in handy somewhere down the road.

I had a nephew once ask me what I intended to do with all of the "useless knowledge" that I had accumulated. If he had started speaking in Javanese I don't think I could have been more startled. Useless knowledge? There is such a thing? But he was all of maybe 14 at the time, raised in a much different household than I was, and goodness knows the young man has his own personality and way of looking at the universe.

But still. Useless knowledge?? That just isn't possible. There's knowledge that I don't have a specific use for but that doesn't make it useless. If nothing else it makes me positively lethal at Trivial Pursuit. However, it's also very true that, as I said before, that no one ever knows when some small bit of knowledge, some kernal of learning, is going to synthesize with something else to create pure genius...or at least, the solution to the problem at hand. It has happened to me before. Carrying around all these disparate enthusiasms and boundless curiousities has helped me look at everything from raising children to raising Cain in a whole new way. New engineering feats aren't always born from numbers and isometric drawings; new scientific breakthroughs are as much about flights of poetic inspiration as they are about the known laws of physics or molecular bonds.

I'm not going to cure cancer. Heck, I can't even get the tomato seeds to germinate when I want them to. The house will never be a la Martha Stewart; it's a rare occasion when I can see a flat patch of counter space. But I have this boundless enthusiasm for learning and I hope, I wish, I want to be able to pass that enthusiasm on to my children. They may be the ones who have those marvelous, miraculous, legendary breakthroughs -- or they might be the inspiration for the person who will. They may be thinkers and poets and philosophers that have no great fame beyond their own family circle and as long as happiness and content are part of that circle, there is every reason to rejoice. Just as long as they inherit my love of learning, my enthusiasm for figuring things out -- their father's tenacity in the face of obstacles -- as long as they keep striving to learn more and loving every minute of the journey, then I will count myself a successful parent.

St. Vidicon and the Universe

2008-02-05T20:10:00.000-08:00

Christopher Stasheff is the author of the Warlock Series, most of which I've read and enjoyed very much. I mention him because he created the patron saint of technology, someone I've invoked an awful lot since I started delving into computers and learning the mysterious ways of the internet. I've told my spouse that I'm going to create a niche for a statue of St. Vidicon of Cathode and I'm only half-joking. It isn't that I really believe that a mythical Saint of a religion I have no ties to is going to save my hard drive if it's bound and determine to crash, but there are just times when invoking a fictional saint makes me feel better. It also keeps me from reprogramming the delicate and complicated gadgetry with the tin-knocker's ax that I keep around. St. Vidicon keeps me sane when the internet connection goes south, when the server melts down, and when the files I just downloaded disappear into the ether without a trace. "St. Vidicon, save me from Murphy and the Imp of the Perverse*" is a mantra that is repeated with varying degrees of frequency and feeling in my computer nook. (Even as we speak the internet connection has gone cattywhompus...again. Does garlic work on Murphy or is that just vampires?)

And then there are times when I just blame my position on the Universe in general. That's when something becomes, at least in my mind, unavoidable. There are details about blogs and blog traffic and blog etiquette that I figured I'd never really need to know. No one reads this thing except for a few of my nearest and dearest friends. I have no need to go out and drag traffic back to my blog; there is no inner exhibitionist in my soul screaming LOOK AT ME! in ultra-shrill tones. My friends know where to find me and I'm cool just hanging out here in my own microscopic corner of the web. But the Universe just knocked and I'm going to pay attention because...well, because I'm peeved. All right, I'm far beyond peeved, this emotion goes all the way into immediate white-hot outrage. Deborah Markus, who runs The Secular Homeschooling Magazine, had one of her pieces stolen. When the thief was confronted about it he basically shrugged and said that it was making too much money for him to give it back. My first reaction was immediate and visceral and completely unprintable. My second reaction was to do exactly what she has asked of her audience, and that is to link to her blogpost "I'd Rather Be Hated Than Used". I'm also going to link to the original Bitter Homeschooler's Wish List, because I like it and you deserve to know who authored it. Then I'm going listen to the universe when it tells me it's time to learn about trackbacks, Fark, Stumble Upon, Digg, Boing Boing, and any other place that serves such functions, and whatever else it takes to get the word out about this situation. Just because someone can be a thief doesn't mean they should be a thief, or that it's at all advisable to steal.

It has been pointed out by wiser brains than mine that the internet is still very much in the Wild, Wild West phase of its existence. Laws may or may not exist to cover all contingencies and even when they do, they cannot always be invoked effectively. However, where lawlessness is rampant reputation is everything. Which is a long-winded way of saying that what goes around, comes around and it's likely to be a bitter meal. Go Forth, Gentle Reader, and Spread the Word. I'm going to be digging under the couch for the subscription money.

Hat tip to Tammy at Just Enough, and Nothing More for the heads-up.

*The Warlock Unlocked

november 25, 2007

2007-11-25T14:47:00.000-08:00

we never know we are going to say goodbye

even when we know this parting is coming
even when we practice again and again
the word may fall from our lips with ease
every scenario repetitively run through in our brains
and our hearts have braced against inevitability

we never know

just when the doorway down the hall will softly close
the window in another room softly slide into place
and something that was always, is now foreclosed

there is no grace in grief
only hard jumbled feelings
unexpected impassible barriers
sharp edges where once we were whole

National Novel Writer's Month has Officially Started

2007-11-02T15:58:00.000-07:00

So just consider me a lost cause.

I have found in the few hours since it has started that I cannot eat limitless amounts of chocolate and write at the same time. Since I am slow but not entirely stupid I figured out the correlation between feeling sleepy and irritable and my bad diet after a couple of days. Bah humbug. I need to drop everything and run down for carrot sticks and celery...and how come eggplant is starting to sound appealing? And I have this almost overwhelming desire to kick the treadmill out of retirement. Hm.

On the other (and immensely warty) hand, I did get in a couple thousand words yesterday and there are still a few hours left in this day, so I don't think I'll fall too far behind. And if I actually get on that treadmill I'm going to feel a whole lot better. I won't necessarily be able to kick all the after-effects of a chocolate binge, but I'm going for mentally alert and that has a fighting chance.

NaNoWriMo starts soon.

2007-10-29T09:32:00.000-07:00

62 hours, 24 minutes, 28 seconds.

But who's counting?

Animal, Vegetable, Mineral

2007-10-21T17:05:00.000-07:00

I have been a firm believer in grayscale for a very long time. In life there are very few absolutes, and black-and-white examples of anything are rarely representative of the vast majority of occurrences. Want a mind-bending exercise in grayscale? Take a survey class about art. At the beginning of this sort of class almost everybody is absolutely sure about what constitutes art. Whether they've got hazy recollections of Rembrandt or fuzzy half-tone memories of Rodin, most students are very sure that they know what Art is.

And the teacher can't wait, because there are so many mindbending experiences to lead a class through. Is your coffee cup art? You know the one, the generic white vessel sold at arts & craft stores to gullible 8-year-olds, the one that persuades them that a cup decorated with squiggles and splotches and occasional fingerprints is the thing that Mom wants this year? You've fallen for it and I have too. How about your curtains? Does it matter that they came with the apartment or that you hunted through three counties and considered mortgaging your immortal soul for just the right pattern? Is it the pattern on the cloth that makes it art or the impossible amount of work you went through to get it?

It gets worse. Just about everybody thinks that what Da Vinci produced was art. We have several centuries' weight on that opinion. But consider White over Blue by Ellsworth Kelly, which features a white canvas hung slightly in front of a blue canvas. Is it art? If so, why? It doesn't seem to represent anything but a juxtaposition of color. How about Andy Warhol and his endless riff on mundane objects -- painting of a soup can, anyone? If you want a real mind-scrambling experience, look up Bottle Rack, 1963 on the Norton Simon Museum website. You will be told that Marcel Duchamp signed a mass-production bottle rack in 1914; Marcel's particular viewpoint was that anything signed by an established artist then becomes art, even if it's a mass-produced item. I've been told that he was poking an exquisitely sharp stick at the art establishment and its willingness to declare anything of high value simply because a particular person put a fingerprint on it. However, this isn't the oddest part of the affair -- you see, the 1914 bottle rack has disappeared into the mists of time along with the artist's signature. Bottle Rack, 1963 is a replica. A duplicate. I don't even know if the original artist was still breathing when this one was made. So what makes it art?

If you think this exercise is fun, walk into a family law class just as they're starting to debate what makes up a family. The higher the level of observation, the fuzzier the whole thing becomes.

That's sort of what it's like to homeschool. I know what I'm doing (mostly) and just about every homeschooling family I've talked to knows what they're doing, but defining it becomes an exercise in I know it when I see it, but don't ask me to put it in a dictionary. Unfortunately the average human being likes labels and definitions; life is complicated and pre-defined tags makes everything so much easier. That works just fine until something comes along that wears the tag but doesn't look anything like what the viewer associates the tag with.

School-at-home, unschooling, eclectic, etcetera. When those words roll into the optic nerve most people would swear on their favorite neice that they know exactly what they are looking at. But I know that I fit all of those tags once in a while, and two out of three several times a week, and none of the above more often than I want to admit. The person who looks at me in the bathroom mirror says things like Unschooling? HA, it's pure laissez-faire thanks very much. You just cut the cord to the television set and left the option of reading or running around outside. Of course I did, I say in return. Television is all very well for keeping them quiet when I have an article to write, but do I really need to hear the Compleat Works of Scooby Doo Unabridged...again? They need to look at something that doesn't bounce around unless they're doing jumping jacks in the middle of War and Peace. They need to go dig holes that lead to New Zealand -- although that might get interrupted by finding a new insect or crustacean that they want me to google -- or look for raspberries. They, above and beyond all of that, need to be out of the house so I can hear myself think. It's rare, it isn't often that strong, so I do need to be paying attention.

Eclectic, my conscience snorts. You're just throwing different things at them and seeing what sticks. Yeah? I think as I shake my toothbrush at her. And how's the junior set of thumbscrews working out? Because I know these kids. They did not come from a cabbage patch, they were not miraculously delivered by storks -- they have DNA from two of the most stubborn people on the face of the planet. Lead, follow, or get out of their way, but there is no way of forcing them to understand something they aren't ready to understand. Yes, she says smugly, except for those occasions when you do. Which is a stumper, because there are rare occurrences of textbook behavior where I haul out something and say something to the effect of Thou Shalt Learn. And on vanishingly rare occasions it actually works. But it isn't my preferred modus operandi.

If I happened to be painfully honest with myself, something I try valiantly to avoid, I really don't think that learning should be an excrutiating process. Hard, yes; sometimes learning is unbelievably difficult. Sometimes it can be frustrating, as it is when I try to pry open yet another secret from that 'intuitive' computer program (you know the type, it's pretty and you know people who play with it like they were born with the algorhythm, and it doesn't even come with an owner's manual because it's supposed to be SO user friendly. Dante didn't know squat about torment.) So I poke and prod at it every few months. I spend a weekend learning how to move pixel A to point B, and I'm inordinately proud about it. Don't laugh, this is how I eventually taught myself how to knit. Linux can't be too far behind. Learning isn't always easy and it isn't always fun and sometimes you just have to slog through it. But it doesn't have to be boring, it doesn't have to be numbing, it shouldn't be at the point of dire consequences, it shouldn't be the mental equivalent of bamboo under the fingernails or ripping your eyelids off.

So I don't know exactly what you'd call what I do. It's between eclectic and unschooling and school-at-home with a bit of google addiction thrown in on the side. The Banshees learn in the circle of their family, which is as close to a definition of homeschooling as I'm ever going to get.

There might be a SMALL change in plans

2007-09-25T20:27:00.000-07:00

We may have to rebuild the old computer first, after all. It appears that my cd-writer-thingitt has bitten ye olde dust and it has to be replaced if I'm going to back up some of my backuppable things.

I think. This is where the spouse comes in with hot Earl Grey (or Dragonwell green, depending on the pitch of the fit) and speaks soothing words until I quit crying quite so hysterically. He's not worried, so I suppose I shouldn't be.

But it's an old system. And I haven't backed up the way I should. Even though I've already had one computer crash and go boom in a very very final way. Okay. No panic. Deep breaths. Think peaceful, happy thoughts. Do NOT think about the issue that needs to be worked on like, yesterday. Do NOT think of the unhappy children missing math assignments. Everything will be all right.

As soon as I get my new computer. Which I can't afford but want anyway -- but that's a semi-sort-of-larval-stage computer geek for you. I really need to get over the deep desire for the ultimate computer case. The thing is big, it's cool, it's....expensive. I don't need it. I'm not going to be killing off mutant bug monsters in a galaxy far, far away. I'm going to be editing, blogging, corresponding, writing, occasionally getting into something like a video game. I don't need it. This is more my speed. Yeah, and tell it to my howling, fit-throwing inner child.

Okay, when does National Blow-Your-Computer-Up Day begin?

2007-09-21T20:23:00.000-07:00

And if there isn't one, can I be the first to suggest that there really, really needs to be one?

How about hack-it-to-pieces day? Drop a heavy object on it day? Take it to a monster truck rally and accidentally leave it on the field of battle week?

No?

Really, in this time of there-outta-be-a-law frenzy, there ought to be a law saying that you can drop a desktop with impunity from the 405 overpass onto the 605 freeway and watch a long string of 18-wheelers run it over. Except of course that there is only about 10 minutes of any given day that anything with wheels gets up to any sort of speed at that interchange...and there might be a computer geek who would suffer long term emotional damage from witnessing such a spectacle...although a true computer geek has had his or her share of problems that would have them dancing on the hood of their car shouting You go girl!!

Ahem.

I want to mention that my current desktop is not really doing anything wrong. It just got old and now newer, more modern star-belly programs don't want to play with it. Which leaves me with a couple of options. I could go option number 1, the 405/605, except that would leave me without a functioning computer (the laptop works just fine if you don't count the motherboard refusing to connect to the internet) and I hear that the local constabulatory sort of hates this kind of venting. I could go option 2, some preassembled bit of gear from a big name with a lot of options I don't want (can we say, avoiding Vista as long as humanly possible? I knew you could!) and a few things I want that I can't get with this configuration. Or, we can go with option 3: Build My Own.

Now I know I'm lucky to be obscure and to have changed my name once in my lifetime because I tell you this; there is an old boyfriend who would drop dead of massive apoplexy if he ever read that last sentence. Back when we dated I was about as phobic about computers as anyone is ever likely to be. Avoided them like the black plague. Thought that an electric typewriter was as high up the electronic mountain as I was ever going to climb. My brother was the computer genius. I preferred calligraphy over keyboards. But yeah, option 3 is beginning to sound better and better. We can call it a science project and let the kids help, or I can send them to my mother-in-law's for a couple of days and have a functioning computer. They can help me rebuild the old computer when the new system is stable.

A Random Collection of Thoughts

2007-09-20T20:05:00.000-07:00

We're having our two days of autumn this week. Here in the desert we have two primary seasons, otherwise known as summer and winter. Spring and autumn have devolved into transitional seasons that last anywhere from two days to a week, but never any longer. Last week we were having 90 degree weather and this week the temps are dipping into the high 40's at night.

But I like fall weather, transitional or not. It has always felt like something brand new and exciting was about to happen. The dragging heat of the summer is over and the nights are getting crisp; the days are getting shorter and there's all of the planning I start to do when darkness starts happening earlier. I never ever get everything done that I plan to do, but that's what happens when you have three kids, two cats, a dog, a husband, a house (the last of the guppies died last night, but it was nearly two years old which is positively ancient for a guppy.), and the sort of hobby-habit that earns nicknames like Stash Mountain. (I swear, I really do not have that much yarn. It's an optical illusion. Really.)

After a little introspection this feeling of anticipation probably dates back to elementary school, when the beginning of the school year was a time of exciting change; new school clothes, paper that hadn't been written on yet, the feeling that this year was going to be new, different, better somehow. I think maybe in elementary school those things were possible. It was when I went into junior high that everything went into a non-recoverable tail-spin. It was in high school that I began to have the feeling that formal education left a lot to be desired. Or maybe I'm just one of those critters who is hard-wired to like autumn weather and has a predisposition to over-analyze things.

I want to start being a little more formal with the Banshees and their education. The main problem with this, of course, is not the Banshees. It's me. I take to formal anything like ceramic takes to sky-diving. It isn't natural. On the other hand, a little structure will probably be good for me. I may have to be convinced.

Or we can just do what we keep doing, planning on one thing and ending up with something completely different. We were supposed to do history today and ended up researching black holes. EB is a little concerned that a black hole will come by and wreak all sorts of damage; she's somehow convinced herself that black holes were responsible for the disappearance of dinosaurs. (No, dear, the current theory is that meteorite had a lot to do with the lack of large lizards. Or it might have been climate change. Or maybe both. Which devolves into what theories are and why scientists use them. She's still giving me odd looks.) So we find a neat website that says that our sun will never get to be a black hole (not massive enough) and that black holes aren't really black, they just swallow light, and my own personal favorite, that they range in size from a couple of miles across to millions of miles across. It's my personal favorite because I didn't know that before. I knew all about massive stars exploding and collapsing in on themselves, but I didn't know that black holes are also found at the heart of huge galaxies. History gets to wait, but we got a heckuva lot in on astronomy. MB even went on to explore a little of the Solar System before losing interest and wandering off to other, more entertaining activities. (No, you may not pull dresser drawers out just far enough to use them as a step-ladder. It's one of those side deals that physics has with the universe; gravity is a constant and if you overbalance the furniture it will fall on you. Go check out why ladders work when you climb on them and dresser drawers won't. Just as soon as Mommy quits hyperventilating and screeching in painfully high registers.)

Oh yeah, and we had a cougar-alert yesterday. I've lived here for the better part of two decades and this is the first time that I've had the city call me to tell me there were mountain lions in the area and would I please keep an eyeball on any outdoor pets? Now, I like that dog of mine. She's cute and she's intelligent and she's an excellent companion, but she also outweighs all of my children and if a mountain lion is going to think anything is cougar-chow, it's probably not going to be the critter with the functioning fangs. EB spent this morning discovering the difference between the common housecat and their larger cousins.

So we've covered astronomy, scientific methodology, physics, a bit of metallurgy (did I mention they bent the drawer slide when they put their full weight on the drawer?), biology, public service and governmental theory, and a soupçon of evolutionary theory. But no history.
Dang.

One of the Top 5 Unexpected Breakfast Conversations

2007-08-28T07:41:00.000-07:00

From my four-year-old: "Mom, can I go play with the human head?"

Which sounds very odd even around here, and especially as I'm riffling through my emails and putting off dishes as long as possible. It turns out that she wanted to play with a...toy? ...science lesson? The Smithsonian Anatomy Lab ("Includes 10 Removable Body Parts!"), a human torso with all sorts of interesting secrets.

So the correct answer is, "Yes, as soon as you finish your milk."

When You Finally Want To Run Screaming Into The Night

2007-08-26T10:16:00.001-07:00

...you manage to catch the Banshees' illness and are too headachey/feverish/itchy-eyeballed to go. But no one ever said that life was fair.

I did manage to fix the tea cooler (a modified 5 gallon igloo). With no working ac and 107+ temps we go through a lot of liquid around here. I could fix the ac if the relative who understand ac was standing over my shoulder but he isn't available, and even I know when to throw my hands up and call in a repairman. Except that the dh and I have already decided that the ac unit needs to be replaced and that isn't going to happen until next summer. And that brings us to the bad news/good news portion of the program: the ac isn't working -- but the electric bills are the lowest they've been in the better part of a decade.

The Banshees, by the way, are a bit disappointed that Mom isn't going up on the roof again. My reputation has taken a bit of a hit. I'm making that up to them by repairing the toilet.

The books that we bought at the conference are batting .500 -- LB's book has disappeared into the ether and we haven't broken out the How to Read book yet, but MB's anatomy book and EB's origami book are great hits. In fact, I had to put a moritorium on paper penguins and pianos. So far the biggest spash has been the anatomy coloring book, which MB thoughtfully took to a recent family gathering. While he was there he curled up with a great-grandfather and they went through it together, with MB pointing out his favorite bits. Great-grandfather was impressed all out of proportion, which is understandable since you really have to live with the Banshee's to have the proper perspective. GGF saw all of the fancy words and advanced concepts; MB sees it as a really neat coloring book.

That was a family gathering of disconcertion. GGF asked me what grade-level the anatomy book would be considered. I'm not sure that has a definitive answer. Most people would probably consider it high school or even college level. However, it belongs to my would-have-been-second grader so in our house, it's a second-grade textbook. Great-grandmother wanted to know what grade level the Banshees were. I gave that my best thoughtful look and said that it was an impossible question to answer. There's grade-level according to age, there's grade-level according to learning, and there's grade-level according to school districts. The best answer I can give is that they are way ahead of themselves in reading speed and comprehension, and even better than that, they love to read. They won't write unless forced to or if it's a current correspondence with a friend or favorite relative. Math is very much catch as catch can at this age and can be anywhere from simple addition to the explanation of credit cards and income tax. History and science and politics creep in wherever and whenever there's a niche to put them. "And spelling?" she asked. "Are you teaching them spelling? Because schools aren't teaching spelling these days." Yes they are, actually. I know that because EB's ex-teacher gave me the homework assignment of teaching spelling to EB. It's one of the reasons we're homeschooling now, under the theory of cutting out the middleman. (Or, as my beloved spouse said at the time, "If the teacher is expecting you to do her entire job, we might as well bring the children home.) But no, I don't teach them formal spelling right now. That will probably come later when they get more into writing. GGM looked faintly shocked.

This is the sort of thing that is going to get me the reputation of being the family bore. Creating a common lexicon takes time and most people don't understand why they can't just be answered in public school terms. With a little time and practice I'll be able to tell when they're genuinely interested and when they're just making polite conversation and trim my information accordingly.

Somewhere on the top 10 list of Things To Be Grateful For

2007-08-23T12:58:00.000-07:00

The attendance record that I'm required to keep is set up so that only comas and detectable alien abduction are recorded as absences. Which is good for days like today, where all of the children are running triple-digit fevers and no one is much interested in eating, let alone any sort of formal instruction. I'm not sure they would even regard ice-cream with much favor.

It isn't much fun, dealing with a house full of sick Banshees. They aren't bad patients -- they don't even complain as much as I do when I get a garden-variety cold. It's just difficult to see such bundles of energy temporarily sidelined. The house will get cleaned today and stay clean. The hole in the yard that may eventually reach Australia will get not one inch deeper. No one is arguing over who touched who and what may eventually happen to make who STOP touching who. They're just listlessly watching The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe yet again and waiting to feel better.

From a purely selfish point of view, these are days when I'm so glad they're home with me on a full time basis. I no longer have to contact schools and explain that no, my children are not coming in with 101+ degree temperatures. I don't have to listen to some well-meaning teachers chirp about how they can send the missed schoolwork home for the children to work on so no one will fall behind. These people aren't sadists but they do have clockwork to mind; if a 6-year-old can't color his worksheets on time there will be very large irritating grains of sand in their oyster of a world.

I don't have to rearrange my plans to accomodate the sudden advent of children, either. I just have to tweak them to deal with unenergetic children; no field trips today and we'll go light on the history of chicken soup. (Although it can be fairly said that chicken soup in my family has a bit of history; I'm a child of the suburbs that has actually plucked the chicken that went into the stock pot.) We've had a bit of discussion on Celsius and Fahrenheit and the merits of home-made bread and that's been about it. EB is concentrating on knitting a bear for a friend whose birthday party she's probably going to miss. They're all a bit wary that I'm actually going to try to feed them the hummus I've been experimenting with. And Narnia plays in the background (Mom, how do they get the wolf to speak like that? Diction lessons, honey.)

What's a Diction?

A horrendous pun your mother should be ashamed of.

I Survived Expo

2007-08-17T18:54:00.000-07:00

And the kids did too, so that's all right.

I'm remarkably proud of myself for limiting new textbooks to just four, three of which are slim little tomes picked out by the target audience. The last is a how-to-teach-your-kid-to-read book that I'm hoping my nearly-five-year-old will humor me about.

Vendor halls are tricky places, mainly because their very existence will dredge out the second-guessing and worrying that normally lives stuffed under a mental waste-paper-basket with a very large and heavy brick making sure escape doesn't happen often. It usually happens in vendor halls. How am I ever going to exist without xyz gadget? How will my precious bundles ever figure out science without this latest doohickie? Goodness knows they're going to turn into cretins if I don't get that doubles-as-a-doorstop math text. And while I don't know what use we have for beakers in this house, it's hard to say no to those big, begging eyes my son developed. Being the next thing to paupery is usually what saves the household from finding yet more shelf-space.

This Expo was more about reassuring the Banshees that I wasn't going to drag home just anything a salesperson waved under my nose. It took two circuits of the hall before I got through to them that just because I thought it was interesting didn't mean I was going to foist it off on them. My efforts at conversation, God Save the Mark, were all about finding out what the Banshees were interested in. This was followed by an impromptu lesson on the art of negotiating with Mom. Nobody is rioting quite yet over the choices, although there were a few skirmishes over the origami book.

Most of the Expo I spent spinning, or knitting, or fishing various Banshees out of nooks and crannies and inquiring as to whether they were having a good time. I didn't attend a single session although I had meant to. I'm learning, however, that going to sessions and looking out for three wiggly children are a bit incompatible, even for such family friendly places as a homeschooling conference. The debate is not whether I'm going to the next one, it's whether we are going to the next one. I may decide to treat it as a mini-vacation for a mom who desperately needs one.

The other fun part of Expo was my first experience with feeding children out of a cooler for three days. It went remarkably well, nobody died of food poisoning, and I got to play with my new obsession over Bento lunches. Most of the time the Banshees think I'm dotty if well-intentioned but they really like the new hobby. Unfortunately or fortunately, depending on your point of view, they also picked up my prediliction for the pretty little boxes. I outgrew that when I accidentally found Lock & Lock boxes; those unpretentious little bits of plastic are now my Bento box of choice. The Banshees think that this is all well and good, but prefer the cute little boxes that are either hideously overpriced on Ebay or sold in local markets that have no online presence and therefor are generally invisible to me.

I can't really explain the new obsession. Part of it is my...er, shall we call it persistance?...when confronted with something that I think I ought to have access to but don't (call it the whaddaya mean I have to pay $40 for a $1.50 piece of plastic?!? syndrome). Part of it is also the weight I gained over multiple pregnancies that has been notoriously hard to shed. Some of it is about having to cook everything from scratch because it's 1. cheaper and 2. healthier. A lot of it has to do with a recent medical diagnosis (nothing life-threatening, just altogether prosaic and boring) which is greatly influenced by diet. So, for the first time in my life, I really have to think about what I'm putting on my plate. Bento is all about balance, proportion, and beauty. If I have to play with my food, I ought to have pretty stuff to play with, right? Like every other interest under the sun, there is an online community that supports those of us who find ourselves wondering how to parse up the rice and properly present the broccoli. It's turning out to be the best cook-book experience ever. I'm sure if I really want to lose weight I'm going to have to dust off the clothes-hanger (also known as the treadmill) and go a few rounds, but eating better is a good start. And the Banshees are going to learn something about diet, not to mention the genetic component behind...er, persistance.

Teaching Conundrums

2007-07-15T23:42:00.000-07:00

It really isn't fair sometimes, this teaching gig. I shouldn't grumble about it, because the worst day of parenting is far, far better than the worst day of parenting in addition to public school. But I'm human. I admit abject humanity and thereby my tendency to grumble when I find I don't know what I'm doing or how I'm going to do it.

I think it's time for my oldest child to have just a smidge, just a wee bitty slice of structure in her learning. Not that I want that. I take to structure like a polar bear to hot tubs. It isn't natural and it isn't me. And yet, I need to find some way of measuring something for which I have no natural way (yet) of measuring. I need to know where she is with her knowledge. It doesn't feel like a need to keep up with the Joneses, or a need to figure out if she's on par with little Janey at the local elementary. It's more like a dance where you need to know your partner's skill range. I don't particularly care how many lists of words she has memorized, but I do care if she knows what a suffix is, or a prefix, and how and why they can change a word, and where they are used. What's a root word and does it make a good soup? What's the difference between a verb and an adverb, and if you catch a wild gerund should you shoot it or tame it? I'm not sure I would know a gerund if I saw it, wild or not. What's a participle and should it really be dangling like that? I know how to split hairs, but can I really mend a split infinitive?

Since she isn't applying for grad school quite yet we may have time to figure out whether it's really wise to kill your average adjective. Some of them might really be nice creatures.

On Being Hit By Lightning

2007-07-09T22:25:00.000-07:00

Granted, I am speaking metaphorically. I'm sure that if I had been hit by an actual bolt of wild electricity I would be wandering around with my mouth hanging open like a grouper trying to figure out what in the world just happened.

Wait. That does pretty much sum up what I've been looking like this month.

Really, it is a most undignified look for someone who has just been elevated to the grand title of Editor-in-chief (who is also, by definition, chief cook and bottle washer, not to mention beater-of-brush in the authorial fields. Did I mention I volunteered for this? Did I also mention that I only did that because I was sure they'd find someone more qualified? HA. We hold forth that this is exhibit A in proving that the Universe has a sense of humor.)

My spouse has no sympathy whatsoever. My children rally round and tell me that they still love me and that everything is going to be all right. Which goes to prove that they really don't know what's going on, but bless their little bitty hearts anyway. And my first thought on receiving the news that I'd been picked was, geez, this is going to make NaNoWriMo an even hairier challenge.

So why take on this challenge? Because it would have been so much easier to say no, but it wouldn't have been wiser. Because it is possible to do this and it is entirely possible that I can do this, and with this being so it was impossible not to try. I've managed to pull off the impossible before. Because it's a chance to work with adults again in a way that will not compromise my ability to be a mother to my children. I also need to do this because my children need to see mom working with other adults, doing adult things. I wish they could see their father doing that as well, but their dad's line of work sort of precludes that. Not every job can be made kid-friendly! In all fairness, it's also because this is the biggest brain-candy I have come across in a long time. Did I mention that I'm a learning junkie? If it's new, different, unknown, potentially dangerous (at least to my ego) and intellectually challenging I'm a lost cause.

All hail to the chief cook and bottle washer, and let's hope for a plentiful season on authors!

NaNoWriMo Claims Another Victim

2007-05-02T21:17:00.000-07:00

I shouldn't have told the Banshees about it.

Really.

But they caught me in an off moment, the sort of moment where they've done something they shouldn't have and they know they shouldn't have and I've just caught them red-handed doing it and I'm squalling like a cat in a mangle about how I should be able to relax after they are supposed to be in bed and just because I'm in training for a contest doesn't mean that they are entitled to run around the house like I'm deaf and can't figure out that they're up to something.....

Yeah, like they heard all of that.

What they heard: Mom.

In Training.

Contest.

Cooooool.

Immediately I had their full, undivided attention and they wanted to know all of the particulars. So now the entire house is in training for a contest that I don't think I'm going to be able to get through without copious amounts of chocolate, coffee, and possibly mead, not to mention dead silence and the fervent hope that the spouse has decamped to his mother's with children in tow. What the heck. Life is a gamble so let's throw the dice.

The Banshees have opted for a set time every day for writing, writing, and nothing but writing. They've declared an earlier bedtime (yeah, let's see how long that lasts, shall we?), the need for more books, and hand exercises because they think that if they're going to write for long periods of time they just might need them. Huh. Smart Banshees. I wouldn't have thought of that.

The set time for writing went of with only a minor hitch: youngest Banshee (who can't write yet anyway) was sent to bed early and was sleeping like a contented brick. The real time consuming activity was convincing children that spelling did not matter. Grammar did not matter. Plot and characters did not matter. My only requirements were lined paper and a collection of connected letters. They finally got into the swing of things but I swear I thought I was going to have to pry that dictionary out of Middle Banshee's hands with a 6-foot crowbar.

Oh yeah. Bedtime didn't quite go off as planned. But it's only the first day in a 6-month training period, so I'm sure we'll improve.

Just as soon as I unload that bridge I bought a while ago.

Just A Thought

2007-04-30T10:00:00.000-07:00

My father and I routinely solve the world's problems every other week or so, or at least get into some rousing debates while trying to do so. It's a challenge and a brain sharpener. We routinely go into hunger, world peace, global economics, and anthropogenic global warming -- we only agree on roughly half the issues, so they are very lively discussions! One of our thorniest knots, of course, is the public school system.

Obviously it doesn't work for the betterment of either the children or their society anymore, but only a small percentage of the population wants to change it drastically. Why? My theory is that everybody is deathly afraid of...well, leaving a child behind. The system is broken. The system is chewing up more children than it's benefitting. And yet the system is a known devil as opposed to an unknown one; we keep tinkering with and poking at the evil we know because the unknown could possibly condemn an even larger number of children than this one does. I also think the public school system, like any other successful organism, is very good at protecting itself. It has managed to be the only game in town for several generations; most people alive in the United States today are products of the system. They can't imagine anything else, and the system has told them that everything will crash and burn if the system isn't perpetuated. A little more money here, or a few stricter standards there, whole-word as opposed to phonics perhaps, or maybe if teachers held Phds instead of Masters degrees, then everything would be just rosy.

No, the system as an educational system is broken beyond all mending. So how do we fix it? I haven't the faintest clue in the world about how to fix the entire problem. On the other hand, I also don't believe we've been accurately describing the whole problem; we've been the blind men and the elephant, grappling with only part of the difficulty and never quite seeing the whole.

Part of the difficulty is that everybody wants to save everyone and believes this is possible. However, not everybody can be saved, not even if you spent your last dollar and your last drop of blood trying. Not only that, but the more centralized and distant the 'saving' authority is, the fewer children are going to be saved because further and farther means more ignorence and inefficiency. Being forced to attend an ill-fitting institution means that, at best, many campuses have apathetic ghosts that are just shuffling around doing their time, and at worst have levels of violence that would make prison guards pale. It's rare to hear of expulsions for anything short of murder or an ill-timed essay. My solution to this is to do away with compulsory attendance. Don't make people be where they don't want to be and conversely, let's get rid of people who are problems to those who do want to be in a public school setting. If we as a society want to make public schools better and safer, then we have to weed out people who don't belong in them. Harsh? Oh yes. And I speak as someone who would have been invited to leave on an academic basis.

What would happen to children who were disinvited from the public school system? I can only speculate. Our society hasn't developed cultural outlets for people considered too young to work as adults and yet who do not fit into the traditional school roles. Would there be an uptick in crime? Unless and until those outlets form, I would bet on it. Would it wake some parents up to what's really going on in their children's lives? Oh, you'd better believe it. How they would react and what they would do -- I'm utterly ignorent and freely admit it. My guess would be that the reaction would range from child abuse/abandonment to the formation of differing types of schools and apprenticeships, to the homeschooling option in all of its glorious permutations. Will children be lost? It's an absolute certainty. Would fewer children be lost than are lost now? I would say that different types of children would be lost and that it's impossible to say beforehand who they would be, how many, how badly, how permanently.

What I know is that one size never fits all, no matter what the label says. Those who believe it about the public school system are the very people who, unbeknowst to themselves, have been destroyed by it.

Did I Mention I Don't Have A Clue?

2007-03-05T19:15:00.002-08:00

A poster on one of my home school lists asked for an account of a 'typical day' in the life of a home schooling family. I have to admit that I stared at the monitor for 30 seconds wondering rather bemusedly what that would look like. I'm still struggling to have a typical day as a parent, thank you very much.

I have morning people as offspring. I, unhappily enough, am not, not, NOT a morning person. So my typical day involves getting up several hours before my brain is prepared for it and suffering the usual consequences of being far, far behind the curve of whatever is going on. Fortunately the offspring have figured out peanut butter and jelly sandwiches and where the fruit bowl is. They aren't going to starve and they'd prefer to wait on me to cook the vegetables anyway. After that we're in free-for-all for the rest of the day. I'm still trying to work myself into a housekeeping routine. I hate the stuff, I'd prefer not to do it, but I have had to live with the consequences of not doing it -- believe me, that's worse. When you're healthy and childless it doesn't really matter as much how big the laundry pile gets, or whether you're gnawing on something nameless from the back of the freezer, or how high the paper mountains get before you decide to heck with everything and shred it all. When you have more than one child organization gets pretty attractive BUT by the time you have more than one child you are operating at a distinct disadvantage to getting organized. You have a sleep deficit. You're trying to keep them from killing themselves in their exploratory zeal. You're trying to cook healthy meals when it's a struggle to even locate the refrigerator. The short list of advice I'd give to prospective parents is 1. Whatever it takes to stay sane, keeping kids, spouse, and various small animals safe, do it. You'll thank me later. 2. Get organized now. Later, you won't have the time.

All right, I'm not a Martha Stewart Convert, and I'm not about to get into semi-monastic decorating esthetics. Nothing in my house will ever be color-coded, my filing system will always look suspiciously like the one out of Real Genius, and my hobbies will always be battling it out for floor space. (Did we mention books? I'm a candidate for L-space*. I'm not kidding.) But as I would prefer my science experiments directed as opposed to serendipitous, the kitchen has got to be cleaned every once in a while, and sooner rather than later is the operative. The laundry cannot be allowed to form its own zip code. Projects cannot be left wherever they were at when their various authors got distracted by other projects. Clean up as you go is becoming less of a mantra and more of a Thou-Shalt, because if thou doesn't shalt, Mom is going to go even crazier and start talking to walls all of the time. At piercingly loud volumes. My version of neat will not always have the floors swept, nor will all of the books be on the shelves at all times. My version of neat is that everything has a home and finds its way back to that home on an almost daily basis. There is an educational purpose behind the late-life conversion to an abbreviated neatness. I find that teaching is easier in a neat house. My patience actually exists when I can see the color of the carpet and when there are flat surfaces that aren't piled to gravity-defying heights with what-nots and whatchamacallits. There is more room for projects and new ideas. It would have been unthinkable to my younger self, but I find that I work, think, and create better in a picked-up house as opposed to one on the verge of bedlam.

There are also lessons that I'm struggling to teach my children even as I am learning them myself. I'm learning that it's all right to let some things go -- even things that I've been carting around from pillar to post for the last 3 decades. Even if it's sentimental, if it's broken or used up maybe it's time for it to be gone. The importance of teaching this to the children was brought home when I found myself confronted with a child who treated throwing away a broken paper-clip, a pine cone picked up at play, even rocks, as major emotional traumas. Better to tackle it now before she has to move the same boxes three times without unpacking them.

In between all of this there is a lot of reading. Lots. See books, above. (Our secondary motto is Reading Is The Key to Everything. That's right below All Conditions Subject To Change Without Notice.) There is some writing, as I encourage them to write to friends or to write stories about their imaginary dragons (all gifted when the Banshees turned three or so and started having inexplicable nightmares. Dragons eat monsters, whether they are in the closet, under the bed, or hanging out in hallways. Useful creature, the dragon!), there is math, of the "Mom, I'm bo-o-o-o-o-ored" variety. One of these days they'll either learn not to say that around me, or they are going to be certifiable math wizards, as well as very good at folding laundry. Thus far, however, no typical days. I am so looking forward to one.

*Guards! Guards! Terry Pratchett. Any place (us. libraries) where the sheer volume of books and their accumulated knowledge distort time and space. All libraries, past, present, and future, are connected by L-space.

Give Them the Tools of Learning

2007-03-02T22:25:00.000-08:00

I'll readily admit I haven't been home schooling long. Officially it has been less than a year since I walked into my children's public elementary and airly announced (quivering violently in my tennis shoes the whole while) that they wouldn't be back the next fall. Where are they going? the friendly secretary asked. "We're putting them in a private school," I replied. Oh, which one? It was a friendly question, one of personal and not school interest but I wasn't prepared to be that open. Courageous I am after I have a few miles of experience, not when I haven't taken more than a half-dozen steps. "It's a new one and pretty small," I said vaguely, and that was that. I asked them what their procedures were for disenrolling students, followed them to a T, and O My Goodness the kids were mine again. The next October I followed our state procedures and filed a Private School Affidavit, and Starlake Academy was a reality.

I scared the the heck out of my friends and relatives. It was one thing for me to have lost my mind, but this time there were children involved. No one knew if they should take me seriously when I announced that Summer Vacation was officially being extended to Christmas. The announcement garnered some nervous giggles and I have a sneaking suspicion that more than one relative looked at another and said, "She's joking. I'm sure she's joking. She has to be joking, right?" Let me set the rumor to rest: despite my unusual sense of humor I wasn't joking. I was completely, thoroughly, and dead-set serious. My children loved school but school wasn't loving them back. The homework load was a ridiculous burden for 6- and 7-year-old to bear. Not only was there way too much of it, but it appeared utterly arbitrary and nonsensical. I can handle not being able to answer all of my children's questions about the workings of the universe, but having my bright little ones ask me to explain the importance of some of their homework was beyond me. I didn't know why they were supposed to color the baby chick yellow and the fox's tail orange on one page and figure out double-digit addition on the second. I didn't know why there were so many pages, why so many of them were beneath my children's ability, and why all of them appeared to be the same level of do-or-die importance. I was ill during that year of public school and it took all of my energy to get them up, dressed, and fed. Forcing them to do homework and having to deal with all of the animosity and trauma involved with that was more than I was willing to face. So that October I declared a No Homework Zone in our house. If they wanted to do it, I was fine and I would help. If they didn't, I wasn't going to lift one miserably exhausted finger to make them. The teachers weren't happy. Later, after the children came home, I found that my daughter had been kept in at recess to finish the homework that Mom wouldn't make her do. They called it detention. I called it a lot of things, most of them not printable. The odd part was that her final report card had only one bad mark on it -- for not turning in enough homework. On every other level she met or exceeded their expectations.

What I learned from my children's public school experience was what I feared would happen, based on my own experiences with the system some 20 years ago. They were killing my children's love of learning and replacing it with a fear of being wrong, a fear of taking chances and making mistakes. There was no right answer unless a teacher gave it to you -- even Mom and Dad were not trusted to know the right answers. Only the teacher knew. My daughter threw a hysterical fit when asked to come up with the answers to an assignment. She wanted to copy them verbatim from the textbook if she couldn't get the answers directly from a teacher. She knew the answers, she could recite them to me chapter and verse, but she had no confidence in her own knowledge because the teacher wasn't there to validate it. She was seven and already her confidence was destroyed.

So when I said vacation was going to last a long, long time I had every reason in the world for being serious. It was time to take the pressure off. It was long past time that I figured out how my children operated, how they learned, what methods worked and what wouldn't (forcing them to do anything wasn't going to work, we'd already had that with public school homework). It looked like goofing off. It looked like a lot of playing in the yard and much too much television. My kith and kin kept telling me that I needed to start getting discipline in my teaching methods or the kids were going to be as ignorent as yams. Maybe. But I do know that they read for pleasure, that they are reading a little more every day, and that I don't have to assign it or force it. I have learned that "Mom, I'm bo-o-o-o-ored" is the sweetest sound on the face of the planet. They'll read, they'll write, they'll beg me for math concepts, they'll even fold the laundry if they're bored enough. They do what I do, not what I say. If I'm reading, they read. If I'm pulling out math, they think that's cool. All of them want to knit or crochet or spin. It's going to be another couple of years before they can help me with the soap. But they're doing it because they're curious, not because someone arbitrarily decided that this was what 6- and 7-year-olds needed to learn.

I call it Sustainable Learning, the encouraging of this curiousity and talent. I've always felt that the keys to creating a lifelong learner is to give someone the love of learning, to give them the tools of learning, and then to get the heck out of their way -- because at that point, you have to work very hard to get them to quit learning. I want to nurture autodidacts, just the way my parents did (despite great obstacles) with my brother and I.