News from Hawkhill Acres

Ant Rant

2008-06-30T18:58:00.003-04:00

Lynn over at Bore Me to Tears (the blog that asks if you're an Ant trying to understand the Internet) posted about whether or not kids should be tested for knowledge and I wrote a comment that threatened to turn into a short novel, so I figured I'd better post here instead. First of all, I don't think the post at Homeschooling Research Notes that Lynn referred to in her post was talking about standardized testing, but just in case, here's a link that pretty much sums up what I think of that. I'm ag'in it, in case you don't want to click on the link.

I've read some of Rob Reich's writings and I'm ag'in what he has to say also, although I agree that he's a thoughtful, even-minded critic of homeschooling and an advocate for children and their right to autonomy. However, how he squares this with his belief that government testing would be a good idea is beyond me. How can kids learn what they want to learn if the government is testing them for what the government thinks they should know?

What happens when kids fail the tests? Knowing the government the way I do (hey, I sleep with a government worker, don't forget), I can't believe failure or low marks won't lead to more government intervention and possibly a recommendation for remedial learning in public school.

As far as Lynn's "gray area" of worrying about kids who are allowed to learn only as much math as they need to balance a checkbook, while I understand her concern and sometimes share it, I have this to say. I'd rather see that than government intervention and I don't agree that it can't be remedied if a kid decides that she wants to be a doctor or scientist. For one thing, by the time the kid is old enough for the kind of math needed for any math-intensive profession, surely said kid would have a clue that they'll need more than multiplication to be a rocket scientist. If they don't, then I question the desire for that kind of profession.

If I remember correctly, Algebra 1 doesn't really start until 4th or 5th grade and can be learned in a matter of weeks. I know this because when I was in Algebra 1, which started in 8th grade back in the 60's, I got a C-, because my teacher was a kind man who didn't want to flunk me even though I failed every test and never really got the basics so I floundered through both semesters. In 9th grade, we had Geometry which made a lot more sense to me, because I could actually see the lines and angles, unlike those mysterious X's and Y's in the Algebra formulas. (Hey, I'm an Earth sign. What can I say?)

Several years later, I realized that failing to learn Algebra still rankled, so I got an Algebra 1 course that consisted of a textbook and workbook and I slogged through it all by myself until I grasped the concepts and could pass the quizzes and tests. I've never used or thought about Algebra since I closed the workbook, but I learned it. If I did it, anyone can. There are adult classes in high schools and community colleges and online lessons for free in almost anything that a person could need to catch up on.

Daughter is another reason I don't think testing is necessary. She chokes on tests. They give her hives. If something is timed, her IQ slips twenty points and she assumes the emotional attributes of a toddler who hasn't napped, but has ingested a 5 lb bag of sugar. She's wicked smart, but we didn't find that out by testing her. I've figured it out from living with her for almost 11 years.

Those of us who have children who learn at home, whether we "teach" them or "help" them with their unschooling or just let them learn whatever they want with no guidance from anyone, know much more about our kids' intelligence, interests, capabilities, drawbacks and weak areas than any test can show. We also probably know from the time the kid is a pre-teen whether or not they'll need math for science or extra emphasis on language arts to express their love for words or art lessons instead of sports.

Testing does what public school does: It separates learning from life. It breaks down learning into neat little categories like math, reading and writing. As if you can. Life is too big for that. It's "everything" as my late son once said when asked what he was learning at home. I think the only way to "test" our children is by observing whether they're happy and engaged and interested in life. If they are, how can they help but learn what they need to know to succeed?

Welcome To The Hotel Paranoia

2008-06-25T11:13:00.002-04:00

Daughter and I recently managed to combine business, pleasure and terror in a trip to our old stamping grounds in Vermont and New Hampshire. I made some money and she added yet another stuffed animal to her collection, which now rivals the nearest Hallmark store. We also took in the sights, ate a few good meals at the beaneries of Brattleboro and stayed at a motel that wasn't too bad, once I'd cleaned the filter on the window air conditioner/heater unit and used hand sanitizer on the mold on the microfridge's freezer door. Did I mention that this was a frugal expedition?

Well, it was. The idea was to make money, not spend it, so we resisted the urge to flee to better (and more expensive) surroundings and toughed it out for a week. However, as usual, we brought our own bedding and pillows and threw the motel bedding on the floor beside the bed. Other than those few little drawbacks, the room wasn't bad and we enjoyed our stay.

Except for the bikers, who had evidently pooled their social security checks to rent most of the other rooms, the motel was kind of quiet. Evidently, the high price of gas is keeping people home. Who knows? Maybe in a few months, only bikers will be able to afford to go anywhere, so motels will be full of them. That would certainly change the look of the upscale places, especially if, like one biker we know, some of them insist on parking their bikes beside their beds.

But I digress. We were talking about mold, but I don't know why. Let's segue into the next scene where we leave Vermont and travel across New Hampshire on our way back to Maine. Let's turn on the radio and listen to the gentle strains of classical music on NPR. Then let's almost go off the road when that damned weather warning buzzer starts blatting and a hollow, cybernetic voice comes on and says that the National Weather Service in Nashua, New Hampshire has reported a tornado headed toward Northwoods at a speed of 35 mph.

Coincidentally, that's the speed I would have liked to be going at least as fast as, if I hadn't been stuck behind a pulp truck that was crawling up a hill at 20 mph and slowing down by the inch. And, even more coincidence here, folks, Northwoods was the next town on the map. Daughter is terrified of garden-variety thunderstorms, so she went into complete panic mode when she heard the warning. And I wasn't exactly as cool as some cucumbers, let me tell you.

It got worse when we looked to our left and saw two distinct funnel-shaped inky black clouds, swirling toward us. That's when we reached the top of the hill and the pulp truck began to pick up speed. It's a good thing or I would have passed it in the oncoming lane to get ahead of those clouds. As we raced down the hill, Daughter reported on the clouds, which I could see in my rearview mirror. They were still to our left and falling behind us. After another five miles, they were gone, but the sky had taken on that eerie green Wicked Witch of the West glow that so often results in houses pitching, twitching and landing on ladies wearing red stripey stockings and ruby slippers. (Talk about a fashion faux pas, no?)

Well, we made it safely to Sanford, Maine and staggered out of the car and into the first motel that we saw. At that point, the Bates Motel would have been fine with us, as long as it had four walls and a roof. So we checked in and raced into our room without even grabbing our suitcases or anything else. The sky was still very dark and there had been severe storm warnings for that area also. (I was thinking maybe it was us, bringing it with us.)

It was during a lull between bouts of thunder and lightning, that I decided to go out to the car to get a few things. That's when I met our neighbors. She was talking loudly into a cell phone and drinking from a bottle of gin. (I've never known anyone who actually drank gin. We always used it for linament and I didn't know anyone could get past the smell long enough to drink it. Live and learn, I always say.) He was wearing a shirt which said, "Where the F*** is my medication" only with no asterisks. I smiled at them and he bared his teeth and growled.

It was a long night. They made several trips to their car, totally ignoring the vivid lightning, thunder and hail that kept us awake. They also watched TV until 2 and then argued loudly for a few hours. Probably still looking for his medication and I would have gladly given him some of mine if I'd brought it with me. (Linament, that is.) Finally, around 4 a.m., they both began to snore so loudly that I thought the bikers had followed us and checked in next door.

Very early in the morning, I decided to try to shower without waking Daughter, who was exhausted, poor thing. The danged bathroom light was combined with a fan, so I just opened the curtain on the small, high window which barely gave me enough light to see my way to the shower. I opened the glass shower door, grabbed some soap and a packet of "Hotello" shampoo (all vegetarian ingredients and imported from India, no less) and prepared to figure out how to operate the shower.

This is always a challenge for me and this one was even more cryptic than most. There was a lever underneath the water temperature control that said "flow control". I had no idea what that meant, but the water was coming out in a very fine mist, almost a vapor, so I figured I'd turn the flow control up and see if I could get a little more enthusiasm out of the unit. It did seem to perk it up, but not much. It was still more mist than spray, but I stepped under it, prepared to make the best of things.

Then I immediately leapt out of the thing, almost smashing the glass door, because somehow, in spite of the fact that the spray was so mist-like, it managed to feel like tiny little needles penetrating my skin. When I turned the spray down with the flow control, it was so anemic that I couldn't get the soap off my face. I had to stand there for what seemed like hours, just to get most of the suds off and I'm sure there were still soap bubbles in places. Then I tried opening the shampoo, but my hands were slippery and I couldn't get enough traction with my fingers to rip the thing.

So, I did what any reasonable person would do to open a packet of shampoo in the Shower of a Thousand (Paper) Cuts, I grabbed it with my teeth and yanked. It not only opened, but opened with a rush of shampoo that went right into my mouth. All I could think of as I spit flowery-smelling stuff all over the shower was that I was so glad that it was all-vegetable.

There was barely enough shampoo left to wash my hair, but it still was impossible to rinse the stuff out due to the low flow situation. I either had to live with soap coating my hair or risk death from water pressure and I chose to live. When I went out into the room, Daughter was awake and very anxious to leave the No-Tel Motel behind us, so we lost no time in leaving.

Unfortunately, in our haste, Daughter left Henry the white stuffed elephant on the floor beside the bed and we got all the way home before we realized it. (As you may remember, Henry is married to Rose, the handkerchief doll and father to Valentine, another handkerchief doll, and they were, understandably, upset, according to Daughter who does voices for all of them, so she'd know.)

I called the motel manager, who said he'd found Henry but would have to have a money order before he could send him to us. We sent one off immediately and Daughter is anxiously watching the mailbox and hoping that Henry will be back with his family before many more nights. If he's not, we'll go back and get him, but it'll be a one-day round trip, let me tell you. And it won't be in tornado season, although who knew that Northern New England even HAD a tornado season? Except for Al Gore and that NASA scientist, of course.

Mercury Isn't Retrograde; It's On the Floor Next To the Bed

2008-06-09T15:21:00.001-04:00

Geekdaddy is an early adopter. If it's technical and it's available, even in Beta - especially in Beta - he's gotta have it. So when compact fluorescent bulbs came out, the geek was first in line at the power company giveaway where you could get four bulbs free. He got 'em and loved 'em. I hated 'em.

They buzzed. They flickered. I complained. "That's a problem for you?" the geek said, not understanding why anyone would object to a buzz that he can't hear anyway with his hearing or a flicker mighty like the one of his beloved computer monitor. After all, this is the man who willingly closes the door on a room that houses "The Smilodon", a computer case that smells like Love Canal used to smell on a hot August day. It gives the rest of us a headache and we're on a campaign to make him get rid of it, but in the meantime, we insist that he close the door.

He's fine with that. Just like he was fine with the buzzing, flickering CFLs that he purchased in quantity and stuck into every light in the house. I thought it was ironic that I, the green maven chez Hawkins, was asking him to stop using something that everyone from Al Gore to the EPA endorsed.

So, we compromised. We put them into some of the lights, but not the lamp next to my chair, the kitchen light or the bathroom. For them, we use long-lasting bulbs while we wait for LED technology to be ready for prime time. Apparently, that'll be a very good thing, because those environmentally-friendly CFLs contain mercury, a heavy metal group that I'm not a fan of.

Unfortunately, I DID get involved a few nights ago when the geek knocked over his bedside lamp, thereby breaking the compact fluorescent bulb which strewed mercury impregnated shards of glass all over our bedroom floor. I have to admit that Geekdaddy cleaned it up immediately and did a very thorough job of disposing of it in the approved manner, but I was still not sanguine with having mercury-bearing bulbs in my vicinity.

Then, yesterday, as I went to open a window so that I could lean out and shake my fist at the heat wave that is inflicting itself upon our usually-cool corner of Maine, I stepped on something very sharp. It was a u-shaped shard of CFL and it was wedged into my foot so tightly that I had trouble removing it and bled profusely even after it was out.

I washed my foot, applied antiseptic and then googled mercury to see if I should be worried. I found this link to a fact sheet on Mercury and CFLs, but it didn't say a mumbling word about what to do if you step on a piece of the glass. Deuced remiss of them, I think. Don't they know any geeks?

So, I emailed a friend who's up on scientific things and I also found a place where I can get a cheap test to find out how much mercury I have circulating in my blood and brain. Considering all the fish I've eaten over the years and the fact that my brother and I used to play with mercury "snakes" from broken thermometers when we were young, I'm afraid the results might be high.

You know, it's interesting that when the planet Mercury is retrograde, as it is now, astrologers say that there will be communication difficulties, because Mercury is the planet of communication, writing and speaking. While, if you get too much mercury, you may have trouble communicating because of cognitive problems and mental confusion. I can understand that mercury, also known as quicksilver, was named for the swift messenger god, Mercury. But how is it that the effects of the planet appearing to stand still in the heavens has the same effect as ingesting or absorbing the metal that's named after it?

I'm not dissing the geek's attempts to be Green. At least he's not trying to be frugal like he was when he used old motorcycle batteries for a battery-backup for his computer. That time, they started to smoke and sizzle and spark after about a week and we were treated to the spectacle of the geek dashing madly back and forth from the four batteries to the back door until he'd thrown all of them out into the snow. This time, at least, there were no flames or smoke, only toxic chemicals, so I guess I should count my blessings.

Sneaky Stinky Sticks, Mysterious Marsh Mammals, Light Nights and Dadblamed Disillusioned Daughter

2008-05-28T10:57:00.001-04:00

Throwing caution (and concern about gas prices) to the wind, Daughter and I decided to take a roadtrip yesterday to the bustling metropolis of Bangor. Home to Stephen King, a huge statue of Paul Bunyan and a pretty nice Annual Folk Festival, Bangor is also home to over 31,000 people. They're sprawled out all over Bangor's 34 square miles and - as far as I can tell - every one of them keeps their yard light on all night. What is this with the yard lights? I'm lucky in that I live in a very isolated spot with no neighbors nearer than a half mile through heavy woods, so it's nothing to me if my neighbors want to mount klieg lights on their sheds.

But for those who pile into neighborhoods together, it's getting so that night time is bright time, instead of when our eyes and bodies get a much-needed respite from bright lights. Research has shown that breast cancer rates are lower for women who sleep in darkened rooms and it just makes sense that, as mammals, we're programmed to thrive with sunny days and dark nights. Else, why would the human race have survived this far? How much longer we'll survive is anyone's guess if we keep behaving like those early humans who huddled around the fire, or kids who are afraid of the dark. Turn the lights off and go to bed, I say, and let everyone else have some restorative darkness.

But I digress. I was talking about stick insects. Well, okay, I was GOING to talk about stick insects. They're sneaky, folks, make no mistake. Did you know that they drop their eggs onto the ground where ants mistake them for seeds, carry them to their nests and eat the outsides, so that the little stick insect can get out and start a family in a new place? Yup. This may be why there are stick insects on every continent except Antartica. (And I think they just haven't looked in the right place there. They're probably lurking in one of those old boats the early explorers left behind. Take another look, scientists, and get back to us.)

Many stick insects are also stinky if you disturb them when they're dropping eggs or give them the hairy eyeball or something. The common Walking Stick, for instance, can release a toxic spray that will temporarily blind an adult. Who knew? Do you know how many of the little critters I've let walk over my arm over the years? Too many, now that I know what I know about their sneaky ways. I should have realized that anything that cons you into thinking it's part of a branch is capable of anything.

I call the marsh mammal mysterious, because it showed up outside the window of the Bangor Borders Bookstore, in a little pool. Daughter and I looked out the window to check the sky, because it looked thundery, and there was this little brown head poking out of the water. We watched, trying to figure out if it was a muskrat or a beaver, as the animal swam around, . Why a beaver should be in an area where the nearest trees are saplings is beyond me, but it looked like a beaver. The pool had an outlet that led under the road, and from there to another little drainage area that eventually hooks up with the Penjajawoc Marsh, which runs into the City Forest. (I think every city should have a forest, but, surprisingly, many don't.)

Daughter and I theorized that this might be a young, callow male beaver who was kicked out of the family home in the marsh and was trying to establish a home territory as best he could. (We're good at coming up with possible scenarios, no matter how farfetched. It's a knack we have.) Then, we saw another beaver, if beavers they were, swimming near the first one, so it looks like beavers are thriving in Bangor. That's good, because they're often chivvied from pillar to post (or aspen to apple tree, I guess would be a better analogy) when they flood roads or cut down trees people don't want cut down. Apparently, they're also prone to falling down wells (who knew?) and fall prey to birds of prey (apt, that, though unfortunate) and get run over crossing roads.

If you're ever confronted with beavers in your backyard, cutting down your Japanese Maples and flooding the veggie garden, don't panic. And, whatever you do, don't buy one of the popular but ineffective "Beaver Bafflers" or "Beaver Deceivers" that you've heard so much about. (I believe I saw William Shatner touting them on an infomercial, but it could have been something else.) No, walk right back into the house and call your local Wildlife Service or whatever you have where you live and tell them that you have a Problem Beaver. They can help you install a flow device to unflood the garden while leaving enough water around their lodge to keep the beavers happy. Relocating isn't a good idea, because other beavers will just move in or the local beaver population will explode (beavers self-regulate their numbers depending on food and nearby beaver populations), so they'll move in as fast as you move them out. Sort of the beaver version of the old game, Space Invaders. (I bet you didn't know that one Native American name for the beaver also means affable. Neither did I, but it does, which shows you what Native Americans thought of them.)

When watching marsh mammals palled, Daughter perused the books and chose one by Daisy Meadows, who is reputed to be the hottest of hot stuff with girls 8-12, who are heavily into fairy stories. I read one and it didn't do much for me. I found the writing very simple and the plot thin, not to mention that I'm not big on fairies. (If daughter knew what I know about REAL fairies like you find in Terry Pratchett books and old Celtic tales, she'd drop Daisy like a dead duck, but I figure she doesn't need to know that stuff right now.) However, I don't censor what Daughter reads and we always discuss the books, so we talked about Daisy Meadows' ouvre on the way home.

This morning, Daughter googled Daisy Meadows to find her web site and was not amused by what she found. The yowls brought me up from my basement study. (Let's not forget that Daughter is the child who suffers from Dramatic Fever from time to time.) She was yowling because she found out that "Daisy Meadows" doesn't exist. Four authors, including the woman who wrote "Bend It Like Beckham" of all people, write the books. That doesn't surprise me. I figure they saw a chance to grab a piece of the pre-teen fairy lovers market, probably when they were having coffee in their publisher's cafeteria, and ran with it. However, now Daughter isn't sure that she wants to read any more Daisy Meadows books, so they may have lost a reader who buys a lot of their books. Or not. The pull of fairies is strong. Oddly enough, it's the same in Pratchett novels, only he writes much better than Daisy Meadows, even with the beginnings of Early-Onset Alzheimer's. But that's another, and much sadder, story.

Blogged with the Flock Browser

Life With a Feller-Buncher or Why I'm Not So Chipper

2008-05-20T11:06:00.000-04:00

I’ve had a headache for three days now. It’s one of those pounding at the temples, vise grip around the forehead, hot pokers in the eyes kind of deals, but at least it’s a Green Headache. Yes, folks, I’ve gone completely eco-freak and now have an environmentally-correct headache. And it’s certainly sustainable, because it’ll probably be here for at least three weeks.

With the guidance of a forester, we finally decided to selectively cut and improve the mix of hardwoods and softwoods on our sixty acres, before any more succumb to wind, weather and other trees falling on them. We have some nice old trees, but we also have - as they say in Maine - a mess of popple (poplar) and they’re taking over and so are the wild cherries that are so attractive to tent caterpillars.

We’ve had woodcutters look at it before, but they wanted all of the trees or nothing and we weren’t about to clearcut the place. We have too many animals and birds depending on our woods for food and shelter and we have no wish to look out at a bare back forty that’s eroding away toward the swamp.

But now, with biomass boilers and wood pellet stoves popping up all over the place, things have changed. We had no problem finding someone to selectively cut the place, with a contract and oversight from the state. So we signed on the dotted line, sent the paperwork into the state and it was a done deal. We’re even going to make some money out of it. Not a fortune, but maybe enough to pay part of next year’s fuel bill. Or fill up the gas tank in the plow truck.

It was pretty exciting when they drove their feller-buncher into the yard, followed by a skidder (ours is a high-end grapple skidder) and something that I assume is a de-limber, because that’s what it does to full-sized trees, which it picks up in its claw. There’s another piece of equipment which may be a Rottine Forwarder, but don’t quote me on that. I’m not Paulette Bunyan. (By the way, in England, they call de-limbing “snedding” which sounds kind of x-rated, doesn’t it? I can just see the old man on the park bench on Laugh-In asking Gladys Ormsby if she wants to sned.)

However, after a few hours of machinery whining and growling, and trees crashing to the ground, the novelty wore off and the headache started. It got a lot worse the next day when the chipper showed up. If you follow the link and scroll down the page to “other” you’ll find that there are very large chippers that handle whole trees and have knives that shred the trees against an anvil. They don’t call it an anvil in the wiki, but that’s what our woodcutter calls it and he’d know.

I think that’s ironic (no pun intended) for anyone who was alive during the heyday of the Excedrin commercial that used a little animated graphic of a hammer pounding an anvil to illustrate the kind of headache pain it could cure. I don’t use Excedrin. I hardly ever use any painkillers, except when I overdo the gardening and have a sore back for a couple of days, and then I take a couple of valerian before I go to bed.

Valerian didn’t touch this headache, so I tried Ibuprofen. I won’t say the headache laughed at it, but it snickered up its sleeve and it still hurt. I’m not going to take anything stronger, so I guess my options are pretty narrow. I can stay here and listen to it or go to the library and use my laptop there. However, with the price of gas, that kind of deflates our profit. And did I mention that they show up at 5 and work until almost 7? Yup. They’re behind because of the weather and have to finish this up so they can keep other commitments, or leave it half-finished and come back when they can.

After twenty years in Maine, I know better than to tell someone to stop a project and get back to us later, so there’ll be a feller-buncher in the back-forty for almost a month. If my posts stop, check the local psychiatric facility bar Day’s Inn. After this, I think I’ll be so traumatized that I’ll shy away from bonsai plants at the local nursery and give up pruning my roses. Who knew that being green could be such a headache?

A Clique of Clicks

2008-05-16T11:00:00.000-04:00

If, like me, you were dying to know the difference between a marsh, a swamp and a bog, here’s a link that will sort it all out for you before your next nature walk. If, on the other hand, you’re sound on wetlands, but somewhat confused about our winged insect buddies’ private lives, this site will explain why that old Don Ameche movie was called “Cocoon” rather than “Chrysalis”.

If you’re sick of the same-old, same-old browser and would like something much snazzier, which makes blogging so easy-peasy that you may be inspired to start several more blogs, I urge you to consider my new blog of choice, Flock.

I have the Eco version, but the orginal version is great for anyone who likes the idea of posting to their blog(s) within their browser, being able to share photos, feeds, media streams or anything else seamlessly and effortlessly and so much more that I haven’t even explored it all yet. I’m a big Firefox fan. I’ve been using it since the Mozilla dragon was an egg, which may be why I like Flock so much. It’s built on the Firefox framework and seems to like all the Firefox extensions and add-ons I’ve stuck onto it so far. I especially like the keypad scrambler that encrypts my keystrokes at the kernel level and the “no-flash” option which turns flash into little icons that I can turn on or not, as I wish.

When you tire of playing with Flock, may I suggest you learn a new language or brush up on the ones you slept through in high school at Mango Languages. Like the web site says, “Don’t mangle a language, mango it.”

With a foreign language under your belt, perhaps you’d like to try your hand at some art. For the art-impaired like me or someone young, Carmine’s Landscape Adventure is just the ticket. I opted for the sleepy landscape, but you could go for adventure or a landscape that shows the weather.

Art is nice, but knowledge is power. If, to your chagrin, you find one day that your almost-adult son doesn’t know the fifty states and their capitals, or, worse yet, that you don’t, take heart. Most Americans don’t know how many states there are, never mind their names and major cities. You can learn everything you need to know about the 50 states at any of the web sites on this page. And with that I’ll leave you and return to satisfying my curiosity via the Net. Happy surfing.

The Good Vibrations Tour

2008-05-08T13:45:00.001-04:00

(From the WP version of News From Hawkhill Acres)

We’re back from wallowing in the (somewhat limited because it’s not tourist season) fleshpots of coastal Maine. It was a really nice break from dealing with what winter has done to our house, driveway and psyches. And speaking of Crystal Energy Healing Power (just seeing if you’re paying attention), did you know that amethyst is supposed to help with anxiety, sleeplessness and symptoms of ADD/ADHD? Well, according to the proprietor of a little shop we visited where shelves of precious and semi-precious stones and crystals attracted my crow-like children’s eyes, it is.

It’s no secret that both of my kids and my dh have been diagnosed with Attention Deficit Disorder. However, after living with the effects of ADD for lo these thirty years (in June), I can’t help but wonder why it’s called Attention Deficit Disorder or ADD instead of Attention Surfeit Syndrome or … Ah, maybe that’s why. After all, everyone I know who has the diagnosis has no problem paying attention. Give them something they’re interested in and you can’t tear their attention away. Put them in a room where there’s a lot going on and they’ll pay attention - to everything at once - which effectively means that they don’t pay attention to anything.

I have the opposite of ADD, whatever that is. I can focus on anything unless there’s a full-blown melee going on or someone is throwing food at me, so, I don’t need an amethyst crystal to help me keep my mind on what I’m doing. Daughter, on the other hand, who has trouble sleeping to the point where she’s been known to waken and run to the window several times a night in the autumn when the leaves are falling, because one fell outside her window, does need an amethyst or anything else that will help her relax and get those zzz’s that are so necessary to her well-being. (Not to mention that when she doesn’t sleep, I don’t sleep.)

So we got an amethyst and she put it under her pillow in the motel room and it worked. She slept like a top. That, of course, led to a discussion of whether there really is anything to the whole “crystal energy healing” that the shopkeeper talked about while we were there. My theory, and I always have one, is that there might be something to it, because of vibrations.

Physics teaches us that everything in the known universe vibrates constantly. Every piece of matter and anti-matter, including the matter that makes up the human body, is moving at a frequency of its own. (Of course, with humans, you tend to notice it more when they’ve had a lot of coffee.) So why shouldn’t crystal vibrations have an effect on humans?

While I don’t want to teach my kids that every cockamamie theory that New Age devotees come up with makes sense, I don’t want them to have closed minds either. And, of course, there’s the ol’ placebo effect. My feeling is that why it works makes very little difference as long as it does work. If Daughter sleeps better because she thinks the amethyst helps her sleep, then it’s helping her sleep.

Coincidentally, my brother sent me some large chunks of salt crystals for my birthday. They’re supposed to help clear positive ions from the vicinity of computers and electronics OR you can take a bath with them in the water and it relaxes you. I opted for the clearing the air wheeze and have two of them next to my PC. I can’t tell if they’re generating any negative ions, but they sure are pretty and soothing to look at. (And in a pinch, I could break a little piece off and sprinkle it onto my sandwich if I forget to salt it before I bring it downstairs from the kitchen.)

Besides absorbing crystal lore, we spent some time beach combing and also visited The Farnsworth Art Museum, home of the Wyeth collection. Both of my young artists were inspired, so after the museum we went to a really well-stocked art supply store in Camden and bought enough oil pastels, oil paints, paper and brushes to equip all three of the Wyeths. We walked around Camden until we felt like we lived there. We had several really good meals and the kids loaded up on cable TV, because we don’t have much TV at all at home.

The only downside to our trip was that my usual bad hotel karma was working. We had booked our hotel from Wednesday night to Wednesday morning, so I was flummoxed when the bill slid under our door on Saturday afternoon. When I talked to the manager about it, he said he’d understood that we wanted the room for four nights and had already reserved that particular room for someone else, so we’d have to take a smaller room with double beds rather than queen-sized beds if we stayed.

We decided to spend our last two nights in Bangor, so I made a reservation at a motel there, telling them that we wanted a “quiet room with two queen beds on the first floor.” The woman I talked to said there’d be no problem with that. However, when we arrived and went to the desk, another woman told us that we had a room with two double beds.

“But, I specifically asked for queen-sized beds,” I told her.

“Well,” she said, sounding as if I should know this, “There ARE no rooms with queen beds on the first floor. They’re all doubles.”

“Okay,” I said, “Then how about something on the second floor.”

She said that was doable, so we got our keys and headed up to our room. It was spacious, clean and quiet, so we brought our bags up and were unpacking when a horrendous whining noise broke out in the room next to us. It sounded like about a hundred dentists drilling at once. We all looked at each other in shock. I phoned down to the front desk and asked the desk clerk what the heck was going on and she told me that some repairmen were fixing a light, but they’d be done soon.

Two hours later, they were done and we settled down to some peace and quiet. We sent out for pizza, watched a little TV and went to bed, only to be awakened at 11:30 by the new occupants of the room next door (we were calling it Hell Room by this time). They seemed to consist of about twelve toddlers and seven yappy little dogs, but at breakfast the next morning, we met them and it was two toddlers, an infant and one yappy little dog with ADHD. Boy, could that crew have used some amethysts.

Yea, Nay, What the Hey

2008-05-08T13:43:00.001-04:00

(From the WP version of News From Hawkhill Acres)

Somewhere in the bible there’s a recommendation that you “let your yea be yea and your nay be nay.” I believe this was an admonition against swearing as in “I swear to high heaven I did NOT take the last cookie. It must have been the aliens that swooped down and sucked it up with their ray gun.” For some reason, god had a thing about people using oaths or embellishing their yeses and noes.

Well, I can relate to that. I decided a couple years ago that I was going to do everything within my power to say “yes” instead of “no” to my kids, even though my genetic makeup leans toward the other model of parenting. That would be the parenting style where you automatically say “no”, no matter what your progeny asks you, on the basis that whatever they ask you is a bad idea and will lead to tears, bruises, a mess or time behind bars.

When my youngest son died suddenly, I realized that the parenting style that I had been raised with wasn’t the way I wanted to raise my two remaining kids. If I had realized what a lousy parenting style it was, I would have dispensed with it when we acquired our first kid, but we can’t go back and do this parenting wheeze over, unfortunately.

So, from 2006 on, I’ve done a pretty good job of saying “yes” to almost everything my kids have asked of me. Luckily, I have pretty sensible kids. They seldom ask me if they can do things that are dangerous or expensive or extremely time-consuming. But yesterday, my son asked me something that I couldn’t say “yes” to and it’s bothered me ever since.

He’s 18 and his two best friends are 17. They have their licenses. He has his permit. They were all going to a movie and he asked me if he could ride with his friends. I didn’t even have to think. I said, “No, I’m sorry but you can’t.” He said he understood and gave me a hug and a kiss and went upstairs to bed, but I could tell that he was disappointed. Why wouldn’t he be?

Today, his friends pulled up to the movie theater in Josh’s little red car with the bumper sticker that reads, “Don’t piss me off. I’m running out of room to bury the bodies.” Never mind that Josh is a nice kid who gets straight A’s, babysits his little sister and has never given his parents a moment of worry. The bumper sticker says it all. “I have a license, a car and a healthy level of testosterone.” Showing up in the passenger seat of your Mom’s SUV with your little sister in the backseat just doesn’t cut it.

I’m really sorry. I wish I could see my way clear to letting Son ride with his friends. If they had been driving for a year longer, I’d give it my blessing. If Son had enough hours in to get his license and had passed his road test, I’d loan him my car and he could show up driving a vehicle and be on a par with his friends.

But, for now, he’s just going to have to put up with being driven around by his mom. It makes for some awkward moments and adds several trips a week to my schedule, but it beats lying awake nights wondering if I’ll be getting a call from the State Police. There’ll be plenty of time for him to give me gray hair when he gets his license in a couple of months. Of course, what with the price of gas, he’ll be lucky if he can afford to drive past the mailbox.

And speaking of driving, we’re driving to the coast of Maine for a two week vacation. This blog will be on hiatus until we get back. I’ll probably have a lot to blog about, seeing as how Son and Daughter and I will be sharing a motel room and Daughter and I will actually be sharing a queen-sized bed. Don’t miss the next exciting installment of “As the Clamworm Turns, A Maine Idyll” or something like it.

Shifting From Park To a Low Idle

2008-05-08T13:39:00.001-04:00

(From the WP version of News From Hawkhill Acres)

One spring ritual around here is the April visit to the Dodge dealer to get the ol’ Durango sorted out after a season of driving up and down the rutted washboard formerly known as our private road. It was great when the warranty was still in effect, but the odometer hit 100K in March, so this time we’d have to pay. I was going to skip the whole thing, but then we got a safety recall notice on it, so the geek, who works nearby, dropped it off one morning.

I had his weak excuse for a vehicle, which is even more decrepit now that I backed into it last weekend. In my defense, he’d parked it within two feet of my rear bumper, almost blocking me in between it and the garage. But in his defense, it was one of those deals where I came out, looked at his car behind mine, got into my car, started it, looked in back of me and crashed right into the sucker.

How I could miss a whole car is troubling, unless you take into account that I was being yakked at by a ten yr old who just got “Disney Friends” for the Nintendo DS and has to tell me all about Stitch, Pooh, Dory and Simba’s doings whenever we get into the car. Why she saves it up until then is a mystery to me, as is so much of my interactions with other people, including Geekdaddy’s surprisingly gracious reaction when I went in to tell him that the Durango’s trailer hitch had gouged several huge holes in the Taurus’s front bumper.

His only concern was that the airbags hadn’t gone off and once I assured him that they hadn’t, he gave it a brief, unconcerned look and went back to blogging about union matters and Daughter and I went on our way to town.On our way, we picked up the mail and there was the recall notice for the Dodge. And that’s how Geekdaddy ended up calling me the next Monday afternoon to tell me that there was a little problem with my car.

“Well, it’s not unsafe anymore,” he said. “As a matter of fact, it couldn’t get any safer. It’s so safe that you can’t possibly get into an accident, because you can’t drive the thing. They can’t get it out of Park.”

He went on to tell me that the head mechanic was working on it, but if he couldn’t get the shift to move, the dealership would rent a car and deliver it to the geek at the computer mine where he works. However, about an hour later, he drove into the driveway in the Durango. Obviously, there’d been a paradigm shift. Or a shift of some kind.

He said the dealership had called another dealership or something and had figured out how to get the shift to move out of Park without stripping any gears or shredding any metal, which is a good thing when you’re dealing with transmissions. No harm was done. There was no charge and the Dodge was once more fit for duty.

The thing I found the most ironic about the whole thing has to do with the reason we brought it in. The safety recall was to fix a problem that Durangos have with jumping out of Park. Odd that the repair seemed to create the opposite problem of not being able to get it out of Park at all.

There’s probably some kind of deep message there, I’m sure, about balance or yin and yang or something philosophical like that. However, I don’t have time to go into it right now, because I have to call the Dodge dealer and ask them to come tow my car in so they can get it out of Park, where the shift is stuck apparently permanently, albeit it safely, in the driveway.

Yikes! It's the End Times! Again.

2008-05-08T13:35:00.001-04:00

(From the the WP version of News From Hawkhill Acres)

Somehow, without me even noticing, it’s time for our end-of-year review once again. This is where I tell our reviewer, a fellow homes schooler who holds a teaching certificate, what the kids have learned this year and how they’ve made progress, which is all that’s necessary in the state of Maine, thank goodness. This is also where I suddenly realize that they haven’t learned anything or made any progress since the last review, because all they’ve done for a solid year is play computer and video games, argue and goof off.

Of course, I could always say that they’ve become skilled at applied technology, rhetoric and creative time-management. It’s true, but I’d like to think that I don’t have to fudge to satisfy the “making progress” requirement and I’d also like to reassure myself that this unschooling wheeze is working. So, I cast my mind back over the year and look for instances of learning experiences, but it’s really hard to pin them down and isolate them.

The trouble with trying to assess unschooling is that it’s such an organic process. Because we’ve gone to the extremely relaxed (practically boneless) end of the unschooling spectrum, I don’t assess the kids’ progress, except in the holistic way of being aware that they’re maturing and changing and gaining knowledge. Where some of my more “schooly” friends can tell you what reading or math level their kids are at, I have no idea if mine are ahead, behind or level with other same-age kids. All I know is that they read a heck of a lot.

I can, however, tell you that they can figure out what they need and want to figure out when it comes to math. Sit my daughter down in front of a Webkinz page and she can instantly tell you how much the one she wants costs, complete with shipping and how long it will take for her to save up for it at $2/wk, how much quicker she could get it if we increased that by fifty cents and how many months, weeks, days and minutes it is until her birthday if she has to wait until then because we won’t loan her what she needs to get it now.

Son uses math of all sorts in his drawing and has been responsible for several of my after-lunch naps, when he’s explained the Golden Mean of Art or some such and exactly which ratio he’s used for each of the ten drawings of heads and shoulders he’s working on at the moment. As my chin hits my sprouted rye with ham and Swiss sandwich, I see that there’s absolutely no reason to worry about his grasp of fractions and I also realize that after-lunch math is still putting me to sleep, just as it did back in 8th grade algebra.

Unfortunately, or probably fortunately in some cases where sanity is something the people value, none of the folks who evince concern about my kids’ academic prowess live with us, so they don’t experience the day-to-day evidence that unschooling is working on all levels for Daughter and Son. For some reason, almost every time we run into any of these doubters, my kids seem to come all over witless.

We’ll be at the park, having a good old time, when Daughter gets a piece of grass in her eye. As another mother, who’s a former science teacher, holds her, I try to get the grass out, whereupon Daughter shrieks that it’s going inside her head and will get into her brain, thereby showing a complete lack of knowledge vis a vis the structure of the eye, which all the other kids there learned when they were toddlers, and which Daughter knows, but forgets in times of trauma.

Or Son, who is trying to be more independent, with my blessing, tells the woman at the pharmacy that his birthdate is March 29th and she asks him, “what year is it?” and he looks at me in terrified appeal. It’s only after we leave the poor woman, who is valiantly trying not to laugh, that Son explains that he didn’t know whether she meant “what year is your birthday” or “what year is this” or something completely different involving prescriptions and pharmacies that he didn’t understand. It doesn’t help that we’ve chatted to that particular clerk about how wonderful unschooling is, nor would it help to explain that it was a lack of confidence in successfully completing a new interaction, rather than a lack of IQ that was in play there.

Just to make myself feel better, I sat down the other night and made a stream-of-consciousness list of what I’m aware of that the kids learned this year. I know I didn’t catch everything, because half the time I don’t know that they’ve learned something until they surprise me with it by telling me something I don’t know. Like the time Daughter told me that Killer Whales aren’t whales; they’re Dolphins. Good thing I didn’t put money on it, because she’s right. (I still maintain that they should rename them Killer Dolphins. Just to make things clearer.)

Anyhow, my list ran to several pages for each of them by the time I was done and included books they’ve read, videos and tv shows we’ve watched, radio shows and podcasts we’ve listened to, museum trips, field trips (although every time we leave the house it’s a field trip, I guess), conversations with all kinds of people and the Democratic Caucus for Son, newscasts we watch together and then discuss and probably about a million or so questions that sent one or all of us off to the library, the computer or a friend who might know the answer.

Then there’s the stuff that they’ve learned from their friends, the medieval dances and (in Son’s case) the fighting in armor from the Society for Creative Anachronism we belong to, not to mention the feasts in costume and the other SCA events which include Medieval Arts and Sciences such as fiber arts, painting and crafts. There’s the music they listen to and Son makes with his saxophone, the drawing and (in Daughter’s case) the photography and writing. Their blogs. The housework, cooking, personal care and chores they’ve learned to be responsible for, unlike most of their friends who are told that “school is your job” and who can’t cook a meal or do their own laundry without help.

I guess for people who are used to testing kids against other kids based on what a group of adults thinks they should know at a certain age, assessing my kids’ progress in life would be very difficult. It’s like the different results you get from painting freehand or painting by the numbers. You can get a nice picture either way, but my kids do much better when they create their own picture . They need more control over their lives and education than public school allows.

So, that’s why I’m temporarily flummoxed every spring, trying to put down on paper what I know in my heart. My kids are making progress, although maybe not the progress that they’d make in school where they were miserable. They’re learning all the time and as a friend of mine says, they’re more like human becomings than human beings, just like all of us. That’s progress.

Eat Your Letters

2008-05-08T13:26:00.001-04:00

(Okay, I give up, no one is going to the wordpress blog, so I'll keep posting to this one in addition to that one. Sheesh!)

We stopped getting the daily paper sometime last year shortly after we figured out that, if we didn’t cut expenses, we’d be using newspapers for fuel thanks to the rising cost of oil. Now, I buy one when the mood strikes me as it did yesterday. I’ve always read most of the paper, but now that I only get one once in awhile, I find myself reading all of the paper, right down to the legal notices and police blotter. (But not, of course, The Phantom cartoon strip. Why is the racist thing still in the paper? But, I digress.)

Yesterday, there were two things that struck me. In the police blotter, there was a paragraph about a young man who had held up a grocery store with a bloody syringe. Horrifying enough, but what the paragraph seemed to dwell on the most was the fact that he was also charged with “committing robbery while concealing his face from the victims.”

I don’t know what they tack on to your prison sentence for that charge, but to me it smacks of penalizing someone for being intelligent. What, is there a rule book somewhere that you can look up the rules of robbery and see if it’s “cheating” to hide your face? To me, it’s right up there with “the rules of war” and “giving deer a sporting chance” by not using bait to toll them in.

I guess I’m just a simple soul, because it seems obvious to me that it’s part and parcel of being a miscreant to hide your face, just like it’s inherent to cats to sneak up on their prey, which we call sneaky, rather than rushing up with a lot of noise, which cats call starving. And when humans feel that they have to resort to war, the rules of human interaction have already broken down and the two sides should just get it over as soon as possible and have it over.

Making rules for killing people is ridiculous, except for the one that they used to have back in the good old days before guns, when armies met away from civilians and fought it out with each other. A better rule for war would be that the people who want the wars (and Homeland Security will no doubt be calling me on this one), such as the Neo-con chickenhawks in Washington, should fight the wars. They could bring their friends and the talk-show hosts who urged people to vote for them.

The other interesting item I saw in the paper - you remember the paper? - was a Notice of A Request For Permission To Enlarge a Suit. I mean this anti-obesity campaign is all very well and good, but really! Turns out it wasn’t what I thought at all but rather a bank trying to get more time to notify someone about a foreclosure. (I wonder if they’ve checked the homeless shelters?)

However, it did tie in with something I saw in a magazine. I believe it was Woman’s World, this week’s issue. It’s the “S” diet and it’s taking the weight-loss world by storm. Apparently, it’s so simple that a tubby child could do it. You simply eat 3 meals a day with no seconds, snacks or sweets - except on days that start with s. That would be Saturday and Sunday, so you can pig out on weekends.

I was on a similar diet this winter, only it was the “Y” diet. I could eat what I wanted, but only on days that end in y. For some reason, I didn’t lose an ounce, but rather gained about 15 pounds. I figured it was water weight, so I went on that diet where you drink a gallon of water everyday. You know, the “P” diet, but that didn’t work either, although I drank water with every meal and snack. Must have been six or eight times a day and even with my midnight snack.

So then I figured I’d try another letter. I googled letter diets and came up with the “W” diet which I followed faithfully for almost two weeks, until I went back to the web site and read the thing more thoroughly (I’d only skimmed it the first time) and realized that the diet was for skinny folks and guaranteed to “double you” in a year. Geez, that would explain why I needed a whole new wardrobe - including socks!

I’m no quitter though (especially when it comes to finishing dessert) so I continued to look for ways to cut down on the calories. I was overjoyed when I found “The Knitting Diet”, because I’m an avid knitter. The theory was that no one could knit and eat at the same time, so keeping your hands busy with knitting projects would just automatically cut out 250 calories a day. It’s a nice theory, but it doesn’t explain how I ended up with 12 pairs of socks, all with large chocolate stains on them.

Nope, I’m afraid I’m going to have to go on the only weight-loss plan that’s ever worked for me. I’m going to have to eat sensibly and move around more. I don’t know what the letter is for that - maybe the S and M diet? Anyhow, I’ve started using my gazelle exercise machine in the morning, planning what I’m going to eat for the day instead of just randomly grabbing whatever looks good and doesn’t take long to prepare, and I’m back on the ol’ cranberry juice spritzers instead of wine, except for two glasses on Friday night with two slices of pizza.

I figure by the time the snow is gone, I’ll be down ten pounds and maybe we can just let the last five pounds slide. Hey, we’re down to two feet and we even have bare patches that are big enough for a robin to stand and look disgusted in, so I guess I’d better get going with the ol’ diet. I don’t have the money to hire a lawyer to get me Permission to Enlarge.

What Is The Sound Of One Voice Arguing?

2008-04-02T09:07:00.002-04:00

Read the post AND for goodness' sake, update your bookmark to the wordpress site, okay? I'm going to stop leaving reminders here as of 4/25/2008. That's when I'll turn 57 and be too old to keep up with two versions of anything.

Seeing Things, Hearing Things and Doing the Groucho Crouch

2008-03-28T11:42:00.002-04:00

READ THE POST

I'm Worried About This Manifold Destiny Thing

2008-03-19T16:40:00.001-04:00

Have you ever noticed how the more there is to worry about, the more people tell you not to worry? For instance, if you tell a good friend that you have a funny pain in your head and your arm keeps going numb, do they ever tell you to worry about a brain tumor, even though those are two of the symptoms of one? Nope. The first thing they say is, “Don’t worry. READ THE REST OF THIS SCINTILLATING POST.

When Your Biological Clock Goes Off, Sometimes You Should Hit the Snooze Button

2008-03-17T07:20:00.002-04:00

It must be a trend. Three people have told me recently that they're trying to figure out if they're ready to have kids. One of them is barely more than a kid, herself, so I hope she decides to wait awhile. The other two are both in their thirties, so I suppose they're thinking that time is running out, but I hope they take a while to think about it in spite of the time crunch. READ THE REST OF THIS SCINTILLATING POST.

Get All the News From Hawkhill Acres at Alltop.com

2008-03-11T11:50:00.002-04:00

I was going to post later this week about Guy Kawasaki's new site www.alltop.com, because it's fast becoming the place I go to whenever I have to research anything. (Okay, that includes when I have to research READ THE REST OF THIS SCINTILLATING POST

I Am NOT Cranky!

2008-03-08T11:29:00.001-05:00

Just because I’ve been a little irritable lately, what with having the flu for over a week, a couple of family members have accused me of being cranky. Me? Cranky? No way. I defy anyone to show one instance of crankiness that wasn’t justified by what I’ve gone through lately.

First of all, it’s not easy to be Susy Sunshine when you’ve been coughing almost constantly for two weeks. Add in a fever, sore throat, body aches so bad that my earlobes hurt and my eyelashes are numb, and it’s obvious that any slight hint of irritation that I exhibited was absolutely understandable. READ THE REST OF THIS SCINTILLATING POST.

Weaving Peace as Opposed to Waging War

2008-03-03T10:27:00.002-05:00

Who doesn't remember Sparta and Athens, those city states which were so easy to study because they were direct opposites. Well, at least they were the way history was taught in the early sixties when we labored over dioramas of burly athletes trouncing skinny guys in togas. I remember that we touched lightly on Aristophanes and his plays, including Lysistrata. If I recall correctly, we had an unmarried, rather prim and proper teacher that year and she was so vague about the whole thing, that I came away with the feeling that Lysistrata and the women of Athens had quit cooking supper for their husbands, thus bringing about an almost-immediate end to the Peloponnesian War. I remember thinking, "Wow, those Greek guys really liked their chow!" READ THE REST OF THIS SCINTILLATING POST

Unschooling Through the Instamatic Flu

2008-02-26T09:34:00.002-05:00

Well, I don't know if it's really Instamatic Flu that I have, but I'm Sick. When I mentioned it in an email to a fellow homeschooler, she sympathized and said she understands how hard it is to be sick when your kids are at home, rather than at school. I started to agree and then I thought a minute and realized READ THE REST OF THIS SCINTILLATING POST AT THE NEW WORDPRESS VERSION OF NEWS FROM HAWKHILL ACRES

Why Is The Shortest Month of the Year So Long?

2008-02-20T10:46:00.003-05:00

Around this time of year, I think we all get a little cranky. In Maine, we call it cabin fever and it leads to headlines like Woman Grabs Salad Tongs, Slathers Six. (In more urban areas, it’d be Woman Grabs Ax, Slays Six.) What with the snow, the short days, the frost heaves, potholes, high heating costs and the pounds we’ve packed on since November, clinical depression is about one whoopie pie away for some of us.
READ THE REST OF THIS SCINTILLATING POST AT THE WORDPRESS VERSION OF NEWS FROM HAWKHILL ACRES

Does The Marriage Bed of Satan Have A Memory Foam Mattress?

2008-02-14T08:19:00.001-05:00

As usual, Daughter and Son and I went to the library last Monday. While there, I perused the new books and had a hard time finding anything at all to read, so I browsed the stacks and found a couple of ancient books that looked intriguing but turned out to be more like bible tracts than books when I read them later. Daughter, on the other hand, found a stack of books and was already putting them into her cloth bag when I joined her in the children's room.

Now, some of my relatives and a couple of friends, have criticized me for not monitoring my kids' reading material. When I was a kid, one of my late mother's church lady friends told me that reading the wrong kind of books when you're a kid leads just one step closer to the Marriage Bed of Satan, a phrase that pops into my mind when Son takes out books with covers that show warrior women wearing the latest in leather bikinis. But I still let them read what they want to read.

Daughter's reading tastes are, like mine, varied and eclectic, and tend to run in spurts. Lately, she's been reading a lot of American Girls, Ranger Rick and Discover for Kids magazines, joke books and her constant favorite: animal encyclopedias. Son, on the other hand, enjoys a range of non-fiction, but only sci-fi and fantasy fiction. Lucky for him, fantasy seems to be the genre du jour lately and he also found bushels of books. So we were all booked up and went home to read our heads off.

A few days later, while I was working at the PC and Daughter was reading on the couch behind me, I heard mutters and mumbles and exasperated sighs. When Daughter sighs, work is impossible. If Tolstoy had been blessed with a daughter like Daughter, War and Peace would have been a shopping list. However, I'm not writing War and Peace, although it feels like it sometimes when ideas won't come, so I turned to her and asked what was wrong.

"Her father's a jerk," she said.

"Whose father?" I asked her.

"Elizabeth, the girl in this book I'm reading. He's really mean. First he's nice and then he's not nice. And her stepmother is a wimp. She says she'll help and then she says she's too busy to even see Elizabeth. And I think he killed Elizabeth's mother. Elizabeth thinks so too."

This did NOT sound like an American Girl. Well, unless the latest AG takes place in Prohibition Era Chicago and Elizabeth's daddy is a gangster. I didn't think that was likely, so what the heck was my ten year old reading that had this level of domestic violence in it?

"Are you sure about her father killing her mother?" I asked. "Maybe you read it wrong?"

Sometimes, Daughter's attention wanders and she misses facts and the odd sentence or two in books, although she's a very good reader otherwise. This is one of the reasons she learns at home - so that someone else can fill in those little gaps. Like when she read the book about American government, but couldn't answer the question about why we have an electoral college. Oh wait, that was me! Well, anyhow, she misses things sometimes.

"I'm going to go back to the beginning and read the part where she talks about her mother dying," she said, "Maybe that'll help."

So she did and it helped.

"Yup, he killed her. Killed a bunch of his other wives too. What a jerk."

Light dawned.

"What's Elizabeth's father's name?" I asked.

"Henry Vee or Vie. It's V-I-I-I but I don't know how to pronounce it. What a jerk."

So there you have it, folks. Daughter's pithy but accurate review of Henry VIII. And they say unschooling kids can't do book reports. Hah! Later Daughter finished the book and treated me to a scathing, but realistic report on most of the Tudors and a couple of the Stuarts with a short but compelling airing of her views on Phillip of Spain, who was, according to Daughter, also a jerk.

If your daughter or son would like some painless - and actually enjoyable - history lessons, sashay to the shelf in your local library that has The Royal Diaries, published by Scholastic. And if, like me, your library books of the week turn out to be clinkers, the Royal Diaries aren't bad for a quick read after the kids go to bed. I've just finished Kazunomiya, Prisoner of Heaven, Japan 1858 so Daughter will be reading it today. I wonder what public place we'll be in when she asks me what concubines are.

Really, Roger?

2008-02-07T09:47:00.000-05:00

This post is a response to a comment that someone left on my previous post about the dangers of plastics, although the comment is on the subject of depleted uranium.

Dear Roger,

It's obvious that you feel strongly about the issue of depleted uranium weapons, unfortunately, your condescending tone just turned me right off. However, I did go to the link in your comment and looked at several of the reports. Most of them are from the US government, Department of Defense and the one from the UNWHO was disputed by the three scientists who conducted it. As reported in February of 2004 by the Scottish Sunday Herald,"WHO ‘Suppressed’ Scientific Study Into Depleted Uranium Cancer Fears in Iraq. Radiation experts warn in unpublished report that DU weapons used by Allies in Gulf war pose long-term health risk."

I wouldn't dream of trying to convert you to my views on DU, Roger, but for the other people who might read your comment, here's my position on DU and "expert opinions" in general.

In the early 1950's, my mother's doctor gave her medication to prevent miscarriage. She took it for 4 of the 9 months she was pregnant with me. It was DES, diethylsilbestrol, a form of synthetic estrogen. It was, the doctors and drug company assured the public, perfectly safe and had absolutely no side effects except for mild nausea - a small price to pay for a perfectly healthy baby. Not quite two decades later, I too had a baby, but without the use of DES which had been found to be carcinogenic to mothers and babies alike. My baby never thrived and died at two weeks, most likely because he had a birth defect common to babies of DES daughters.

Seven years later after three miscarriages, I developed cervical cancer and had surgery that made it very unlikely that I'd ever carry a baby to term. During that time, my mother developed breast cancer, the only one of seven siblings to have cancer. None of her siblings had taken DES. Some DES daughters received compensation in a class action law suit, but I didn't because I had no documentation except for my mother's word that she'd taken it.

In the early 70's, I dated a man who had served in Vietnam. He had many serious health problems, although he'd been very healthy before he'd gone. His doctor thought it might be from the effects of Agent Orange, which he'd handled almost constantly, sprayed by hand and dropped on the Vietnamese countryside from his aircraft. The Department of Defense pooh-poohed this idea, much as you, Roger, dismiss my opinion of DU's effects. The DOD, like you, even had studies from scientists that "proved" that there were no lasting effects from Agent Orange. The only side effect they'd admit to was a skin rash that went away with time. (The DOD still refuses to admit that Agent Orange caused problems for Viet Vets, but they pay compensation for some veterans who are dogged enough to keep fighting.)

After we drifted apart, I lost touch with him until I read in the early 80's that he had died from sarcoma, one of the diseases that the DOD now recognizes as one that they'll compensate veterans for if they've been exposed to Agent Orange. By the way, Agent Orange is a term for any of the several herbicides dropped, sprayed and poured onto 10% of the area of South Vietnam. Over 90% of the herbicides were contaminated with Dioxin, one of the most carcinogenic substances in existence. In addition to the health effects on veterans and civilians, the herbicides used in Vietnam had serious consequences on the mangrove forests, especially, and the environment throughout the country.

In the late 70's, I was a welder in a shipyard in RI. We used heaters to warm the metal before we welded it. Because we weren't a union shop like the nearby Groton, CT shipyard where my stepfather worked, we did our own grinding. We weren't always terribly accurate, so the air was filled with fluffy gray particles from the fabric the heaters were covered with. I suggested to my "team leader" that the particles could be harmful, because it was impossible not to breathe them in. He laughed. My stepfather was diagnosed with mesothelioma when he was in his sixties. His doctor said it was from breathing in asbestos fibers from the heaters in the shipyard he welded in. Those were the fibers that my boss laughed at. I think about the ones I inhaled sometimes, usually around 4 in the morning when I can't sleep.

And now I come back to the main point of the post you commented on, Plastic Is Not Fantastic. For decades, the plastics industry has been extolling the virtues of plastic. One of the first things they said was that it doesn't contaminate the environment because it's impervious to decay. We now know that this is not true. It leaches chemicals into the environment and into our food and water, while at the same time filling our oceans and landfills with plastic debris that kills birds, fish and mammals and lasts for generations.

Even now, plastic industry web sites are claiming that there is no health risk from bisphenol-A in baby bottles or other food-grade containers. Many reputable scientists disagree. Many scientists also suggest, and I agree, that bisphenol-A is only one of many endocrine system disruptors in our environment, and that they all contribute to a toxic load that is damaging our bodies and our planet. (I'm not even going to go into the pollution plastic manufacturing generates and the fact that it uses petroleum resources.)

I was exposed to DES before I was born. I was exposed to asbestos even after the Dept of the Navy, the US government and most reputable scientists knew that it could have serious health consequences. Because the present administration lied about WMD's, some of my young relatives are fighting an unjust, unethical, ill-conceived war that is bankrupting my country, literally and figuratively, and has damaged America's image so badly that I don't know if we'll ever recover in the eyes of the world. If you can see anyone besides the oil companies and defense contractors who are benefiting from this war, Roger, let me know.

I've been lied to so many times about so many harmful substances, that I have very little capacity left to just blindly accept anything the government or Corporate America says about anything they have a stake in. And now I have you, Roger, telling me on my own blog that I need to shut up because I'm ignorant of the facts about depleted uranium, based on my admittedly weak attempt at humor using the term. I'm not an idjit. I know that "depleted uranium" doesn't contain as much uranium as natural uranium or enriched uranium.

Heck no! It contains less than a third of the radioactive type of uranium. Practically none. Why, a child could play with it (and probably many have in Iraq when they ingest the soil laced with DU dust.) When it's not burning and exploding, it's absolutely harmless except, of course, for the odd piece of shrapnel that lodges inside one of the thousands of wounded Americans and Iraquis who happen to get hit with DU containing material. I wish I had some right now so I could sprinkle it over my kids' cereal. Oh, wait a minute, I'm sorry. I forgot to telegraph another weak attempt at humor. I'm incorrigible.

Plastic Is Not Fantastic

2008-02-06T12:59:00.000-05:00

In The Graduate, a character named Mr. McGuire tells Benjamin Braddock (the character played by Dustin Hoffman) that plastics is the one word he needs to know. We never find out if Benjamin takes his advice, but apparently everyone else in the 60's did. Plastic is everywhere and it's my contention that it's one of the biggest problems we face in the world.

Think about it. According to The Independent, UK and Alternet, "A "plastic soup" of waste floating in the Pacific Ocean is growing at an alarming rate and now covers an area twice the size of the continental United States..."

And then there's this sea of plastic as reported by Frontline.

From the first one, we get dead sea animals and birds, toxic chemicals in our food and water, and waste that apparently never goes away. (Remind you of anything else that we can't seem to find a place for? Maybe we should rethink the whole nuclear power industry until we find a place for that planet-wrecker too. Or maybe we could encase all the nuclear waste in plastic. Yeah, that's the ticket.)

From the second sea of plastic credit cards, we get a culture that uses spending and buying to take our minds off the fact that we're killing people around the world, providing an army for the oil companies with our National Guard troops, and poisoning the survivors with depleted uranium, which is not depleted at all, but instead is radioactive. (Kind of like giant shrimp or military intelligence, I guess.)

Anyhow, a long time ago, I decided that plastic wasn't a good idea. Maybe working in the RI plastics industry for a few years as a young adult had something to do with it. Or maybe I was smarter then than I am now, because a whole lot of plastic seems to have found a home in my home over the years. Now, once again, I'm trying to rid myself of it, but boy is it hard! It's so ubiquitous and it's so hard to find alternatives.

No, wait a minute. Why am I finding alternatives to plastic? This whole plastic thing happened to us because plastic IS an alternative. It's an alternative to glass, ceramic, wood, metal, cloth and paper. So, I guess the way to get plastic out of my life, as much as humanly possible, is to get the other materials back INTO my life.

That's why there are glass mason jars in my freezer and glass bowls in my fridge. Unfortunately, I can't stop the supermarket from packaging everything in plastic, but I can remove the plastic wrapping when I get home and put the food into something more natural. I've never nuked anything in plastic in my life, because no matter what the plastics industry said, I always suspected that heating food in plastic leaches toxins into the food. From what I've read recently, I was right.

I've always used canvas bags for schlepping everything from library books to swim gear, but I need to make more of an effort to actually use the re-usable supermarket bags I bought and keep leaving in the house. I need to bite the bullet and give up my beloved frocs (faux Crocs) and wear leather or cloth shoes or maybe they make them out of bamboo now? It's being used for everything else. I could wear hemp shoes, but I'm afraid I'd be sniffed out at the airport by drug-finding beagles or something.

So that's my little diatribe on plastics and the ruination of civilization as we know it and I'm sorry if you were expecting something light and frothy about unschooling or family life. I've had a couple of emails lately from readers who want to know if I'm still homeschooling my kids because I hardly ever mention homeschooling anymore. They seem to feel as if I'm shortchanging them by not writing about what I put in my headline. Sheesh! Everybody's a critic.

Yes, we're still unschoolers. They learn something everyday. Today, for instance, they learned about plastics, nuclear waste (including how to pronounce nuclear), depleted uranium and the history of hemp in America. While I was writing this, they also watched The Call of the Wild - the one with Charlton Heston back before he got religion and/or Alzheimer's and took up gunning for Liberals, all subjects we also discussed in passing.

Son made a twisted wire hairpin and Daughter drew several paper's worth of funny little bug people and did a stint on the Gamecube, playing Harvest Moon. They both went on http://Factmonster.com to learn more about the states they didn't know about when Geekdaddy asked, which made him so upset that he said the S word. School.

Now, if you'll excuse me, I'm going to go research whether it's feasible to nuke something in metal INSIDE a plastic container without blowing up the microwave or starting a fire. And then, because my cousin's daughter is having a baby, I guess I'd better go see if glass baby bottles are on sale. Or maybe I could just get the kid a teeny, tiny stainless steel hip flask?

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Is Your Webhost Really Green? AISO is.

Writing About What You Know

2008-02-02T09:05:00.000-05:00

People often ask me why I write. Okay, so they phrase it a little differently, but what else could they mean by asking "Why don't you stop writing?" The answer is another question: What else would I do? Why did Shirley Jackson, Will Cuppy, Erma Bombeck and Jean Kerr write? Why do millions of bloggers, like me, sit down to the keyboard and share their sometimes very personal life experiences with the world? Why don't we put our time to better use by finding a cure for migraines or a way to stop global warming, or televangelists or something worthwhile like that?

Well, in my case, at least, there is one compelling reason for sharing my life experiences. I have so many of them and they're so weird. I think I was about ten when I realized that I'm a magnet for strange people, odd coincidences and bizarre events. If there's one loony in the bin, wherever I am, the loony will sit down beside me and start to tell me her life story.

What's more, I probably won't find that story terribly strange, because I've heard many similar stories before, at least once from a man who was wearing a plastic bowl for a hat. If I remember correctly, he was also wearing roller blades and had a wooden cup on a string around his neck, but this was decades ago, so I could be imagining the cup. I do remember that he gave me a butterscotch toffee that was covered with lint from his pocket and I mimed putting it into my mouth so as not to hurt his feelings. Unfortunately, then I had to make sucking noises and poke my tongue up against my cheeks to make it look like I was eating it.

This week has been a veritable cornucopia of writing fodder. I suppose the strangest thing happened at my doctor's office where I went to get my infected ears looked at and ended up sharing a bathroom stall with 3-yr old twin boys. This wouldn't usually throw me, but I was supposed to be producing a urine sample at the time, which made it a little dicey.

They crawled under the door and into the stall while their mother was diapering their baby brother, who seemed to be having some sort of medical crisis which involved his diaper contents. At least it smelled like that. Anyhow, Frick and Frack or Thing A and Thing B or whoever they were managed to escape their double stroller and popped up like little gophers right in front of my knees. Luckily, I had a long sweater on, so I just kind of pulled it around my lap and set the specimen cup on the toilet paper holder.

I smiled and they smiled and one of them said, "We got lead poison."
"We might die." The other one said.
"Oh, dear," I said, "That's not good. But I don't think you'll die. I think you'll probably be fine."
"Nope," Boy in Green said, "Mom says we're in deep doo-doo."
"Evan!" A horrified voice yelled. "Devan! You get out of there and leave that lady alone. Let her pee in peace."
"She's not peeing," Evan or Devan said, "She's talkin' to us."
"Well, actually," I said, "I'd appreciate it if you guys could crawl back out. Can you do that?"
They wiggled backwards, but somehow the stroller had gotten in the way and that wasn't going to work. The door opened outward, so I couldn't even open it to let them out. I was in the stall on the end, so they scrooched down and into the next stall and a loud voice said, "Hey! Get out of here!" and they were pushed back onto my feet.
"There's a mean old lady in there," one of them said.
"And she doesn't like kids," the other one said.
The stroller moved and a hand reached under the door into the stall and grabbed the nearest boy's pants cuff. His astonished expression was so comical that I started laughing and so did his twin, as the first boy was dragged out of the stall backwards.

Unfortunately, just as he was about to go under the door, he put his head up and banged it. His loud yowl of pain set off his brother, who also started yowling and my already painful ears started to hurt even more from the din. I think it was the acoustics, but it was a bit like being between two cymbals with the orchestra playing the 1812 Overture. The woman in the stall next to me left, banging the stall door as she went and I opened the door so that the second twin's mother could reach in and grab him. The woman was evidently somewhat used to this kind of thing, because by the time I finished doing what I had to do, the restroom was empty and very, very quiet.

For the rest of the day, I found myself wondering if they really do have lead poisoning, maybe from a recalled toy? Or maybe they ate paint chips on the windowsill of their decrepit apartment building which is all their mother can afford now that her husband is fighting in Iraq. Or maybe they live in an old farmhouse with lead soldered pipes and they'll just keep getting dumber and dumber and grow up to be the kind of people who forward emails about disappearing hitchhikers and spiders in bananas. Or become financial analysts. Or maybe, twenty years from now, they'll be offering toffees to women who sit down next to them at bus stations.

Well anyway, this kind of weirdness is why I started writing way back in 1961. I started with little stories about horses and animals and fairy tale creatures, but only because that was what my teachers told me I should be writing. Then, a few years later, I saw The Purple Avenger episode of Please Don't Eat the Daisies by Jean Kerr, a humor writer. (Dom Deluise was the Purple Avenger so I got to discover him too.) I read my way through her books in a week and moved on to Shirley Jackson and Erma Bombeck.

Some writers will be remembered for their stirring love stories i.e. Pasternak's Dr. Zhivago. Some, like Hemingway, for their style and some like Faulkner for their ability to evoke a place and a time and characters who people it so well that we feel as if we know them. Me, I suspect that I'll always be the woman who blogs about the funny things that happen to her, which is just fine with me.

Unschooling On The Side

2008-01-27T14:04:00.000-05:00

I guess I AM an optimist. I just went to take a nap in my bedroom which is directly under Son's bedroom where he and two other teenage boys were playing a board game. You'd think I'd know by now that there are board games - think senior citizens playing checkers - and there are board games - three 17 yr old boys doing anything. So instead I'll write the post I was going to write later today.

Recently on Elisheva's Ragamuffin Studies blog I read something that really made me think. In a post about her son being uncomfortable with schedule changes, she said that she forgot to "be the guide on the side, rather than the sage on the stage." I don't know whether she made this up or got it somewhere else, but it worked its way into my brain and I find myself saying it like a mantra. Several times in the last few days, it's saved me from an angst-iety attack when what my kids seem to be learning doesn't fit my perception of what they should be learning.

Daughter is a reader, which is wonderful. However, oftentimes it seems to me that the only things she reads are Pokemon cards, Club Penguin chat, Neopets Magazine and restaurant menus. Sure, we go to two libraries every week and she brings home at least two cloth bags full of books, but I rarely see her read them. How in the world, I wonder, is this kid going to learn anything about history, science, math or literature? But, unschooling advocate that I am, I repeat my mantra while biting my tongue, and let her follow her interests.

So, a couple of days later, we're buying drapes to darken my bedroom and she gives me a fifteen minute history of blackout curtains as they were used in England and the US during World War 2 with a side trip to discuss bomb shelters and the London Underground or tube stations. She says she read it in an American Girl book earlier this week. That night, we're watching Jeopardy and she knows three questions that I didn't know she knew. One was about Theodore Roosevelt having Booker T. Washington to lunch at the White House, one was about Abraham Lincoln's son, Tad and the third was that "ferrous" means "containing iron."

I don't know why I'm surprised at this. Just yesterday, I finished reading "Shadows and Lies" by Marjorie Eccles, which taught me more about the Boer War and the Relief of Mafeking than I ever learned in school. Because I've been reading from 7-20 books a week for over fifty years, and because I have very eclectic taste in books, I've probably gotten about three college degrees' worth of knowledge from reading. So why do I doubt that my kids can do the same thing?

Maybe it's the same mindset that people have when they doubt that parents who have been educated in public schools can teach their children as well as public schools can. It's always seemed like a silly argument to me. If I learned something well enough to pass it and graduate, why can't I convey that knowledge to my kids? If my kids want to learn something, why can't they find a resource where the knowledge is available - maybe with my help - and use it to study the subject?

I guess it comes down to a matter of trust. Public educators don't trust parents to teach their kids, nor do they trust kids to be capable of learning through any agency other than teachers and textbooks. And when I doubt that my kids can learn without my constant direction and correction, I'm falling into the same mindset as the people who believe that my kids can't learn without school.

So thanks, Elisheva, for getting me back on track. Sometimes I forget why the unschooling/homeschooling community is so important to me both online and offline. Now, I think I'll attempt that nap again while the boys are out flailing at each other with swords made of foam and duct tape. It's such a waste of time and I'll be so glad when they outgrow it and get interested in more worthwhile things like what they're going to do with the rest of their lives, which is what they should be thinking about instead of playing... Oops, there I go again. Guide on the side. Guide on the side. Ommmmmm.

Icicles and Undies

2008-01-22T12:51:00.000-05:00

Daughter often accuses me of providing TMI (too much information) and yesterday was no exception. It started when I came in from starting the car to warm it up for a trip to the big city. The temperature outside - or rather lack of one - was minus 3 so I didn’t linger. I raced outside, inserted the key, turned on the car’s heater to blasting and raced back in.

“Boy,” I said to Daughter, who was drawing at the table, “I am so tired of this constant tinkling.”

“TMI, Mom,” she said, putting her hands over her ears.

“Well, that and this permanent wedgie I seem to have developed today,” I went on even though she wasn’t listening. “Talk about getting my knickers in a twist.”

Evidently she heard me and I got a “ooohhh, that is SO gross, Mom” back.

Believe me, this was a highly unusual conversation chez Hawkins. Maybe because my kids don’t go to school and I’m not big on making fun of bodily functions, we rarely make fart jokes or snicker at someone’s really impressive burp. Even when I was a kid, I didn’t get that kind of thing. Too practical and down to earth, I guess. So someone burps or passes gas. Big deal. Wedgies? Only if they’re potato wedges, thankyouveddymuch.

But my undies were feeling like they were two sizes too small and every time I’d gone outside that morning, I heard this weird tinkling sound. When I filled the bird feeder, it was there in the background, as if maybe the red squirrels had started wearing chandelier earrings or the chickadees were sporting ankle bracelets with tiny charms on them. It was driving me mad and I was beginning to think I might have a case of tinnitus when I realized what it was.

Before I went out the first time that morning, I’d taken a shower as usual. However, I was in a hurry, so I didn’t dry my hair completely. I hate the hair dryer, so I only use it when I absolutely have to - like when it’s minus something outside and I have to go out. So I’d gone out with slightly damp hair and it froze. The tinkling sound I heard was my frozen hair, which had turned into little strands of icicles, hitting my glasses and my earrings and probably my thick skull. Sheesh!

The wedgie? Well, I didn’t sort that out until I took off my clothes for the night. As I threw my dirty clothes in the hamper, I saw the writing on the underpants, as it were. The printing said that they were Daughter’s size, which is two sizes smaller than mine.

This morning, I told her about it, expecting to get a TMI and some eye-rolling. Nope. She snickered and then she snorted and then she laughed hysterically and ran to email her friend about it. Since her friend’s mother is the local equivalent of CNN, I suppose by lunchtime, everyone I know will be talking about the idjit who wore her daughter’s undies for a whole day and didn’t know it. Well, I for one think that’s just TMI.

The Fabric of our Family Life

2008-01-19T15:04:00.000-05:00

This has been one of those weeks where my email brings me the world, or at least the more interesting parts of the world. From my friend Margaret at the Secular Homeschooler's play group that Daughter and I attend, I got this neat link - Peter Callesen's Paper Art. I love the skeleton. (How's that for a teaser?)

From Deborah Markus, editor of Secular Homeschooling Magazine, I got an email that kept me from bellowing at my ~~highly irritating, completely disorganized and ADD-afflicted~~ beloved family. She said something about how her son was sick so she could just focus on him which simplified things for awhile and I started thinking about focus.

As a mother, I spend 99% of my time focused at least somewhat on my family, more specifically on my kids. Of course, the fact that my kids are unschoolers means that they learn a lot from our interaction. But even when I'm doing other things, there's a thread in the back of my mind (or my heart or my nervous system depending on what the kids are up to) that ties some of my attention to them. But just in case that thread gets a little frayed, there are other ways that my focus is forced to return to them, again and again throughout the day. To stay with the textile analogy here, our lives are so interwoven that when they warp, I woof.

Here's a typical example of that. I'm sitting at my desk, where in a few minutes I'll be writing a book of organic gardening tips. (Actually, it's written. I'm just proofreading it for the last time.) But on top of the notes I've made of changes I might make, there's a drawing of a very fashionable, slightly anime-ish young lady (with a tail) who's ice skating with flowers falling all around her. True, the flowers are kind of a tie-in with the book, but still.

Daughter's drawings are all over the place. This is partly because she draws literally scores a day, and also because of the ol' boundary problem that ADD people find so hard to resolve. Like gases, they expand to fill the available space, taking over rooms like Sherman took Atlanta. I love her drawings, but I get ~~extremely pissed off~~ just a little cross when I have to do an archeological dig to unearth the notes I took on carbon offsets, and then discover that they're mixed in with anime as expressed through the medium of peanut butter and jelly because Daughter was having a working lunch. It gets old.

As I've mentioned before, I have the least stuff of anyone in the house. Most of it is on my desk in the basement computer room, in my closet or on the table next to my living room chair or beside my bed. We live in a huge old house that has either 9 or 11 rooms. (We disagree on whether two of the rooms are actual rooms or... well, something other than rooms.) But anyhow, we have plenty of space for everyone's stuff.

So, why is it that everyone else's stuff keeps getting into the middle of my stuff? I pick up my Word for Dummies book to check out indexing and there are little foam fashion items - high-heeled shoes, hats and dresses - stuck to the pages. Daughter's, obviously, but why has she stuck them to the pages of a book about using a word processing program? Why not stick them into a junk mail ad for Kmart or something? Come to that, why stick them to anything at all? Why have them in the first place, if you're going to just stick them all over other people's stuff and then forget about them?

I settle down in my chair after dinner and pick up one of my half-knitted socks and find that I'm missing the needle I need to knit the socks off the needles they're on. (I use the four-needle approach to sock knitting, which means that the sock is on three needles and I knit it off with a fourth needle.) After a short search around my chair, I'm frisking Son's cat, who is a fool for yarn and knitting needles, when the geek bursts into the room and says the stupid stick broke and now his computer repair isn't going to hold.

"Where did you get this stick?" I ask him.

He looks at me with his hair in points and a vague look in his eyes.

"Someone left it beside your chair," he says, "I guess it was a lollipop stick or something."

"No, it was a wooden knitting needle and I needed it to knit my socks."

"Well, maybe you could still use it," he says, "If it's a short sock."

And this illustrates the other side of the coin with mothers and families. What's theirs is all over the place and what's mine is theirs, when they can't find something of theirs that they need. I hate to sound like a selfish old termagant (which always sounds like some kind of shore bird to me but is actually from the Crusades), but sometimes I'd like to have just one room that I could call my own. A room with a lock on the door and all my stuff inside. I'd go inside, lock the door, sit down all by myself... And be bored to tears and very, very lonely.

Winter Is For the Birds

2008-01-15T09:36:00.000-05:00

Before he went to work in the computer mines this morning, Geekdaddy plowed the driveway and I shoveled a path to the cars and scraped the snow and ice off the one he was taking to work. There was no sense in cleaning off the other car. It's not 4WD, so it'd only end up in a snowbank covered with more snow, if the geek drove it out of the driveway.

Later on, Son used the roof rake to rake the snow off the dining room roof so that it won't leak if the temperature ever gets above freezing. Then Daughter went out to shovel off the deck so that the cats could get out onto it so they can drool at the birds that are feeding out of their reach in the soft, powdery snow. One of our cats, braver or more foolish than the other two, started out into the snow when we opened the door this morning, sunk over his head and "swam" back in covered with snow and fluffed to gigantic dimensions. He disappeared down the basement stairs, maybe thinking he'll just take a nap until spring. Cats are so intelligent.

When I was a kid in RI, I loved winter. The sledding, the skating, building snowmen and igloos - there was so much to do. There still is, but somehow as an adult, I'm not enjoying it so much. I can't figure out whether my memories of childhood winters are rosier than the reality of them or whether I'm just turning into an old poop.

Did I really not mind getting completely frozen and wet and then having to hang up all my wet clothes before I got into dry ones... Oh, wait, grownups took care of my clothes, come to think of it. And they also made the hot chocolate, bought me boots and ski pants, mittens and hats, and kleenex for my runny nose. When I was really young, they even wiped my nose for me. There's the difference.

Nowadays, I'm the one who has to figure out how to buy all the stuff we need for a Maine winter, including enough oil to keep the pipes and the people from freezing up. This is getting harder and harder to do as the war in Iraq siphons life and money from the US, the rich get richer and the rest of us wish we'd installed those solar panels back in the 70's and listened to Jimmy Carter instead of Reagan.

I don't mean to complain. I have it a lot better than many people do. The geek has a gov'mint job. I work at home. I live in a place where front page news is three mailboxes bashed overnight. (The headlines said it was a crime wave, but I'd call it more of a crime gesture.) I guess it's just human nature to find something to complain about no matter how good we have it.

And now that I have that out of my system, I'm going to quit focusing on the downside of winter and look at the upside. So far on my list, I have "no blackflies". Come to think of it, I could stop with that. However, I'll add that Daughter is getting really good at photography, as you can see from the photo of the pair of Pine Grosbeaks feeding in the snow.

What I Did On My Winter Vacation

2008-01-06T19:59:00.000-05:00

Although I'm not officially moved into my new hangout at www.lillhawkins.com where my shiny new Wordpress blog smirks at me, I've been making stabs at learning how to use the thing. I'm not an idjit, but in spite of my best attempts, I'm not doing too well at housebreaking the critter. Just when I'm congratulating myself for learning enough html to put together a webpage that doesn't look like a ready-made Tripod page, I find that html is old hat and CSS is what tickles Wordpress's fancy. Sheesh!

Like a kid switching from riding with training wheels (Blogger) to riding a 15-speed mountain bike (Wordpress), I'm wobbling a bit, but game. It didn't help when I learned that my Wordpress blog isn't constructed of pages of html, but rather with one CSS stylesheet that controls the look of the whole blog. Oh great, now instead of a paragraph with two different fonts because I forgot a closing bracket, I can screw up all my posts, pages and sidebars at one swell foop. As I pore over the CSS and PHP, I worry that I'll try to change the post text color and black out the whole Net - or at least the Wordpress portion of it.

Ironic isn't it that CSS is supposed to simplify web design because it separates the package from the content. That may be, but in my case, I think I'm a few packing peanuts short of a UPS shipment, because it seems harder to me to figure out where anything is on the stylesheet. I think I've tracked down the line of code that tells the post font to be 1.5ems Verdana and change it to 1.8ems Trebuchet and hit "view site" and suddenly the left side of my blog leaps over to join its brethren on the right and the post is at the top of the page with the title at the bottom and my blood pressure goes up 8 points or its CSS equivalent.

This may be why the Wordpress version of News From Hawkhill Acres is still a bit stark. I know what I want, but I'm having a leetle bit of a problem getting it. So far, I've managed to put the title on it, import my blogger posts and figure out the difference between a page and a post. I find it deuced odd that Wordpress's WYSIWYG post interface has no font choice, except for a very rudimentary one that uses Header sizes and such. Of course, I could use HTML tags, but that kind of defeats the purpose of CSS, doesn't it?

So I continue to struggle and search the Net for a plug-in or theme that allows me to choose font sizes and styles on the fly. I resolutely refuse to give up on the thing and crawl back to Blogger, because the one thing Blogger doesn't have that Wordpress has is ownership. I own my Wordpress blog. It's on my site with my domain name. No Google caprice or whim can shut me down. (No, only I can do that with one misplaced line of code.)

I'm an unschooler for word's sake. I've been scaling learning curves since computers had only floppy drives and CPM operating systems. No way am I going to be cowed by a few lines of code. I will work on this until the pages in my copy of Wordpress for Dummies are dogeared and Lorelle on Wordpress bans me for asking too many stupid questions. I will learn how to format a post in Wordpress without making my whole blog go kerflooey, as Junie B Jones says. And when I do, you'll be the first to know because I'll go back to writing about unschooling, life in Maine in the winter and why Geekdaddy tried to bribe the governor with a stick of gum at the union contract signing. (Hey, at least he didn't offer him a pair of purple boxers.)

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Where Do Unschoolers Go On Winter Break?

2007-12-22T10:35:00.000-05:00

To my ~~many~~ gaggle of subscribers:

I wish you a very happy holiday season, or a string of happy regular days, if you prefer.

While I don't celebrate any religious or pagan holidays, I do welcome the Winter Solstice because that means that we'll be gaining a second of daylight tomorrow and (feel very sorry for us) that's a big deal here in Maine. Why at this rate, by next month we'll be able to leave the lights off while we eat dinner. That's if we eat it at 4:30.

To celebrate - for lack of a better word - the joyous albeit infinitesimally slow return of the sun to our little ice-cube shaped piece of the world, I'm taking some time off. For the next two weeks more or less, I plan to reflect on ~~whether it's worth it to even bother getting out of bed in the morning~~ many things.

One of the things I don't have to reflect on anymore is whether or not to leave this little piece of Virtual Real Estate for the halcyon fields of a self-hosted WordPress blog. Yup, I've already signed the papers and own the deed to News From Hawkhill Acres at my own domain. This is heady stuff, folks, even though I've barely unpacked my blog posts and looked around for a theme.

Starting in 2008, I'll be double-posting to this blog and that blog and gradually migrating to that blog sometime in the Spring. Just so you won't be totally at a loss for entertainment while I'm on hiatus, here's a link that should keep you busy for... Oh, let's just say you shouldn't click on it while there are 2007 appointments on your calendar.

For those of you who are Rocky and Bullwinkle fans, Mr. Peabody invented it and now someone has put it on the Net. It's the Wayback Machine and Internet Archive and you'll need breadcrumbs when you go there. It has 250,000 books available for download and over 300,000 text files. There are over 45,000 Live Concerts from some of the most popular (and also some of the most obscure) musicians in the world. You can view over 117,000 movies and listen to 228,000-plus audio files. And that's just the beginning.

If winter is getting you down - even though it only started today, but why wait? - and you're crushed at the thought of no News From Hawkhill Acres for a while, this will ease your pain, believe me. And if, as you're trundling through a stack of virtual books, you see an avatar of a slightly frazzled woman with her arms full of books, videos and comfort food, don't let on that you know me. I'm on vacation, remember?

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What Do Unschoolers Do On Snow Days?

2007-12-14T16:03:00.000-05:00

Just this morning, I was complaining to my brother that I'm already sick of winter in Maine.

"Cheer up," he said, "You're not really sick of winter, because it's not winter yet. You're still sick of fall."

How encouraging. He's probably the person who came up with the Maine Tourism Board's current headline: "Winter is When Maine Really Sparkles" or some such tripe. As I type this, there's a couple feet of snow ~~sparkling~~ leering at me from outside the window. Well, I think it's leering. It was leering at me when I looked at it before it got dark around 3:30. This weekend, we're supposed to be hit by a Nor'easter with snow, wind and blizzard conditions. How jolly. I'll lay in another pallet of toilet paper and bread. That's what New Englanders stock up on whenever bad weather is forecast. I have no idea why.

Me, I stock up on books. This is why I went to the library this morning and returned with several cloth bags just bulging with reading material. Daughter filled her bags with books about fairies, animals, some graphic novels featuring "Fashion Kitty", one of the Warrior books and a few American Girl books just to round things out.

Son opted for his usual Fantasy novels by R. A. Salvatore and others and some art books. He's spending so much time on his art lately that he has less time to read. But every once in awhile, like a drowning man gasping for air, he'll surface from the art and read great gulps of a novel late into the night.

I got my usual mixed bag of fiction and non-fiction. In case you're really interested, here's a list in no particular order of what I'll be reading as the winds wail and the generator burns up gallons of propane when the power goes out.

The Top 10 of Everything by Russell Ash. ( A bathroom book if ever I read one.) Webonomics by Evan I. Schwartz (so I can see how well he did at predicting what was going to happen to the Net from the vantage point of the early 90s. So far, he's not doing too well. He says paypal type operations have no future.) Google Hacks by several authors. (Hmm, I'm noticing a trend here.) The Modern Deer Hunter by John Cartier. (Well, maybe a couple of trends.) Natural Ideas for Christmas. (We're not celebrating Christmas so I have no idea why I got it, but I'm sure I had something in mind.)

The Lobster Chronicles, Life On A Very Small Island by Linda Greenlaw. (She's the author of The Hungry Ocean, a great read.) When You Need A Lift But Don't Want to Eat Chocolate, Pay a Shrink or Drink a Bottle of Gin by Joy Behar and Friends. (These are all subjects that Mainers start thinking about sometime between October and May.) Chat by Archer Mayor, another Brattleboro mystery. (I've spent a lot of time in Brattleboro and I love reading mysteries set in places I've spent time in.)

Three Sisters, A Charlie Moon Mystery by James D. Doss. (This is the series with Charlie's aunt, Daisy, a Ute shaman, helping him whether he wants her to or not. I've really enjoyed every one of them. The characters just keep getting better. If you like Tony Hillerman, try these.)

I'll preface this by saying that the last book on my list The Intellectual Devotional General Edition has mistakes in it. I found one of them and there are comments on the book's website citing other mistakes. A tad more editing would have been a good idea, but even so, it's a darned good book. So there. I got it from the library, but will be buying it and its companion volume, The Intellectual Devotional American History Edition as soon as Ma Nature quits dumping snow on my little corner of Maine.

How can you not like a book which begins with John Smith and the Pequot Wars and ends with The Simpsons and Ronald Reagan? (I love the irony of the Pequots having the world's biggest casino in spite of earlier attempts on the government's part to eradicate them from America.) In between, there's lots of good stuff like a page about James Baldwin. Although I read his novel Go Tell It On The Mountain back in high school, I never knew that he was gay or that this distanced him from the mainstream civil rights leaders because they didn't want to be associated with a gay man. Of course, many of the leaders like King and Abernathy were also ministers, so this doesn't surprise me. It angers me, but it doesn't surprise me.

If you're looking into the teeth of a Nor'Easter or a Sou'wester or some other directionally-enabled weather, hie thee to your library and check out some books on my list or someone else's list. Or just browse the shelves, picking books at random to stuff into your book bags. Heck, even if you're facing a long run of sunny days with beach weather temperatures, you should get some books. That way you'll have something to read at the beach.

We have beaches in Maine. They're currently covered in two feet of snow, but I'm not bitter. I have my books. Check back in 8 days when winter officially starts. I may be just a tiny bit bitter by then.

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Splogs Are Reeking Habit On Me

2007-12-09T15:40:00.000-05:00

I admit that my writing isn't always top-notch. I occasionally forget to dot my i's and cross my t's, put in too many commas and leave out the odd second quotation mark. However, at the risk of being accused of grammar policing, I'm going to yowl about something that drives me bananas. Let me tell you a little story. I was looking for some information on the Net the other day and I came across an article that began with this paragraph.

"If you loose your way of coarse you should immediately ask for help before it reeks habit on you schedule. If your late you're job interview won't probably go to well. Also hopfully you're car won't get a ticket if you're appointment runs late. Thats why its important to be their on time so your ready and willing to the eyes of the higherer. If you have a winning attitude and your on time,how can you loose?"

How, indeed? At the risk of "reeking habit", which sounds like something a nun would be concerned about after a heavy workout, I'm going to say that this kind of - for lack of a better term, writing - gives me a migraine. I have a lot of migraines lately, because this is the quality of much of the writing that article writers are churning out by the yard and posting to splogs and MFA sites by the thousands, if not millions.

In case you don't know, splogs are splam blogs, blogs that are made only to be a framework for ads, mostly adsense ads. And MFA sites are "made for adsense" sites that are sold to unsuspecting newbies who think that they'll get rich from them. Why they don't stop and think that no one would sell them if they could get rich from them is beyond me. Just like flipping houses by buying them, fixing them up a little and selling them, people are flipping blogs and web sites.

One technique works with Wordpress blogs. With Wordpress, posts can be timestamped with any time you want. So, Joe Internet Guru buys a snappy domain name like "earnmoneywhileusleep", sticks a WP blog on it and fills it with free articles from article directories. Some of them he backdates and some he schedules to post in the future. I've seen blogs selling with posts that'll go into next year. This is a great selling point for the newbie who thinks that this is all he needs to get rich while he sleeps. (Note: This only works for mattress testers and millionaires.)

Of course, most of the articles are written in the gibberish that passes for article writing on the Net nowadays. Much of it is "spun" or rewritten with article rewriting software that doesn't work very well. Some of it comes from writers from Third World countries, people who write 500 word articles for fifty-cents. That's pathetic. So is the writing for the most part. It's ruining the Net, clogging it with useless information and almost-unreadable garbage articles that exist only to fill space, not to inform, entertain or educate.

I think it's ironic that people are always worrying about my unschooled kids making a living when they're adults. Obviously, anyone with a second grade education and access to a computer can make money. My kids can already both write much better tripe, I mean copy, than most of the article writers produce for splogs. Of course, this article writing wheeze won't last forever. Already, some of the gurus are catching on to the whole Web 2.0 revolution.

Some of them are starting to produce videos and hiring people to post in forums that they've started just to fool google into thinking that their sites are really social networking venues instead of adsense billboards. So, pretty soon, we'll have copycat videos and misspelled, vapid posts in forums all over the Net. Maybe it's time to rethink this whole Internet thing, you know? Maybe, like they do in Europe with trucks, we should have a special lane on the Information Highway just for ads. We could call it the Lie-Way.

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Multitasking Momma, Lay That Keyboard Down

2007-12-03T10:31:00.000-05:00

~~Because so many people have~~ ~~Because a couple of people have~~ Although no one has asked me, I'm going to reveal the secret of successful blog writing. I'm sure that there are many people who read my blog and wonder how I do it. How do I come up with twice-weekly blog posts, brimming with humor and interesting tidbits and still manage to raise two kids and work at home? What is the secret of my success, if success is the word I want? I'll tell you in one word: focus.

For instance, yesterday, I sat down to write a post about writing blog posts. Now, there were several things that could have gotten in my way, but I didn't let them. Laundry, squabbling kids, rodents, illegible bills that may be overdue by the time they dry out, cats in shopping bags, possibly dead woodpeckers, and a lack of information about Hanta Virus - it was all ganging up on me, but I managed to put it aside and write a post. Well, I started to write a post. I'm going to finish it now.

To begin with, when I descended to my basement computer room, there was a definite pong of something other than the incense I use to inspire me. Eau de Souris Morte would be my guess. Sure enough, when I tracked the smell down to its source, I found a dead mouse lying under the sleeper couch that we use for guests. And when I picked up the mouse with paper towels and threw it out into the woods behind the house, a thought occurred to me.

I believe it was Elisheva who mentioned Hanta Virus, so I washed my hands and boogied over to her blog. I couldn't seem to find the entry on Hanta, but I did have a nice half hour reading her Thursday entry about auditory processing that, oddly enough, included the subject of mouse brains. And I had to take a quick look at her latest entry about New Mexico weather which features some beautiful photos that almost make me want to pack up and move out to the mountains.

I could have gone on reading all day, but of course I didn't, because I needed to focus on writing a post for my blog. This post, as a matter of fact, which had started with a dead mouse but that wasn't the focus of my post... Hmm, what WAS the focus of my post? Oh yes, I was writing about the secret to successful blog posts, which is focus. Women who blog, especially mothers who blog, often have trouble staying on track because of all the little domestic problems that crop up over the course of a day.

Laundry, for instance, is a never-ending chore in our house and I seem to be the one who does most of it. Of course, partly that's because the washer and dryer are in the basement and that's where I am when I'm writing. It's not really that much of a hassle for me to throw a load of clothes into the washer before I turn on the computer. But what is a hassle is taking them out of the dryer, folding them and stacking them on shelves so that family members can retrieve them later. As I heard the dryer stop while I was typing the third paragraph of my blog post yesterday, I thought about whether it's more annoying to get up in the middle of a thought or to wear wrinkled clothes. I don't mind wrinkles, but Geekdaddy does have to interact with the public and his income floats this boat, so I opted for the interruption.

When I got back to my desk, I noticed that there were little black particles on the rug under my chair. Further inspection revealed that they were mouse turds, which led my thoughts back to Hanta Virus again. I figured it would be a good idea to vacuum them just to be on the safe side, so I went upstairs and lugged the ancient Miele downstairs and plugged it in. It's a really nice vacuum, with a long hose and wand that reaches all the way to the ceiling corners for cobweb removal, which is what I'd been vacuuming the last time I used it.

That's why, when I vigorously attacked the mouse droppings, the excess wand that stretched out behind me hit my coffee cup on the desk, next to a pile of bills I was planning to sort and file for future payment. Unfortunately, I didn't notice it until I turned off the vacuum, so the envelopes and the papers inside them were so saturated with coffee that I didn't dare do any more than lay them next to the baseboard heater to dry.

Some people might have lost their focus right there and gotten involved in checking their records to make sure none of the bills were due right then, but I am not one of those people. I stayed firmly focused on whatever it was I was doing before the coffee spilled. Hmm, vacuuming? No, I wasn't writing about vacuuming. I was writing about blogging. That's right. And I'm still writing about it and will continue to write about it until I'm finished with this post. If it kills me.

Focus, is what separates professional writers from amateurs and what the heck was all that noise upstairs? Kids fighting was my guess, and I was right, so I went up and mediated and got them to keep it down so that I could write. The post was coming along nicely until there was a huge bang and Daughter came running downstairs to tell me that a woodpecker had hit the dining room window and was lying on the deck.

It was Mrs. Meep, the mid-size woodpecker and she was lying there with her eyes open and her head at a very odd angle. I was sure she was dead, but daughter begged me to give her a chance to recover, so I did. That's why only half my mind was on my blog post as I typed several sentences about how to retain your focus on your writing no matter what's going on in your environment. They were very pithy and helpful and I wish I could show them to you, but Daughter came downstairs crying her eyes out, which took my attention off my writing and I unwittingly deleted several paragraphs.

That's why I had to start all over today, but it's probably all to the good, because Geekdaddy is home due to one of the blizzards we have here in Maine, just to give us a change from blackflies, mud season and hurricanes, so he's able to deal with anything that threatens to interrupt my thought processes and what the heck was that?

I don't believe it, Son's ancient but amazingly playful cat has managed to get her head stuck through the opening of a plastic shopping bag and is whizzing around the basement meowing. Son is thundering around after her, which is not likely to work, because he can't fit under oil tanks and treadmills and behind laundry appliances and she can, even with a bag stuck around her neck.

However, I will let him handle it and keep on with my writing even though I can also hear Daughter yowling upstairs and Geekdaddy attempting to reason with her. I'll just do a quick check to make sure nothing serious is happening and get myself another cup of coffee at the same time.

Good thing I checked, because - proving my brother's old saying, "If it happens once, it'll happen again" - Daughter had somehow managed to get her head through the sleeve of her t-shirt and was semi-hysterical and unable to follow Geekdaddy's somewhat scientific instructions for getting out. That and the huge pair of scissors he was holding had her in a tizzy and I can't say I blame her.

I soothed her down, got her out and helped her make a peanut butter and jelly sandwich to calm her nerves and then went downstairs and continued to write, because I was not about to lose my focus now that my post was almost finished. And now, I guess it is finished. It's not exactly the post I had intended to write, but I think you get the gist of what I'm trying to convey here.

If you want to be a successful blogger, you have to put your craft first. As you can see from this post, without focus, your writing career will be just another daydream that distracts you from accomplishing your goal. So, follow my example. Stay focused and stay on track and you'll soon be churning out posts like crazy, unless mice, cats, birds, kids, lethal viruses, coffee, laundry and life gets in your way. Or you could go live in a cave and become a hermit and it'd be nice and peaceful for writing, except that you wouldn't have anything to write about.

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Is Death by Arachnophobia Insecticide?

2007-11-26T21:09:00.000-05:00

A couple of days ago, after taking a shower, I opened the bathroom drawer where we keep our toothpaste and there was a huge spider doing what looked like a buck-and-wing on the Tom's of Maine Spearmint. Now you need to know that this spider was even bigger than Geoffrey, the spider that waves cheerfully at me from a corner overhead when I shower.

It was also bigger than Ariadne, the spider who lives under the shelf where I keep my clothes in my side of the bedroom closet. And it was certainly bigger than tiny little Ethel who is sitting (can one actually sit with eight legs, I wonder?) next to me behind my incense burner on my desk. I think I'll call the new spider Audrey.

I always assume that spiders are harmless and will leave me alone. The geek always assumes they're lethal and after him. Arachnophobia is one of those things that I didn't know about Geekdaddy - or Geekhubby as he was then before we had kids. Of course, he didn't know that I like spiders and encourage them to share my space, as it were. Hey, some people feed the birds because they like to watch them. I don't squash spiders because I like to watch them. And I don't have to go to Wally World for Spider Chow or hang up a feeder.

I did move Audrey to the little gap behind the hamper where the geek isn't as likely to grab her instead of the dental floss. I don't have to worry about Geoffrey, because Geekdaddy is blind without his glasses and doesn't wear them to shower. Ethel is safe, because I don't let anyone near my desk. But Dennis, who hangs around (literally) on the ceiling over the geek's side of the bed may be pushing things. He's a bit of a daredevil, I'm afraid.

Sometimes, when Geekdaddy is propped up on his pillows reading ~~a technical manual~~ ~~an uplifting book~~ trash, Dennis, laughing up every one of his eight sleeves, drops down until he's almost skimming the geek's head and then just kind of dangles there. That's when I create a diversion by telling Geekdaddy that his computer, which is always running in the bat cave he calls a study next to the bedroom, is making a funny noise.

"Sounds like a rod knock to me," I tell him.

Invariably, he leaps off the bed so fast that he produces a strobe effect and races to his cave, giving me a few minutes to give Dennis a good talking to and a trip to the back hall for the spider equivalent of ten minutes in the time-out chair. I think Dennis is pretty fly for a spider, but if he lands in Geekdaddy's hair, he'll be history.

So let this be a lesson to you, Gentle Reader. If you find yourselves in the heady throes - if heady throes is the phrase I want and it seems awfully unlikely that it is... Well, anyway if you fall in love and start thinking about settling down with Mr. or Ms. Right, take my advice, sit down with a notebook and find out where they stand on the important things.

Does he like onions in his tuna? Does he even like tuna at all or does fish leave him cold? Does she tear the crusts off her toast and, if so, are you going to shoot her for doing it after fifteen years of breakfasts? Better to know now and avoid that long stretch in Leavenworth, I say.

Luckily, in our case, I've managed to hide most of the spiders so well that the geek never even knows that they're there. He's happy. The spiders are happy. You look up simpatico in the dictionary and you'll see a photo of Geekdaddy and me with a spider peering out of his pocket protector and waving. (Probably Dennis.) The only problem I foresee is if we move to California like Geekdaddy would like to when he retires.

A friend of mine who lives in CA recently told me that she found a tarantula and put it in a jar in the ER where she works. She and her coworkers admired it for the day and then released it at the helicopter pad in a field. The next day, there it was, crawling back to the ambulance entrance of the ER like a homing pigeon. Somehow, I think even Geekdaddy would notice huge, black hairy spiders crawling around our retirement hovel. I guess I'll just have to get very creative if we head west in a few years.

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Black Friday or I'll Be The One in Pajamas

2007-11-20T08:46:00.001-05:00

In the last week, three people have asked me what I'm doing for Black Friday. What, it's like Christmas now? One person even asked me what I was going to wear. I don't know if they were implying that I need to dress up in case a reporter asks me how early I got in line or whether they meant I should dress down in a sweatsuit so I can sprint and jostle and elbow tall shoppers in the groin without constraints.

So what happened to Thanksgiving? Are we multitasking holidays now, the way we do everything else at once? Do any of these people really think that I'm stupid enough to stand in freezing Maine weather at four in the morning just to get a better price on Victoria's Secret Barbie or The Diva Dolls Do Dallas on DVD with additional footage not shown in theaters?

No, come Black Friday, which always sounds like a religious holiday to me, I'll be tucked up in my warm bed snoring loudly enough to vibrate Geekdaddy's pocket protector. Later on Black Friday or Mauve Monday or Taupe Tuesday or some other colored day, after a leisurely breakfast of whatever the kids didn't scarf down like locusts, Geekdaddy and I will peruse the sales online and figure out where we want to spend the miserly sum per child we budgeted for Solstice this year. I can guarantee it won't be at a big-box.

For one thing, there are the toy recalls which have really opened my eyes to what I want in my house -- not just my kids' toy boxes and rooms. Before I reach for my wallet, I want to know where that attractively packaged but possibly lethal toy came from. I want to know who made it, how old they were, how much they got paid and whether they were treated like a human being by their employer or forced to wait to relieve their bladders until the two 5 minute bathroom breaks they get a day. And, of course, I want unleaded not leaded when I fill up my cart.

Maybe my aversion to joining the Black Friday lemming parade is part of my unschooling philosophy or my ~~liberal~~ ~~far left~~ flaming radical political beliefs. Maybe I'm just oppositional like I'm always accusing my kids of being. (You'd kick at a football game, is what my brother says about me. No, I wouldn't!) To my mind, this whole conspicuous by its lack of thought for the consequences consumption orgy is yet another symptom of so much that's wrong with society and pop culture.

We're trained to consume from the time we're born and told that its for our benefit. (The big corporations are just making this stuff for us out of the goodness of their little ~~black~~ corporate hearts. They're almost non-profits for goodness' sake, absent the odd billion or two.) We get our ethical standards and values from ad slogans, corporate-sponsored TV shows and even bumper stickers. Who can forget the immortal line: He who dies with the most toys wins? Makes you want to run right over to Wally World and buy three of everything so you'll have more, doesn't it?

But back to Black Friday and what I'm doing that day. Well, I may be writing ad copy for my safe toy blog, How to Find Safe Toys, ironic as that may sound coming from someone who just dissed commercialism and consumers. I confess that I've been examining my motives vis a vis affiliate sales lately. I've talked it over with my spiritual advisors -- my Black Lab, Jetta, and my brother, Uncle Wil the Pirate Cowboy. They're usually pretty good at helping me see whether what I'm doing is A Good Thing or A Bad Thing. (You can't beat Labs or Cowboys for that; they see everything in black or white.)

I (and they and most of my 100 closest friends who were bugged by me with a veritable snowstorm of emails) agree that one of the ways to fight this commercial stupidity is to offer people alternatives to it. Humans are always going to buy stuff. Heck, when archaeologists dig up Early Human graves, there's stuff in there that was buried with them. Yes! Early Humans had stuff too and probably had to move to a bigger cave every few months to store it all. Like crows, human adults and children are attracted to shiny pebbles, glitz and glitter and things that whir and move. (Also to things that need batteries, but that's another post.)

My list of safe toy companies provides an alternative to the malls and big box stores. You don't have to wear your heels to gouge other shoppers' insteps. You can buy dolls that don't need contraceptives or a motel room for pretend play. Blocks and toy trains with non-toxic paint are still on the menu for toddlers who put everything in their mouths - and that would be all toddlers in my experience. (Some tweens and teens too.) Best of all, when we shop at ethical companies, we're supporting a better world in my view. My bottom line is that I think it's way better to buy fewer toys and better toys from companies that treat their customers and the earth with respect. And, of course, that goes for everything else, not just toys. That's why, this Black Friday, I won't be in line; I'll be in bed.

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The Face That Munched a Thousand Chips

2007-11-17T11:40:00.000-05:00

I've added a photo of myself so that you'll know what I look like. A little late for Halloween which is when I intended to put it up, but still. My friend the Very Successful Blogger insists that this is a Good Thing. I think she's ~~nuts~~ ~~a raving lunatic~~ a little out of touch with what wows 'em in Peoria, but I did it anyhow. I wanted to post a photo of Geekdaddy in his purple boxers, but I was afraid that'd get my blog an even worse rating than the PG one it got with this little widget I got over at Lynn's blog awhile ago:

No, I was not drunk in the photo. If I recall, it was morning and I was trying not to laugh as my brother and spiritual advisor, Uncle Wil the Pirate Cowboy Hypnotist, took a photo of Daughter and me in a motel room in Brattleboro, VT where we were ignoring police SWAT and K-9 teams who were having some kind of a conference there.We were getting ready to take Daughter down the road apiece to the Mary Meyer Toy Shop and Museum in Townshend.

Come to think of it, I was probably already grimacing at the thought of Daughter and my wallet together in a place that is filled with stuffed animals, many of which are for sale. If I recall, I got out of it for under $20, but it was nerve-wracking while she cruised the giant pandas and six foot long plush boa constrictors.

I seem to be rambling here and getting away from the point I was going to make when I started this post. That's if I had a point when I started this post. I've had several interruptions: questions about what's on the menu for lunch (anything you want to make, Sweetie), what do we do about the suet that fell down because the dog is trying to eat it? (pick it up, Sweetie, and maybe that also answers the lunch question), how come he gets to play his computer games all day just because he has a friend over and I can only have an hour (because you played for 4 hours yesterday when you let me think you were reading an American Girls book, Sweetie) and why isn't there any toilet paper in any of the bathrooms? (because you haven't put any in any of the bathrooms yet, which you could have done at any time instead of tweaking your computer and downloading jibjab clips, Sweetie.)

Well, if I had a point, it's gone now. Oh wait! I remember. I was going to write about how hard it is sometimes to work on your own projects when you're homeschooling kids. This is why it's taken me three weeks to get a photo onto my blog. I was also going to rewrite my profile, but was halfway through it when one of the interruptions discombobulated my already shaky thought processes and I deleted half of it. However, when I looked at it, I realized that it was just fine, so I left it that way.

Now I have to surface from my lair and find out what happened to lunch, the suet, the toilet paper situation and whether Daughter is really reading or hanging out at Club Penguin where she's just turned her igloo into a giant snow globe, which she can really shake. Yanno, sometimes I have the feeling that I'm in a giant snow globe and someone just gave it a good shake. Maybe that's how I felt when I had that photo taken.

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War College

2007-11-11T19:53:00.000-05:00

Yesterday afternoon, I was pondering, something I do on alternate Saturdays. My great-uncle Sam used a similar system for worrying, only he did it on alternate Tuesday mornings, because he'd read a book on how worrying causes stress and didn't want to get heart disease. He died at 86 from diabetes, so I guess it worked.

Anyhow, there I was in the middle of the Uncivil War and Pot-Luck, which I blogged about in my last post, with hulking people in black armor rushing our men and women in armor, the former yelling, "Uff da!" the latter muttering, "Oh, shit."

It was freezing cold and we were all wrapped in wool blankets, scarves, shawls and capes making us look more like immigrants landing at Ellis Island from County Cork than Medieval minor nobility. Everyone was having a really good time, which got me to thinking about how we talk about life, which is different from how we live life.

Shortly before the war started - it was a little late because we hadn't finished duct taping the toilet paper rolls, er, rocks, that the populace was going to throw at the invaders' heads - I heard someone telling someone else that their kid was giving them a hard time because he was miserable at school.

"I told him, of course he's miserable at school. That's what life is all about. We were all miserable at school. School is hard work, but you have to do it so that you can get a good job. I mean, what's he gonna do, just have a good time until he's 18? How the hell is he gonna get into college and get a decent job? The kid just thinks it's all about having fun and learning what interests him. He needs to get real about life. If he thinks school is tough, wait 'til he gets a job. That's when he'll find out what tough is."

Then the conversationalist and his audience went off to play at war.

Does this strike anyone else as just a little hypocritical? This "Life is Real; Life is Earnest" crap is so bogus. We all just want to have fun. Babies are born wanting to enjoy life and they make no effort to hide it until adults brainwash them into thinking that there's something wrong with wanting to build a life that gives them joy. Sure, back when schools were factories turning out good little immigrants who learned just enough to make money for factory and office owners, this philosophy made sense. But the factories have gone overseas and south to Mexico and the offices are downsizing. We can't all be teachers, doctors and lawyers. (And some of us don't want to be.)

Some of us want to work at what we like to do, earning enough to support ourselves, but not enough to buy a McMansion or Lexus or pay off 4 credit cards. (Of course, some of us are going to need 4 credit cards to afford gas to get to work pretty soon, especially those of us in rural areas. But that's another topic.) Some of us are wondering why so many people are rabid about unschooling or homeschooling, but still take it as read that our kids will go to college. Why aren't we unschooling college also?

Call me simplistic, but could it all be about the money? That piece of paper that gets us a job as teacher, doctor, lawyer or professor? If not, then why is college so good for kids, when high school and elementary school isn't a good fit? Why is it that we're so quick to point out how many unschoolers and homeschoolers go on to college? Why aren't we as quick to point to the many, many people who have made out just fine and are (or were) as happy as clams at high tide without a college degree?

Here are some of them: Richard Branson, Coco Chanel, Buckminster Fuller, Bill Gates, Larry Ellison, Chuck Yeager, Mary Kay Ash, Michael Dell, Debbi Fields (love her cookies), John D. Rockefeller, Doris Lessing, Rachel Ray, William Faulkner, Eleanor Roosevelt, Michael Moore, and Frank Lloyd Wright for gosh sake!

I'm sure there are many more that I don't know about. Well, there's me, for one, and the geek for another one. We each have enough college credits to equal an associate's degree, if we'd ever bothered to get one, but we didn't. We're happy. He gets paid for playing with computers all day, something he'd do for free. I get to raise my kids, with the help of the geek's paycheck and some freelancing. I get to write, read a lot (hey, gotta bone up on stuff to teach the kids), garden, loaf and philosophize.

We're far from rich and sometimes teeter on the edge of financial ruin, mostly because we bit off more than we can chew when we bought Chez Hawkins, where the taxes have tripled during the 7 yrs we've owned it. However, we've used it as an object lesson for our kids, who know that living large gets paid for with time that gets taken away from time spent doing what you like. Now, if only I'd been taught that, but I wasn't. I was taught that I needed to get a good job or a husband with a good job or both. I was also taught that life is real and life is earnest and if you're having fun, there must be something wrong.

It's that ol' xtian work ethic rearing its ugly biblical head and it's a crock. If I teach my kids anything, it's going to be that life is the only time we have to have fun. Childhood is not preparation for life. It is life. Life should be fun, not miserable. If it is miserable, reexamine what you're doing and adjust accordingly.

Of course, each of us is responsible for supporting ourselves in some fashion. Of course, we have to think about the future as we get closer to adulthood. But, jeez, we should have enough sense and emotional maturity to realize that there's something warped about thinking that it's normal for kids to be miserable while growing up, or that schooling magically becomes okay when it's college, rather than elementary or high school.

If our kids want to go to college to learn something that they want to learn, that's a whole 'nother thing. But telling them that they have to go to college to make money, when we supported them in unschooling for 12 years is just hogwash. Now back to the war.

We lost. But we won the potluck, because even the other side loved our food. I'll say it again. The only way to have a war is with a potluck afterward and toilet paper rolls for weapons.

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Head Banging As Therapy

2007-11-08T15:15:00.000-05:00

I'm taking a little break from banging my head on my keyboard and howling, because it's not proving as therapeutic as I thought it might be when I started doing it about fifteen minutes ago. I'll be darned if I can figure out why it doesn't work like it did when I was 4, but maybe I've forgotten the technique. Back then, I mostly did it out of frustration, I suppose. Hmm, doesn't seem like anything has changed.

The reasons I applied headboard to keyboard with feeling are several. Daughter's narrow escape from Death by Art Form was the beginning. The US Postal Service changing our address from Hawkhill Acres to Hell thereby making it necessary for me to converse in Ham operator code over a bad phone connection was the second. I think the third was when I went to get the mail in the rental car and had to stick my head out the window to back up, because the lack of visibility out of the windshield is exceeded only by the lack out the back. It's just been one of those weeks today.

The reason we seem to be living in Hell instead of Chez Hawkins is because a relative who spent the summer here moved out and changed his address. Unfortunately, the USPS decided that we all moved out and went with him. While that seems like an attractive idea to me today, it's not what we did.

Apparently though, our mail has moved to his address. This had an unfortunate domino effect on some important documents that I was expecting and also on the copy of Secular Homeschooling Magazine that has my article in it. Neither showed up when they were supposed to. The first, we'll call it ID, was sent back to the company it had been sent from, because they had marked it "Do Not Forward." The second, the magazine, was probably thrown away, because they don't forward magazine class mail.

I can email about the magazine, but I had to call about the documents. I got a very nice gentleman named Hari, I believe. Throughout our call, his politeness and patience never wavered, even when the connection got so bad on his end that I was forced to resort to spelling out almost every word I said.

"I can see that you are changing your address only yesterday to a new address," he began, "So you no longer exist at Hawkhill Acres, but now you are having an existence at A Pseudonym For My Relative's Address."

I tried to explain about the relative's move and how the postal service had misconstrued it as a mass migration and he seemed to grasp this right away.

"Ah," he said, "This was not a movement of the completeness of your family. It was just the one person who exited to the new existence. We will change back your address and all will be well with the sending of the paperworks."

That's when the trouble started. I gave him my address and he got the street part just fine. The town, however, gave him a lot of trouble.

"We are having quite an insincere connection with this phone of mine," he said, "If you would spell this town of yours, perhaps I will better understand its lettering."

I spelled it slowly: S-H-E-R-M-A-N.

"Okay," he said, "So that is F as in Foxtrot, K as in Kilo, E as in Echo, R as in Roger, N as in November, K as in Kilo and M as in Mike?"

That's when the first impulse to bang my head on the keyboard started.

"No," I said, "That's S as in Silly, H as in Human, E as in Edward - you got that one right - R as in Robert - you got that one right too - M as in Mud, A as in Alice and N as in Normal."

There was a long pause and I wondered if Hari was still there.

"I do not mean to be critical of your training," he said, "But an unusual choice in your wording is making it very hard for me to figure what it is you are spelling out to me. Do you not know the Ham code?"

I confessed that I didn't. (I'm such a slacker.) Hari said we could try to go on anyway, but I could tell that he was very disappointed in me and my training. So we soldiered on and after several minutes of this, we both cheered when he spelled my town the right way.

"Okay," he said jubilantly, "Now there is only the matter of the zip code."

I gave it to him and he got it the first time, which is good because I don't know the Ham code for numbers.

"Oh!" he said, sounding a little upset. "If only I had remembered that the zip brings forth the town name on my screen. That would have saved a little time, would it not?"

Yeah. Like fifteen minutes of conversation that made Abbot and Costello's Who's On First sound like Shakespeare.

I'm not bitter though. At least I know that the documents, which have to be here and signed and sent back by next Wednesday or my financial future will be akin to General Motors', will be here in time. Or at my relative's house. Or somewhere else completely different. If you get them, let me know.

Excuse me. I have to get back to my keyboard.

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Instead of School

2007-11-06T20:56:00.000-05:00

When people ask me what we do instead of school, I hardly know where to begin. If they're parents of public schooled kids, I know that they probably think we sit down for lessons at 8, break for lunch and then do more lessons until 2:30. Or they think that we're slackers and just goof off all day, except for the banjo lessons so we can play the theme song from "Deliverance", pick our teeth and look dumb. Well, this week, I've been paying attention and keeping track, something I'm not usually accused of. This is what we've done instead of school.

We started the week with Daughter and I going to a playgroup for (be still my heart) secular homeschoolers. Add in that they're mostly unschoolers and you'll know why we're so chuffed. Of course, we meet in a church, but we're okay with that. Atheists are used to irony. This group is such a contrast to the groups we've tried in the past and to the school where Daughter spent three miserable years being told that she just didn't measure up.

They pay attention to their kids. They don't push their kids to do things the kids don't want to do. They're aware when some of the kids have trouble with the noise in the big echoing room and take them outside for a break. When we realized that the noise was going to be a problem, a couple of the moms talked to the man who negotiated the site use and we worked out a plan to get a quiet room for the next meeting. No memos. No hierarchy. No copies in triplicate. It's a cooperative and the parents are all on the same page.

As for the kids, there isn't a bully in the bunch. Now isn't that strange, considering how many there are in the school systems around the country? Some of the kids are bumptious. Some are high-energy and would probably have a lot of trouble staying seated for a day of classroom work. They were the kids who were kicking soccer balls, whacking the floor hockey bats around and swinging plastic jump ropes. (Daughter was onboard with that part of the time.)

Once in a while, they bumped into another kid and once one of them whacked another kid with a jump rope. When they did, they immediately apologized, went to the kid they bumped into or whacked and made sure they were okay. They shared their games, toys, paper, markers and crayons. They were scrupulous about including newcomers, including my daughter, in their games. When we said goodbye, one of them hugged my daughter and most of them made a point of saying goodbye and saying they'd see us next week. It was a great start to the week.

Today, it rained and Daughter was forced to stay inside. She didn't complain though, because she has Thora and the Green Sea Unicorn to read. The first Thora book was a hit with Daughter and me and this one is just as good. If you like Pippi Longstocking's attitude, and I did, you'll like Thora. Also in Daughter's library stack are a bunch of the Rainbow Fairies books; the latest American Girl book about Julie, who lives in the 70's; Junie B Jones books and some Judy Moody books. I always get the two series confused, but when I hear the audiobooks for Junie B Jones, I know which is which. Junie's nasal but somehow charming voice reminds me of Lily Tomlin's "Alice Ann" character on Laugh-In.

There are a couple of Pokemon books in the stack for a change of pace and two BabyMouse books that she's read before. Next to the books in the bookcase, are some videos: two Redwall videos, The Twelve Dogs of Christmas and Anne of Green Gables, the really good Canadian tv version. We all watched Redwall tonight and booed Cluny the Rat and cheered young Matthias and Cornflower. My favorite character is Constance, the badger, whose feisty attitude is a nice contrast to Father Abbot's pacifist stance. Me, I would have poured boiling oil onto Cluny when he first showed up. I guess I'm more of a badger than a mouse.

Tomorrow is a red letter day because we go to pick up Daughter's new glasses and we do it in the Dodge Caliber rental car that we have until Dodgey, our trusty Durango, gets his steering rack replaced. We thought he was a little more skittery over bumps than usual, but didn't realize that he was a hairpin turn away from losing it completely. Thank goodness for 100,000 mile warranties.

The rest of the week is going to be pretty quiet if I have my way, because this weekend we're going to a War. It's an Uncivil War between our shire and another shire in the Society for Creative Anachronism. We're all bringing pot luck and there's a rumor that the adults will get to sample the mead that the Thunder Clan is after. (The mead mistress has threatened to pour moxie into it if Thunder prevails, a heinous fate indeed for Sylvia's good mead.) The day after the war there's a medieval dance practice that I know Daughter and Son will want to attend, so I'll be there with a hey-nonny-nonny and a ha-cha-cha, as Groucho Marx once said.

Then it's back to Monday and the play group and another week of slacking off from lessons and workbooks. Jeez, can it be that kids can actually learn without someone standing over them and directing every step they take? Will Daughter grow up to be a Walmart greeter or hash slinger at the local diner or will she open the doggie daycare that she's been talking about since she was 3? Will Son go into the Marines to get a college scholarship instead of pursuing an art career? (Not bloody likely if I have anything to say about it.) Stay tuned and drop me a line telling me what your kids do instead of school. I'd really like to know.

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In Other Words, It's Unschooling

2007-11-04T13:51:00.000-05:00

Are you tired of trying to explain homeschooling or, harder yet, unschooling to family and friends who just don't get it?

Would you like a foolproof way to deflect unwanted comments from doctors, dentists and checkout clerks?

How much would you pay... Uh, sorry, got a little carried away there. I mean, read on and I'll give you the perfect answer to those annoying questioners we meet every time we're out with our kids.

Daughter and I were at the optometrist for her yearly eye exam. Dr. G is really nice and Daughter is fond of her, but she's one of the "caregivers" who always asks what grade Daughter is in and what curriculum we're following. Short of going into a rapid-fire delivery of the principles and philosophy of unschooling, it's very hard to explain what we do in the ten minutes that we have to talk while Dr. G goes over Daughter's pre-exam test results and sets up her exam machinery.

Last year, I tried to explain a little of what unschooling is, but we got bogged down in the grade thing. For some reason, adults seem to have this thing about knowing what grade kids are in. I guess it's an easy way to classify them, so that they'll know what level to talk to them on or something. As parents of unschoolers know, that doesn't really work. Kids, schooled, homeschooled or unschooled, are all over the place when it comes to different subjects and areas of knowledge.

Daughter probably reads on a seventh grade level, but her math skills are much lower. If she was in school, she'd be in fifth grade. Knowing that won't help you if you expect her to multiply double digits or enjoy a fifth grade level chapter book. However, if you don't have those expectations, you can talk to her for a few minutes and you'll find that she's very interesting and interested in just about anything you care to discuss.

Back to Dr. G and the Answer. We went through the "What grade are you in this year? Well, even if you're homeschooling, you must be in a grade. And what do you use for a curriculum? You must have to follow the state standards and make sure she keeps up and blah dee blah dee blah..."

I got a sudden inspiration. "We unschool, which means we follow the kids' interests. Right now, they're very interested in the medieval re-enactment group we belong to. So I just integrate our curriculum into that and we cover everything they need to cover for their ages with it. It's like unit studies. You're probably familiar with them."

"Wow!" she said, "That must be a LOT of work for you. I really admire you for doing that." And with that, we were off the subject and back to the exam.

So, Gentle Reader, next time someone bugs you about homeschooling or unschooling, take a leaf from my book. Tell them what your kids are interested in. (I know that won't be hard with home/un schooled kids.) Then, tell them that you've fashioned a curriculum around it - kind of like unit studies - and have included everything they need to know for their ages. It's the truth. It's what we do.

Okay, so maybe we don't write it down in one of those Plan Books that school-at-homers have, but we do it. We do it when we take them to lessons, clubs, play groups, museums, parks and libraries. We do it when we sit and play video games or watch Pokemon with them. We do it when we cook with them, have long conversations in the car or around the kitchen table. We do it when we sit up until midnight, researching a subject that they've shown an interest in.

It's all curriculum and it's all good. After all, the word curriculum only means "a course of study". Well, my kids are studying life in general and everything in particular, so they have a curriculum that's exactly right for them. If family, friends and people we meet in the community want to think that we're following some kind of guidelines from educational mavens, so be it. And if that keeps the flak to a minimum, that's fine with me.

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Balance. It's Not Just for Checkbooks Anymore

2007-10-30T09:55:00.000-04:00

There's a lot of talk about balance nowadays. We're supposed to have it in our lives and in our families and in our priorities. We're supposed to balance work with play and family time with mommy time. Every other magazine article you read lately is telling you how much time is enough to spend on what you do. (This is after you read the magazine articles that tell you what it is that you're supposed to do, of course.)

Well, take it from someone who skips most of the articles unless they have recipes in them, balance is a lot of malarkey. If you think about it for a minute, life would be a pretty boring experience if everything was balanced. I mean, there are days when I devour a whole book or cook four meals to freeze or sit on the deck for three hours with a cup of tea and clouds for company. There are days when my kids want to learn and there are days when they pore over their Pokemon cards until the edges curl. Not very balanced, but a lot of fun.

I started thinking about this balance thing last night, when I was three-quarters through a mystery novel and it was time for bed. I knew it was time for bed, because I'd stayed up past midnight the night before and vowed to the geek and the kids that I'd go to bed early to make up for it. I lied. I realized at about ten-thirty that sometimes it's more important to do what you want to do, rather than what you know you ought to do. I got a lot more pleasure out of finishing the book, Death of a Maid one of M.C. Beaton's Hamish Macbeth mysteries, than I would have had I gone to bed and probably laid there for an hour sleeplessly wishing I'd found out whodunit and why. (I love Beaton's Agatha Raisin series also.)

Then there was the day last week when I sat down at the computer with a long list of writing and editing that I needed to do by lunchtime, because I'd promised myself that I wouldn't come upstairs for lunch until I finished the work that was piling up. An hour later, I surfaced and realized that I had spent all that time on Cosmic Journey, a site I discovered while doing some research for pay. True, I had finished the job, but instead of going on to the next job, thereby insuring that we have a place to live for another month or at least PB&J sandwiches for a week, I'd just stayed there, exploring the whole site. It's well worth exploring, too.

My whole life is delightfully out of balance it seems to me. We go for days at a time, just staying home, working on learning the new things that we've taken up lately and some old projects: learning to sew, knitting more socks, art for the kids and jewelry-making for Son. Then we'll have a day or several days where we leave the house in the morning and don't get home until evening or later. Once in awhile, we're out so late that we have to almost carry Daughter into the house and the geek comes blinking out of his computer cave, surprised to find that it's after midnight.

Then we'll have a day or two of just basically hanging around. The kids play video games, read and go outside to throw balls for the dog. I read, cook and do a ton of housework to make up for the housework I didn't do the ~~week~~ ~~month~~ season before. We "forget" to get dressed and schlep around in our sweats and snack rather than have real meals. We hide when the UPS man knocks on the door and yell to him to leave the package in the mudroom. We let the answering machine get the phone and only call back the people we really want to talk to.

Then, all of a sudden, like a bunch of bipolar bears changing moods, we get all sociable again and search out the groups we've neglected for a week. We meet friends at potlucks and over pizza and call all the people whose messages we ignored. If we don't have somewhere to go, we're bored and go out to Border's to cruise the books or to an art gallery or donut shop to see if they've released another flavor of donut hole.

So, I guess what I'm saying is that the whole dadblamed family is unbalanced. Too late for us the articles that could save us. We're too busy wasting time at sites that can only loosely be termed "learning sites." If you'd like to ~~fritter away~~ ~~waste time~~ spend some quality time balancing out the earnest, worthwhile, edifying sites that you spend time on, try some of these for a change. I've included some sites that claim to be learning sites, but they can't be, because they're all too much fun.

The Austin Lounge Lizards at the Kennedy Center (a little risque for the younger kids, maybe)

Lou and Peter Berryman at the Kennedy Center

Katerpillars and Mystery Bugs

Maggie's Earth Adventures

Funology

Mop-Top the Hip-Hop Scientist (meet some African-American scientists)

Silly Books

Rainforest Maths

Women Who Have Made History

Gamequarium

Enjoy and let me know how you liked them.

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Poor Richard Had Nothing On This

2007-10-24T20:56:00.000-04:00

My favorite Ant on the Internet, Lynn, from Bore Me to Tears, posted about a different and unsettling type of bathroom reading recently. Well, at our house, we don't strew the bathroom with much of anything, but somehow all three of them are full of reading material. Daughter and Geekdaddy love to take long baths, so they need something substantial to read. The geek usually just takes two or three sci fi novels, a manual for the latest phone system he's tweaking and his well-worn copy of Growing Tomatoes in Your Office. (He harvested the first three cherry tomatoes of the fall season today and they were some good.)

I sometimes bring a book into the bathroom with me, especially if it's heading toward midnight and I should be in bed, but I haven't had my daily allotment of printed word. Sometimes though, I forget and find myself at a loss for a few minutes. It was on just such an occasion that I happened to find myself in the bathroom with one of Daughter's books. An hour later, I staggered out and made myself go to bed, but my head was spinning from all the information I'd just ingested.

Did you know that Wisconsin's state dance is the polka? Did you even know that Wisconsin had a state dance? Oh, don't lie. You did not. I suppose next you'll be saying that you know which state's dessert is kuchen, and which state has a state cooking pot - the dutch oven. I was flabbergasted to find out that I was born in a state with a state shellfish. Who knew? And who knew that so many states have state crustaceans? Well, if you want to know all about the states and many, many other subjects, run, do not walk to your nearest bookstore and buy the Time For Kids Almanac 2008. And to hold you until you do that, log on to their website, Factmonster.com and share it with your kids.

It's an unschooling mom's dream, let me tell you. It's one of those sites where one thing just leads to another and after they go there, your kids are telling you little tidbits of history, science, current events and other things that they learned while not being bored. I know, because I'm doing the same thing. I particularly like the history timelines and the data on other countries. I haven't played the games, but Daughter has and says they're pretty cool.

You can learn how to pronounce and write bubble gum in Latin - something I have no pressing need for at the moment, but I do so like to be prepared. It's manducabulla and it's pronounced mahn-doo-ka-boo-la. This goes nicely with something I learned on the Word Wizard site the other day, Cum catapulatae proscriptae erunt tum soli proscript catapultas habebunt. It means I have a catapult. Give me all the money or I will throw an enormous rock at your head. I thought it might come in handy at Medieval re-enactments.

At the top of most of the pages, there's a little widget that drives Daughter crazy, because she feels like it's trying to put her into a pigeonhole. It says, Girl or Boy? And when you click on Girl or Boy, there are numbers indicating which grade you're in. Since we're unschoolers, Daughter hasn't been in a grade for over two years, so she just clicks randomly. This generates a "Did you know?" question. Sometimes I know and sometimes I don't know, which is what makes it interesting for me. Why they have to ask if you're a boy or girl is irritating and sexist, but this isn't a perfect world, especially when you're swimming in the mainstream media like Time-Life.

And there are the usual ads in the sidebar, but my kids just ignore them and pay attention to the good bits. There are so many good bits, that I'm willing to overlook the ads and the boy/girl thing too. If you're a willow, like me, and can bend a bit, you might enjoy whiling away a few hours on their website. It's particularly useful for those of us who take showers instead of baths, but still like to keep up on current events.

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History Needn't Be a Mystery

2007-10-21T21:15:00.000-04:00

On many of the homeschooling email lists, people ask for book recommendations for different subjects. Next time someone asks for a book to help kids with history, have I got a book for them - or rather two books. It's Howard Zinn's two volume set of A Young People's History of the United States. We've just started to read it and it's very much like A People's History of the United States, which was published during the Reagan administration or nap or whatever it was that Reagan did while the country went downhill.

Howard Zinn is a controversial figure. When A People's History of the United States was published, a lot of people said he was guilty of only telling one side of the story. They said he was too simplistic and divided everyone into either a powerful elite bent on subjugating the masses, or the masses who were crushed beneath the heel of the aforementioned elite. One critic, Georgetown University professor of history Michael Kazin, said that Zinn was too focused on the class struggle and wrongly attributes sinister motives to the ruling elite. (Sinister motives??? I'm shocked; deeply shocked. Next he'll be saying that they do it by stealing elections, fighting unjust wars and using torture and illegal wiretapping.)

Maybe to counter the criticism, in his next book, Voices From A People's History of the United States, Zinn presented well-documented and researched letters, files, transcripts of recorded conversations and other evidence from both well-known and unknown people over the years of America's history. Writer Aaron Sarver put it well when he said, "Voices is a vast anthology that tells heartbreaking and uplifting stories of American history...Kazin will be hard-pressed to charge Zinn with politicizing the intelligence here; the volume offers only Zinn’s sparse introductions to each piece, letting the actors and their words speak for themselves." If you can, get it on CD and set aside enough time to really absorb and digest the words of women, non-whites, poor people and other long-ago people just like us.

My children both attended public school long enough to get the party line on American history, so I'm very glad to be able to present them with another side to the story. With Howard Zinn's books (and he has several more for older readers that I'll be offering my teenaged son) there's hope for those of us who wish that history was not just written by the victors. As Zinn says, history is not just the story of governments, wars and rich people. History is the story of us, the worker, the teacher, the parents and children of ordinary men and women. It's the story of people of color and people who came here in steerage class and of the Native Americans who were here first.

After we've read both volumes and discussed it at length, probably over many breakfasts, lunches and snacks, I'll see if I can dig out Lies My Teacher Told Me by James W. Loewen which used to sit in my bookcase for easy retrieval, but which has mysteriously disappeared. It's probably a victim of one of the geek's infrequent but deadly cleaning binges, wherein he loses several very important or well-loved objects in the process of moving a mess from one side of the room to another while watching tv, reading and talking on the phone. This is called multitasking. This is also why divorce lawyers live in large houses and send their kids to Ivy League colleges, but I digress.

Loewen's web site has an American History Quiz that taught me that I'm not as smart as I think I am. (I got three wrong and I did read his book so I should know this stuff. Please don't tell my kids.) If you're looking to take your kids on a field trip to show them some historic sites, you might want to read his Top Ten Terrible Historic Sites:False American History From Columbus to Vietnam before you hop into the jalopy.

My favorite silly historical marker on the list is the frieze depicting the Dutch buying Manhattan from Native Americans for $24. In reality, they paid about $2,400 in goods to the Canarsie Indians, who lived in Brooklyn and didn't have any claim to Manhattan. The Weckquaesgeeks, who did live on Manhattan, weren't too happy about this. Years later, the Dutch and the Canarsies wiped out the Weckquaesgeeks and that took care of the matter as far as the Dutch were concerned. I don't know what happened to the Canarsies, but judging by what happened to other Native Americans, I hope they spent their $2,400 really fast.

Some online history resources I've found helpful are Facing History and Ourselves, First Nations Site and History Matters, especially their section called Many Pasts. Of course, as with any site that "educates" there's more than fact on these sites and I'm not endorsing or saying I believe everything that they promote.

True, like Zinn and to a lesser extent Loewen, I approach history from a left-wing (oh, let's just be honest and say flaming radical) perspective, so what I read is tempered by my belief that a good part of history was written by the rich and powerful in the blood of the poor and the weak. However, there is much good factual history from all points on the political spectrum on these sites if you look for it.And speaking of looking for things, I'm going to go beard the geek in his computer cave and make him tell me what he did with Lies My Teacher Told Me. If he doesn't come up with it, his pocket protector is history.

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I Am Un With the Universe

2007-10-17T10:51:00.000-04:00

Note: In case you'd like to find a really good web site without wading through the sturm und drang of my terribly depressing post about being -un, I'll post the end of this entry first. This is what I had at the bottom of my post, but it's too good to bury.

End of post, but you can read it first:
When I realized how un I was, I decided that I really needed to lift myself out of this fall funk before winter arrives and things really get dicey around here weather-wise. Serendipitously, I chanced upon Dr. Goodword's site where there was an essay "How I Met My Wife" by Jack Winter. Evidently, Mr. Winter also muses on prefixes, suffixes and what happens when you don't use them. If you're experiencing a little fall angst or would just like to amuse yourself with some very clever wordplay, I can't recommend this article - and this whole site - enough. Do yourself a favor and read the essay and then you might want to drop Miss Spelling an email and sign your kids up for Dr. Goodword's Word Wizard Club.

Beginning of post. If you read this first, read the above paragraph afterwards:
Some of you may remember when I blogged about the suffix "ish" in "Unschooling Who?" It was a riveting (okay, meandering) exploration of how to create delicately nuanced (okay, weasel) words just by putting -ish after them. True, as is usual in our family conversations, there was a little confusion about what is an -ish word and what isn't, but we overcame it (okay, gave up on ever being understood by each other as long as we live) and things were learned.

Well, today I'd like to share my thoughts on a prefix: un. It's fall. The leaves are changing. Geese are flying south in various alphabet formations. (Anyone else have dyslexic geese? Ours fly in U or W formations, not in V formations. What's up with that anyway?) We have to put our flannel shirts over our t-shirts and socks are no longer optional. And I'm un.

Unsettled, uneasy, unable to concentrate, uncomfortable in my skin, unsatisfied with my life, undefined in my thoughts and underwhelmed by everything. Is it because fall is a time of loss? We lose hours of sunlight up here in the frozen north. Many of our animals hibernate, so we lose frogs, snakes, salamanders and the migrating birds. Geez, if it wasn't for chickadees, nuthatches, and the corvidae crew (crows, jays and ravens), we'd be birdless. True, the blackflies and mosquitoes are no loss, but - to use another un word - I'm unable to appreciate that as much as I should due to my present state of un-ness.

My kids don't seem to feel this way. The only un they seem to be experiencing this fall is unschooling. If they have any complaint, it's that fall doesn't last long enough before it turns into the long winter when the weather sometimes keeps them from doing things outside. But they're young. Maybe it's just that they haven't experienced enough falls to settle into un-ness with it.

One of the problems I have with fall now is that it reminds me of people I've lost. My mother's birthday was in November. My oldest son's birthday was in September and he died in October. Even though it was 39 years ago, I don't have to look at the calendar to know what day it is. My middle son Mike's birthday was in October. Two of my uncles and one of my aunts died in October. It's no wonder I cringe when October rolls around. I'm always wondering if we'll get through it without another funeral.

(Now would be a good time to read or re-read the last paragraph, which is at the beginning of this post, unless you read it first.)

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Don't Agonize. Sing!

2007-10-11T21:30:00.001-04:00

Maybe it's not every October. Maybe it's randomly distributed around the year and I just remember it as always happening in the fall. Whatever the reality, the Berrymans have another CD out, The Universe:14 Examples. As usual, I like all the songs, but there are one or two that stand out. If you go to their website and click on lyrics and scroll down to Track 4: Artiste Interrupted, you'll find the ultimate ADD song. My kids, who have been diagnosed with ADD, pegged it the minute they heard it and were falling about laughing for the rest of the day whenever they thought of a scrap of the lyrics.

The song before that song, about whether your dog agonizes, is a hoot too as are most of the songs on the CD. They hit the nail on the head or the thumb, I guess, and describe the human condition as it exists in our neck of the woods. Like Peter and Lou, we have trouble giving and receiving presents, have our ups and downs - sometimes simultaneously - and we have a dog who invented hangdog.

We like Sea Chanteys, but can't understand a word the singers say in some of them. And the geek and I are so old that we remember when ketchup wasn't red and we had to walk uphill to school - both ways.

Also as usual, when I got the CD, I had to fight to listen to it. It seems like, whenever I get one of the Berryman's CDs, the universe keeps throwing roadblocks in front of my listening to the thing. First, the geek had a chimichanga malfunction and almost burned the house down - or at least the microwave - so we had to abandon ship and go out to eat while Geekdaddy put on his hearing protectors and revved up the leafblower to blow out the stink.

For some reason, the geek can't nuke things like other people do. If it says to cook the thing at full power for two minutes, he figures what they really mean is that you should cook it for 12 minutes at ten percent. Of course, that means that you have to hit 1 for cook power on the microwave oven, not 10. Ten is full power and will frizzle your burrito into a charred lump and fill the house with choking black smoke in minutes. This is what happened last night when Geekdaddy fumbled the finger function on the keypad.

Son, who is having trouble with his asthma right now, was the first to notice that something was amiss or agley. He alerted Geekdaddy, who yelled to Daughter and I who were down in my basement lair, researching nifty toys. We sprinted up the stairs, opened the door, noticed the thick black smoke and headed for the exit, sweeping the dog and two crouching cats along with us.

Son and Daughter stayed at Uncle Wil's while I opened windows in the basement and upstairs in their bedrooms, gathered shoes for both of them and grabbed my car keys. With an admonition to the geek not to inhale any more smoke than he had to, we were off like snowflakes on the west wind or something similar, leaving the geek to render the house habitable before we returned.

He managed to get most of the smoke out, although the kitchen, dining room and living room still smell like the aftermath of a bonfire that was fueled by rancid marshmallows. The smell just goes right up our noses and stays there. The geek, on the other hand, who has very little sense of smell thinks it smells like someone burned a little bit of popcorn. Yeah, if by little bit he means a little bit of a forty acre field.

Anyhow, this morning I had work to do and couldn't listen to the CD, so tonight Daughter and I settled into my recliner with wine (for me) and grape juice (for her) and listened to the whole thing. It was unschooling at its best. I had to pause the thing several times to explain some words, including pachyderm, thesaurus, chiaroscuro and a few other terms.

I thought as we listened how so much of our learning takes place before and after the hours that the public schools are open. By the time we'd listened to the whole CD, she'd figured out that MG&E stands for Madison Gas and Electric, gotten an explanation of anthropomorphic and used it in a sentence, commented that Peter seems a little more depressed and Lou a little more manic than they did on the last CD, and noticed that there were only 14 songs, so that was more than a dollar a song unlike their last CD.

It's funny. Like a lot of unschooled kids, she's both more sophisticated and less mature than most kids her age. She still plays with baby dolls, stuffed animals and likes books that are "too young for her", according to society's standards. However, because she's with me so much and not sequestered with twenty other same-age kids, she knows a lot more about the real world than most ten year olds. And, of course, because her brother died a year and a half ago, she knows more than I wish she knew about life and death.

While most kids her age are bopping to popular radio stations and the music on Nick and Disney, she's listening to Junie B. Jones audiobooks, my eclectic collection of CDs and whatever attracts her in the world around her. She sings a lot to tunes that she makes up herself and whistles cheerfully as she takes out the dog and rides her bike in the driveway. She's a cheerful kid who likes music.

So when the mail brings a brown envelope from Madison, Wisconsin, she perks up her ears and is just as anxious as I am to listen to the CD inside. She's been listening to Lou and Peter since she was an infant and I've been listening to them since the geek and I got hitched, lo these many years ago. If you haven't heard them, give them a listen. If you have, then I'm sure you're already humming along to "Does Your Dog Agonize".

We've decided that ours doesn't agonize, but she sure has perfected the hangdog look when we come home and find that she's gotten into the cat food and eaten the soap. We'll think of Lou and Peter every time she puts her head down and looks shamefacedly at us over her Black Lab snout. Give them a listen and you'll be humming along too.

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Hairy Tofu Lemur

2007-10-10T12:38:00.000-04:00

Hairy, the tofu lemur, is at the top of Daughter's Wish List for December. When she told me she wanted a lemur stuffed toy made from tofu, I was a little skeptical. I mean, tofu is the geek's favorite food. He eats it plain, the same way he eats white rice. (The man is the opposite of a gourmet, whatever that is.) He likes his food bland and easy to eat - almost pre-digested - so tofu really fits the bill. I think it tastes like library paste without the afterbite, but that's just me. Anyhow, I was all for making stuffed toys or anything else out of tofu if it means I don't have to eat it. I just wasn't sure if it was possible to do it. After intense investigation, I can assure you that it is and they do.

It all started when Daughter discovered that one of her favorite toys was being recalled because it was covered in lead paint. She was NOT amused. Not only did she throw it away, but she also threw away every little figure and doll from that particular company. Then she had me help her find the site where the toy recalls are listed and she went through every one of them back to the year G.I. Joe signed up for the draft. There were a couple of other toys on the list that hit the bottom of the wastebasket after that and I thought that was the end of it.

However, bright and early the next day, Daughter was at the computer, trying to find safe toys to put on her Wish List for December. (She starts early.) After a half hour with no success, she asked me to help her. I did a few searches and came up with three companies I thought looked okay and gave her their urls. That's when Hairy, the tofu lemur showed up. Hairy and Xeko: Mission Indonesia are at the top of Daughter's Wish List so I was forced to learn more about them.

First of all, Hairy isn't actually made from tofu. He's made from the by-product of tofu production. I would guess that would be soybean husks, but don't quote me on that. Whatever it is, it's spun into a kind of silk or fiber and then made into fabric and they make stuffed lemurs out of it. I think this is such a cool recycling method, don't you?

Thinking that maybe someone could do the same thing with cacao (chocolate) bean husks, I looked it up and found out that someone discovered that a solvent made from them can prevent tooth decay. So maybe someone can figure out how to make fiber from them and produce teething rings that prevent those little baby teeth from decaying? Yeah, maybe I'm taking this thing too far, but it sounds like such a good idea. But back to Hairy tofu lemurs, the toy recalls, my daughter's angst and the launch of a new blog.

Daughter was going to post the safe toy companies on her blog, but decided that she'd rather have me start a new blog with a list on it. That way, we (that would be the mominative case of we, which means Mom is doing it and a kid is getting some of the credit) could find more companies and become affiliates of the companies and make money for presents. So that's what we have done.

The blog is called How to Find Safe Toys. Catchy title, eh? Bet you can't guess which one of us thought that up. Anyhow, tofu-like title notwithstanding, once I decided to do this, I put quite a bit of effort into making sure that the companies I've listed are ethical, trustworthy, have good products and have good customer service. If I wouldn't shop there, it's not going on my list.

So if your kid wants Hairy or one of the Xeko games you'll be able to find it there (at Taraluna). What makes it very possible that my little girl is going to get Hairy this December is that all the Xeko products are made of recyclable paper and printed with soy based ink. Best of all, 4% of their profits go to Conservation International to support the habitats each "mission" takes place in. I'd much rather support companies that respect the environment and have a positive impact on the world than buy another chunk of plastic that was molded in a factory overseas by underage exploited workers and then painted with toxic paint to fuel yet another recall.

I've looked at every product that every company on my list sells and if I had the money and the room, I'd buy any one of them. I like the soft, cuddly dolls and critters made from organic cotton. I like the brightly painted, but unleaded wooden toys from Germany and the European Union. I really like the fact that so many of the toys are unique and not found in big-box stores. I'm not much of a shopper, but I do have several people on my gift list who have small children and it's so nice to find gifts that I'm proud to give them, instead of something I picked up at Wally World along with half of the ten other people who were buying the kid a present.

Enough of the sales spiel. After this post, I'll go back to my policy of not blogging for bucks, although I have nothing against other bloggers doing that. They have to pay their bills and buy their kids toys too. At the very least, you can check the latest recall list at How to Find Safe Toys where it's updated everyday. Just look at the bottom right sidebar. There's also a list of non-toy child-related recalls. I hope this gives my readers a few more alternatives to bookmark for holiday shopping. Just tell them Hairy sent you.

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Swatch Watch

2007-10-05T09:16:00.000-04:00

The geek and I usually crawl out from under the covers around 6 a.m. Of course, it takes him longer, because he spends the night twisting his covers into a Gordian knot that ends up underneath him, which is why he's always cold. Me, I sleep like a letter in an envelope and can just crawl out and then flip the corner of the blankets and quilt back over my side of the bed. It's not that I don't turn over in my sleep. It's just that I seem to do it neatly and without mussing the covers. It may be a Taurus thing. I dunno.

This morning, we wafted into the kitchen on the coffee aromas that were emanating from our trusty percolator, had a twenty minute chinwag before Daughter appeared, and then I went to shower while he left for the computer mines. Usually, I meditate in the shower, but this morning, I just let my thoughts wander where they would and they did. Luckily, they came back so I can share them with you.

I got to thinking that it's about time to start knitting a pair of socks, which led me to remember the guest post that I'd read the day before at the Yarn Harlot's hangout where Presbytera admitted (traditional knitters may want to skip this next part) that she doesn't swatch! Yes folks, you read it here (and there). You have no idea how chuffed I was to read this, because I've never knitted a swatch in my life, although I don't noise it around either online or in (as my psychiatrist friend would say) Real Life.

So how is it that I'm able to knit several pairs of socks a year and have them fit the feet they're for? Easy. I've been knitting since I was knee high to, uh, something that 8 yr old girls are knee-high to and I'm self-taught. I saw someone knitting and wanted to try it. Unfortunately, my mother was a confirmed crocheter, so there was no hope of learning from her.

As I usually did and still do, I went to the library and found a book on knitting. Or rather, in this case, a self-published pamphlet typed on cheap paper with many spelling errors. As is also very often true with me, I managed to find a slightly loony author, who had very firm, but odd, opinions on how best to approach knitting items of clothing. She was obsessed with economy and frugality and said that knitting swatches was a waste of wool.

Her patterns all started with something to the effect that you were a pretty poor excuse for a knitter if you couldn't look at the person you were knitting for and figure out how large or small to make the socks, sweater, snood, dish towel or whatever you were knitting them. She stated firmly that her patterns came in several sizes and it was up to you to figure out which size fit which person before you cast on. My first project illustrated the effectiveness of this method of sizing very well. My father loved the sweater I knitted for him and assured me that he'd get used to holding the hem of it up, so it wouldn't trip him around the ankles.

With time, I got much better at knowing how to match my gauge, yarn and needles to the size garment I wanted to end up with. Today, I rarely knit anything except socks or scarves and I've gotten very good at sizing them. It helps that Daughter's feet are the same size as mine and Son's are the same size as Geekdaddy's. If I knit for someone else, I take their measurements, especially width, because I have wide feet and I hate it when socks are tight. Scarves, I just knit a la Stephanie, the Yarn Harlot. I go on and on until I can't stand it anymore and then I stop. Swatches? I don't need no stinkin' swatches. But I didn't know anyone else felt that way.

Apparently, this aversion to swatching is a genetic thing, because I found a reference to something similar in my late mother's journal from 1961, the year I was ten. She'd been visiting a neighbor and confessed that she'd snooped in the master bedroom on the way to the bathroom. Unfortunately, she wrote, their bureau is too darned narrow for that bureau scarf I crocheted them for Christmas, so I'll have to make them something else and see if anyone else has a bureau that it'll fit. Gee, I hope the doily I'm making Doris fits her lamp table. Maybe I should have measured it before I started? Oh well, too late now. I'm sure I'll find a table it'll fit.

If I recall correctly, my mother's free-form approach to the textile arts extended to sewing also, which is why we saw so many little kids, in our old neighborhood, out hopping around in the snow. They were the recipients of buntings that my mother had made for them when they were infants. Their polite mothers made them wear them as soon as they fit, which was usually shortly after they learned to walk. "Just hobble around for a little while so Mrs. Thornton can see you in the blasted thing and you can come in and take it off and we'll use it for a draft dodger," I overheard one mother say one cold January day.

So now I'm off to find some yarn and my favorite wooden needles, so that I can start a pair of socks for Daughter. Or Son, if I can't find the number 5 needles. Or is that number 3 for daughter and 5 for Son? Oh well, they'll fit someone and if they don't... Someone will be getting a set of beautiful golf club covers this Solstice.

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Don't Know Much About Mad Scientists

2007-10-01T19:00:00.000-04:00

Whether you're an unschooler, homeschooler or schooler, there's a series of books that you should add to your library list. It's Kenneth C. Davis's Don't Know Much About series. I'm reading Don't Know Much About the Universe at the moment and I've just finished Don't Know Much About Mythology and Don't Know Much About the Bible, of all things. Kind of an odd choice for an atheist, but I thought I'd give it another go to see how Davis's interpretation compares to the hard-shelled Baptist view that I grew up with.

Not surprisingly, he differs with them on many points, as he does with the Catholic and Hebrew Bibles, although he doesn't voice an opinion on the spiritual truth of any of the Bibles. He merely presents facts and backs them up with archaeological and historical evidence from Bible scholars and secular sources. He neither attacks nor defends, but merely illuminates the Bible's content.

In addition to the three I've mentioned, he's written books on Geography, The Civil War, and History. (I've read the first and third, but the Civil War is still a closed book to me.) If this doesn't cover everything you don't know, which I have to confess is true for me, there's Don't Know Much About Anything which covers people, places and events you ought to know about, but don't.

Davis's web site for kids is a good place to go for ideas if you're contemplating a unit study on the Pilgrims for November or you're unschooling the history of the pioneers with your 6 yr old or you have a Middle Schooler who needs to know the real story of Rosa Parks for that book report that's due next Tuesday. He has picture books on mummies, dinosaurs, the 50 states the presidents and the solar system for kids from 6-9 or for grownups like me who love picture books still. And for older kids, there are books on Martin Luther King Jr, World Myths,
and much more. Even if you don't read the books, there's a lot of interesting information on the site and he presents it with his usual humor and just the right words to get his point across without being dry or boring.

Actually, whenever I want to learn something new, I go to the children's section of our libraries and take out several books on the subject. Because children's books are usually written to convey information more simply than adult books, I find it a great way to learn the basics of something. Then, after I've gotten the gist of whatever it is, I can go on to the more complicated adult books and not feel like an idjit.

Earlier this year, I developed a burning desire to get the birdseye lowdown on Non-Newtonian Fluids, liquids that don't behave according to Newton's laws. (No, I don't know why I wanted to know. I just did, okay? I'm like that.) Three of the ones I know about are ketchup, quicksand and gelatin. I went to the library and found a nifty little book called Potato Radio, Dizzy Dice, a book in the Mad Scientist series by Joey Green.

It says it's for Mad Scientists age 13 and up, so I definitely fit the reader profile. In it, there's a recipe for Green Slime that demonstrates Non-Newtonian Fluids better than anything I could have read about them. (Not to mention that it's perfect for Halloween, as is the Fake Blood recipe and the ones for a Homemade UFO, a Smoke Bomb and the Human Light Bulb.)

Oh, and there's also a recipe for Quicksand, if the Green Slime doesn't do it for you, although I don't see how it wouldn't. Green has also written several other books on using ordinary household things in unusual ways such as using dental floss for sewing a tent or using Jello to grow seeds in, so that kids can watch them grow. There's a list of his books on his Wacky Uses web site. There are also good scientific explanations for each of the experiments and tangential information sprinkled throughout the pages.

Oh yes, I just remembered why I was interested in Non-Newtonian Liquids. People are actually working on using them as body armor. They'd flex when the wearer moved, but when hit by a projectile, they'd act like a solid and repel the bullet or whatever. I read about it in a newspaper, realized I had forgotten what a NNL was and intended to look it up, but forgot about it again. Later that same week, I was at the library waiting for Daughter to pick out books, when I leafed through the Mad Scientist book and the phrase Non-Newtonian Liquids caught my eye.

Yup, once again I was caught in the Lattice of Coincidence and serendipity was smiling on me. Serendipity. Now that's a strange word. I wonder where it comes from. Maybe I'll look it up tomorrow in a book about word origins. I'm sure they have several in the children's room at the library.

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Middle Aged in the Middle Ages

2007-09-24T19:41:00.000-04:00

Okay, so I'm up to my wimple in yellow brocade, hemming these sleeves that go down to the floor and look like batwings, when Mark, the pool guy, knocks on the door, Daughter starts wailing that there's a hornet in her room and Son clomps down the stairs and announces that he can't get the blue lines off a stop sign, so he won't have a shield for the next time he fights and besides that, how the heck can he make a lobstertail without the material? How, indeed?

Yanno, according to the free horoscope that I get every day, we've entered the peace-loving sign of Libra, where balance is everything. Reflecting the fall equinox, which was yesterday according to my calendar, Libra ushers in a season of sharing, socializing and fairness in business and personal relationships. Time to get together with friends and family, try new things and party hearty. Oddly enough, that's what we're doing, which is why I'm sewing, Son is making a shield and we'll be camping in a field in Maine in September at a re-enactment of a Middle Ages Hunt. I ought to have my head examined.

The pool guy was here to close the pool, because it's way too cold to swim, even though the daytime temps get up to 70-something. At night, it dips down into the 40s and even 30s, so the water is a tad nippy by morning. He was knocking on the door to let me know that there was a horse in my yard again, so I called my neighbor and she said she'd be right down to get the little dickens. Only a horse lover could call something that weighs as much as some cars a "little dickens" with a straight face. The horse lover's face, not the horse's.

The lobster tail, by the way, is layered pieces of leather which go on the back of a hockey helmet, which is what youth fighters wear when they fight like knights used to fight if knights had worn hockey helmets and padding. The stop sign is one that the geek got when the Department of Transportation threw it away and will be turned into Son's shield, if he can figure out how to cut it into a shield shape with the puny tools that inhabit our garage.

For tin snips, he's using some clippers that are barely a threat to hydrangeas. Somehow, I don't think they're the stuff that Middle Ages' ironmongers reached for when they needed something to shape a knight's shield. What he needs is a huge, heavy mallet and some giant, razor sharp cutters that could rip his arm off if he slips while cutting the sign.

Trust me when I say how sorry I am that we don't have such a thing in our garage or anywhere in the house either, so he'll just have to use the hydrangea clippers until the geek gets home to help him. (Hey, call me a wimp, but I'm not up for a trip to the ER and I'm a little hazy on tourniquet application for arterial wounds.) Oh, and I forgot to add that the reason helmets have lobstertails is to protect the fighters' necks and the tops of their spinal columns from blows that might sever one or the other.

Why the HELL can't males find something safe to do? Why do they always have to be doing something that can result in death if one little thing is overlooked? And why is it that the list of things that can't be overlooked is always the list that they hand to Mom? While the list they keep is the list of equipment that they need to play the game that will almost certainly result in death, dismemberment, bankruptcy or all of the above. But, what of that?

I paid the pool man and waved at our horse-loving neighbor as she rattled a can of feed at the horse, who ignored her and peevishly kicked over our garden bench. Then I went upstairs and dispatched the errant hornet with a fly swatter, thus freeing Daughter from her room where the hornet had her and about a dozen beanie babies trapped in a corner. (Beanie babies are notoriously wimpy about hornets, Daughter says, and she stayed to comfort them.)

Downstairs, Daughter's renaissance gown leered at me from my chair, so I glared at it and went out onto the deck to sit in my rocker for awhile. It was very peaceful out there with nary a sign of the horse, my neighbor, hornets or pillaging knights. However, a lot of the leaves have gone over to the Dark Side and are turning colors much faster than they need to. It's only September, after all, not December.

This is the fall equinox when we start the long, slow slide into cold and grayness that is winter in Maine and New England. We can camp out this weekend. Sure, we can. (I'm channeling Mr. Rogers here, folks.) So what if it's cold and damp and we wake up feeling as clammy as bait in a cooler? That's all part of the fun, isn't it? We'll warm up, just like the temperature warms up and the mist burns off when the sun comes out.

In September, you can get away with camping in Maine, as long as you have that sleeping bag that's good to 30 below. Not that it gets to 30 below, but that's what it takes to keep warm in September in Maine, no matter what the tag says. Trust me on this. And if you need more information... If you can't get your lobstertail tied on right or if your snood just won't lie flat, look me up. I'll be the one in the wool cloak, wool tabard, wool skirt, thick cotton tunic and voluminous chemise, wrapped in the "good to 30 below" sleeping bag and half a quart of mead.

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I Got Rhythm

2007-09-20T12:26:00.000-04:00

It's happening again. We're finding it harder and harder to get together with our friends who don't homeschool. Their afternoons are filled with homework and sports practice and their weekends are busy with shopping, football and soccer games and all the stuff they didn't have time to do during the week. Recently, I called and invited a couple and their kids over for pizza and even over the phone, I could hear the daytimer pages flipping.

It had to be either after school or on the weekend, of course, for them, and they both work, so weekend would be better, except that Allen, their son, has soccer practice on Saturday at 11 and his sister, Susan, has soccer practice at 3, so Saturday is no good. Sunday doesn't look too good either this week, because there's an away game for Allen and next week, there's a game for Susan. Hmm, maybe they could squeeze it in next Tuesday from 7 to 9 if the kids don't have too much homework and Bob and Ruth don't have to work late, but they kind of promised to attend that workshop that the PTA is putting on about building better families by doing things together and then there's the Open House at the school - is that Tuesday or Wednesday or next week - and what about the supplies for Susan's art class that they have to get because the school doesn't provide them?

My ear is numb by the time we get off the phone. We still haven't figured out how to get together and I'm feeling less and less like I really want to, especially after Ruth says, "You know, it'd be a lot easier if you guys didn't homeschool. Then we'd be on the same schedule. It's really hard to coordinate things with you because you don't have a routine like we do." Thud!

Well, wrap me in a calendar and call me dated, but don't tell me we don't have a routine! We do so. As a matter of fact, we do better than that. We have several routines and sometimes they're all playing at once. This week was a prime example, because - as so often happens in spite of my best laid plans - things happened, but not the way I thought they'd happen.

The Monday that was supposed to be devoted to writing and learning from workbooks, turned into the Monday morning spent trying to figure out how to get Son enough hockey equipment to keep him from getting dented or demolished at the youth fighter practices he frequents now without taking out a second mortgage. By the time we had found the best buys on what he needed, it was lunchtime and I hadn't written a word.

Daughter had given up on trying to do her math without my help and had doodled girls glaring and tapping their little feet impatiently all over the 4 times table page. I offered to help her later, but she said she wouldn't be able to think later, because she'd be too tired from riding her bike and throwing tennis balls for the dog. I could see her point, so we moved the fours to Tuesday and I went out onto the deck to watch her and throw a few tennis balls, myself.

I noticed that the chickadees have come back from the woods and are enjoying our sunflowers. Three of them were dee-dee-deeing and pecking the seeds. I pulled a few weeds so that the cats couldn't sneak up on them easily and sat on the garden bench, enjoying the sunshine. A huge dragonfly - looked like a Piper Cub for Barbie - swooped over the field, getting the last of the midge crop for this year. I hope. You can never tell with midges. I've seen them when I could also see my breath.

Somehow, without me noticing, our maple had decided that it was fall and time to lose the green coloring that masks the red and gold in its leaves. And also without me noticing, lunchtime had arrived, or at least that's what our stomachs were telling us. While we ate at the dining room table, we realized that our schedule was so out of whack that we might as well throw it away altogether and start on what we'd planned for Tuesday: shopping and libraries.

I took my usual short nap and we set off for two libraries, the craft store and the sporting good store, where Son bought his hockey gear and Daughter and I embarrassed him by discussing the merits of each of the athletic supporters and cups they had. Who knew they had such a range? And what's with the sizing based on waist size? Sure for the holder, but for the cup? What does waist size have to do with it? But I digress.

Like it often does with us when we're out and about, one thing led to another and we didn't get home until almost 8 pm. The geek, who is used to our ways, greeted us with the news that Ruth had called and left a message that Tuesday was out, but Friday was a maybe if Allen didn't have to stay after school to make up a test he had missed because of a dental appointment and why weren't we home at supper time?

I called to tell her that Friday was fine for us, but by then, she'd found out that Susan had too much homework to go out on Friday night, because she'd decided to take the AP Latin course after all, so maybe we'd be able to do something during Thanksgiving break. Right! I told her I'd put that on my calendar, but somehow I know it'll never happen. By the time we're basting turkeys, they'll be deeply involved in football or the kids will have projects to complete and band practice or something.

I give up. I guess we'll just have to look for some new friends who don't have the school routine to get in the way of socializing. That way, if we feel like getting together, we can do it during the 40 extra hours a week we have that we wouldn't have if the kids went to school. We may not have a routine, as such, but we do have a rhythm, which is even better. It's the rhythm of life lived without artificial structure just for the sake of imposing structure.

We're in tune with the seasons, but not necessarily with Hallmark holidays. The weather affects us, but learning is never canceled when there's a snow day. We plan our days and are happy if they follow our plan, but we're often delighted when they don't. Except for math and writing, my kids are free to explore what they want to explore for as long as they want to. Their learning isn't broken up into hour-long units.

They spend at least half of their daytime hours outside as long as the weather permits and when it gets really cold, they still go outside for an hour or two everyday. They don't have to ask permission to eat, drink or go to the bathroom, talk to a friend or leave the room. Most importantly, they're always free to drop everything and say "yes" when a friend calls and wants to get together and have a chinwag. Would that our friends who go to school had that option. I worry that they're not getting enough socialization, don't you?

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Dress Codes, Just for Fun

2007-09-15T22:31:00.000-04:00

The newspaper headline read, "Uproar Over Student Dress Code." I read on, ready to read that students were up in arms over rules that outlawed nose studs or "Kill the Teachers" t-shirts. Nope. This time, it was the parents who were up in arms. Seems the dress code has been relaxed this year in that particular school, so that kids can wear hats, hoodies and sunglasses in class. Quel horreur!

Am I missing something? Wearing hats, hooded sweatshirts and sunglasses is interfering with learning? Why is that? Unless kids are pulling their hats and hoods down over their eyes so that they can't read their books, I don't see how it makes much difference what they wear. Of course, considering what my kids and I wear for "class" it's no wonder that I don't get this dress code business.

Friday morning, Daughter announced that she wasn't going to change out of her pajamas, because we take Friday off. If someone wants to crack a workbook or do something serious, they can, but it's not mandatory. Usually, Son and Daughter spend most of Friday in front of a screen of some sort and I goof off too. I've been known to finish two or three books by Friday afternoon. Sweats are probably our favorite outfits, but we've been known to appear in ballet outfits (Daughter), cut-offs in January because we haven't done our weekly wash (Son), Dad's old flannel shirt because we have a cold and it's comforting (me) or wrapped in a blanket with our jammies on because we're having a rough day and it just feels better (all of us).

The article I read went on to say that students who wore sunglasses might not be maintaining eye contact, which is disrespectful and that's why teachers want the dress code to outlaw sunglasses in well-lighted classrooms. Gee, have I been missing the boat all this time, thinking that eye contact with whatever they were learning was more important than looking at me? Son often wears a hat and Daughter wears a hoodie when it's cold. In spite of this, they seem to be learning just fine. Are they atypical? Would they learn more without the hat and hoodie?

I guess this whole dress code thing reinforces one of the biggest beefs I have with schools: the emphasis on conformity. Kids are taught that there's a right way to look, act, think and feel and - strangely enough - it's the school's way. Maybe that's why schooled kids so often rebel and want to wear outlandish clothes or very few clothes? It reminds me of the kind of thing repressed populations have always done when outright rebellion isn't an option.

I went to high school when mini-skirts were in fashion. I still remember the teacher measuring up from the floor to our hems to make sure our skirts didn't exceed the sleaze limit and distract all those adolescent boys from The Scarlet Letter. Then we had to kneel on the floor and if our skirt didn't touch the floor, we had to wear a towel around it or call home for another skirt. In my case, they could have avoided all this by letting us wear jeans, which I would have preferred to skirts and dresses.

We do have a dress code in our family, but it's not something you can measure with a yardstick or write a list of rules for. If Dad raises his eyebrows at your outfit, you run it by Mom, who does one of two things. She says, "Your dad doesn't understand fashion. I'll talk to him", or she says, "No kid of mine is gonna walk around looking like a hooker/bum" and you take it off and put something else on.

I can think of only two occasions since the kids have been picking out their own clothes that I've had to say the latter and that was because of a swimsuit that would have fit Barbie and a shirt that had something on it that would get my kid beat up in most of the places he goes. In both cases, we talked about why they weren't good fashion choices. And in both cases, after some time had passed, both kids thanked me for helping them avoid embarrassment and, maybe, a black eye.

My kids both have their own unique sense of style. Maybe it's because they're not with 20 other kids their own age everyday. Maybe it's because we very rarely shop at the chain stores. Goodwill and resale stores are our haunts. The kids have gotten really good at spotting terrific buys like designer or homemade clothes that have been gently worn and well cared for. Now that we're drifting into the SCA (Society for Creative Anachronism), it's even more important that we get a big bang for our fashion bucks. I mean, it's not cheap to dress like a 13th century noble or even a peasant. (Have you seen the price of wimples nowadays? Unreal! And don't even get me started on aumonieres.)

So as I sit here at 10 in the morning, with my favorite old stained t-shirt, mismatched wool socks and stretched out sweatpants on, I feel bad for all the kids who are sitting in a classroom somewhere in clothes they don't want to wear, learning subjects that someone else thinks are important to them, at an hour when most of them would be much happier in bed. I contrast this with my kids, both of whom are wearing some of their favorite clothes. They're studying history this morning with a showing of A Connecticut Yankee In King Arthur's Court.

Earlier, Daughter did two pages of multiplication her way. The directions said: Make arrays of boxes to illustrate these multiplication problems. She got some graph paper and made the arrays but she didn't make boxes. Instead, she used hearts, flowers, Pikachu faces and elephant heads. She really enjoyed doing it and got the math right, too. Son researched armor online to figure out what kind of helmet he wants to get for youth fighting, which meant that he had to think about which period his SCA personna is going to come from, which meant that he had to learn something about the whole spectrum of the Middle Ages.

Tomorrow, we're all going to archery practice, even the geek who is still having trouble dealing with the lack of computers in the Middle Ages. He's toying with the idea of having his personna be an inventor. (Did they even have geeks in the Middle Ages? Was Da Vinci a geek? I wouldn't be surprised.) Much history will be learned, I'm sure, along with social skills, geometry and math. (None of that "I shot an arrow into the air" stuff with the SCA. If you shoot an arrow, you'd better know where it's headed or the marshal will cut your mead ration.)

My kids are willing to bow to dress rules because they want to participate in the SCA, because they understand that it's necessary to create the world of the Middle Ages (the best parts of it anyway, as the SCA says). They get to try on different personnas with the different outfits they wear. I wonder what would happen if schooled kids could go to school in costumes from different historical periods? Who knows, maybe it would boost history test scores. Or maybe they'd just get laughed at. Or, if they were studying the 1960's, they might get their skirts measured.

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Pathology

2007-09-14T10:09:00.000-04:00

There are crossroads in life where we choose a path and the impact is felt throughout the rest of our life, even years later. Unknowingly, I reached one of these important crossroads many years ago, and made the wrong choice. In the blink of an eye, I chose to take a road that seemed logical and promising, but turned out to be a dead end. If only I had realized how my choice would trap me in a situation with a huge potential for tragedy.

I was at a weekend convention for foster and adoptive parents. There were several courses that would help me earn college credits and fulfill the licensing requirements for the state. There were other workshops that had no credits, but some of them looked interesting. They covered everything from recipes for picky preschoolers to how to deal with out-of-control teenagers to relaxation exercises. The strangest workshop of all was How to Be a Cowboy, which was led by a therapist who was also a comedian. Apparently, learning to rope and yodel and twirl a toy sixgun was relaxing and therapeutic for some parents.

I was really attracted to the cowboy workshop, the relaxation exercises and the recipe class, but they didn't have much relevance to foster parenting, so with reluctance, I turned them down. Instead I opted for a workshop called How to Integrate School and Home. In retrospect, there probably wasn't a more inappropriate class I could have taken, considering my lifelong distrust of, dislike for and disillusionment with the public education system in this country. However, at the time I had five foster children and, in Maine at least, they had to attend school.

So off I went to listen to some childless guy drone on about how important it is to get foster children right back into school, the day after the social worker drops them off at your home after plucking them out of their birth family's home or a previous foster home that didn't work out. Yeah, that makes sense. You wouldn't want to give them time to bond with their new family, because then they'd feel even worse when they're plucked out of that home and sent to another one with no warning a few months down the road. (You can ask me why I'm no longer a foster parent, but you'd better clear your appointment book first. It'll take a while.)

I got my credits but I wasted fifty perfectly good minutes that could have been spent on schmoozing with other foster parents who knew more than all of the presenters there or drinking coffee and eating those terribly fattening - but delicious - little Danishes that they always have at these events. I was depressed and tired on the two and a half hour drive home, and it felt like years since I'd seen my kids. It must have seemed that way to the kids too, because all five of them jumped on me when I walked through the door and made it obvious that they thought I was a good enough foster mom even without all those workshops, so I figured that no harm was done.

Yesterday though, I realized that a great deal of harm was done and a great deal of trouble came about, because I had opted for that stupid seminar about education instead of one of the other ones. I was sitting out on the deck, pondering, as I so often do in the afternoon especially when I'm drinking my special cranberry drink, when I heard hoofbeats and Son's cat bristled and ran up a nearby maple tree. There in the field, was a horse, whinnying, tossing its head and grazing on our grass. It was Deva, our neighbor Charlene's two year old filly.

Now, Deva's mother, Snapper, was a rescue who seemed fine until one day on a trail ride, she decided to throw Charlene off and stomp all over her. Charlene spent days in the hospital and hasn't ridden since. She kept Snapper long enough to wean the baby, Deva, but then gave Snapper back to the rescue farm she'd gotten her from. From time to time, she'd report to us on Deva's progress. According to Charlene, Deva was a whole 'nother kind of horse from her mother.

I took this with a box of salt, because I've been around horses all my life. My grandfather trained them and raced them at harness tracks. We had four horses when I was a kid. I worked at a racetrack in RI, walking horses, mucking out stalls and exercising them. (I was a lot lighter then, needless to say.) I've been bitten, kicked, stepped on, leaned on until my eyes bulged, thrown and run over by horses and they're not my favorite animal. To me, they're like huge cats without any of the good points that cats have. You have to woo them to get them to "like you" and even then, they can turn on you in a heartbeat. Give me a dog any day.

So when Son, who is a fool for horses and has a way with them, couldn't get Deva to take a carrot from his hand or let him put a leash on her halter, I took it as a bad sign. Even my brother, who is an old hossman and former racehorse owner couldn't get her to let him touch her. As soon as either one of them put a hand on her, she'd shy away, toss her head and flare her nostrils. Finally, she turned around and kicked at Son and that was enough for me. I told him to leave her be until Charlene came home. We'd called her, but she was out.

The day wore on and it started to get dark, and the whole horse in the yard thing was starting to get old. She had chased two of the cats already and we couldn't let the dog out without a leash and even then, she charged at us. I decided that we needed to get rid of this horse, so I walked outside and yelled at her to go home. (This worked with coyotes and - once - with a bear.) She just looked at me and went back to grazing.

I yelled louder and started walking toward her and she stopped grazing and started walking toward me. Her nostrils were flaring again and she was snorting. Not a good sign. I went back into the house and the geek decided to blow the horn in his car at her, but that just made her run around in circles like a circus horse on amphetamines, so he stopped before she broke a leg or crashed into the car. There was nothing to do but wait for Charlene to rescue us.

She showed up just after ten, but the horse was nowhere to be found. Apparently sometime after dark, she'd gone back to her barn as horses are so often wont to do. As the geek and I sat there going over the events of the day, it hit me. If I had only taken that danged How to Be a Cowboy course! I could have swaggered over (cowboys always swagger over to horses), roped her and hogtied her or whatever it is cowboys do to wild horses! (My brother says they shoot them, but that can't be right, can it?) I mean, would Hopalong Cassidy or Roy Rogers (or even Gabby Hayes) put up with being trapped in their ranch house by a filly? I don't think so.

So, gentle readers, let this be a lesson to you. If you find yourself faced with a choice between a course of action that will teach you something that really applies to your life, and another course of action that is totally frivolous but fun, opt for the road to fun and frivolity. I can almost guarantee that somewhere down the road of life, the frivolous, fun information will come in handy. And I can also say with firm belief, that the stuff we think we need to learn from experts is very often stuff that we already know, but think we need an expert to validate.

When it comes to raising our children, we're the experts. Not the school system or the people with more degrees than you've had days with your kid or the talk-show hosts who have other people take care of their kids. Don't waste your time on listening to experts. Spend it learning what you really need to know, like roping wild horses and cooking food your kids will like and relaxing. If you like, I can send you the recipe for my cranberry drink. It's low calorie, gets rid of bloating and is good for bladder infections. And if you add half a shot of cranberry flavored vodka, it's very, very relaxing. Now, that's the kind of information parents should get college credit for learning, don't you think?

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I Always Get a Room With a View

2007-09-11T23:27:00.000-04:00

There is absolutely no truth to the rumor that seasoned travelers, when they hear that I'm setting off on vacation, cancel their hotel reservations even if they lose their nonrefundable deposits. Well, almost no truth, although I admit that I have very bad hotel karma. However, that didn't stop Daughter and I from setting off on vacation last Sunday. We thought of it on Friday, but so as not to upset Geekdaddy and Son, we slid into the subject and moved our trip to Sunday to give them time to get used to the idea that they'd be ~~feeding the dog~~ ~~letting cats in and out~~ ~~washing dishes~~ ~~finding their own wallets,watches,keys,socks~~ getting some prime male bonding time while we were gone.

We spent the time swimming, dipping into the fleshpots of Bangor and sipping from the slippers of ... hmm ... the only famous Bangorites (Bangorians? Bangoroons?) I can think of are Paul Bunyan and Stephen King and ain't no way I'm sipping anything from lumberjack boots or the footwear of the world's creepiest (and best) horror writer. (And, incidentally, a man who - with his wife, Tabitha King - has donated more money to Bangor and Maine and who knows what all else than oil companies have donated to the Republicans. S'truth.) If Stephen Hawking was from Bangor, now, I might consider it. But I digress.

My main objective was to give Daughter a chance to sample the new pool at a Bangor motel where I could pay for our stay with reward points we earned while vacationing last summer. My secondary objective was to get away from the rigors of homeschooling, which we started last Wednesday. We tend to peak early and need frequent breaks to protect our brains from overheating. It's science. You could look it up. (Well, Socrates believed it and far be it from me to argue with a dead philosopher. What's the point?) We checked into the *Notel* Motel (not its real name) and immediately hit a snag. The microfridge I had specifically requested in my online reservation was lacking two things: a microwave oven and a fridge.

I called the office and they said they'd send a fridge right down (conjuring mental images of a small fridge, toddling down the hallway by itself, examining room numbers), but the microwave ovens were all taken. This put a big crimp in our plan to eat frozen dinners and re-heatable junk food to save money and pig out during our stay. But we're willows. We can bend. So we did and while we were bending, we put on our swimsuits and ankled over to the new pool. Hoo boy, is it nice!

It's only 5 ft deep at the deepest end and starts out at 3 ft, so Daughter, who's 4 and a half ft tall, can go almost to the end without having to tread water. And, for ol' sea hags like myself, there's a really neat seat built into the deep end, with a row of jets that feel really good on my aging vertebrae and back muscles, so I can loll and hum and pretend that I'm luring mariners to their doom. (Kind of like a low-rent hot tub but not hot sort of thing.)

Daughter swam and I lolled until we got hungry, then we went over to the restaurant across the parking lot and had their special: buy one appetizer, get one free. With water to drink, the whole deal came to less than ten dollars, which is less than we would have spent at McDonald's. Plus, we had half of each appetizer left over to take back to the room for breakfast, which just proves that life can be good and cheap at the same time. We were pleasantly surprised to find that the staff had found a microwave oven and installed it in our room while we'd been at dinner, so life got even better.

If we could have checked out that night, it would have been a perfect trip. However, we were booked for another night and woke up in the morning, ate our nachos from the night before, put on our swimsuits and went happily over to the pool, only to find that it was closed due to mechanical problems. The desk clerk told us that a pump had broken, but assured us that we could use the pool at the motel across the road. This was not an attractive option to me, dressed as I was in a swimsuit and a terrycloth robe, but one look at Daughter's disappointed face and I forced a smile and we went back for the car keys.

The pool across the road had no seat, no row of jets and way too much chlorine for my rosacea to handle. An elderly couple walked in right after we did and proceeded to have a heated argument on the pool steps, and the echoes of it gave me an instant headache and frightened Daughter, who prefers to be the one making the noise if there's noise to be made, thankyouveddymuch. We left and drove in soggy silence back to our room.

"This has to be the worst trip ever," Daughter pouted, as we changed into dry clothes.

"No," I assured her, "This isn't the worst trip ever. The worst trip ever is probably one of the trips I've taken during the last 50 years."

"What's worse than having the pool closed?" Daughter wanted to know.

"Well," I answered, without hesitation. "You were three, so you may not remember the time Dad offered to watch you and your brothers and the three foster kids we had at the time. I was exhausted and on the verge of a breakdown if I didn't get some peace and quiet, so I checked into a small seaside motel in the off-season, took a nice hot bath and then opened the curtains so I could sit there and admire the view of the ocean. It was gorgeous and I opened the window to lean out and smell the salt and listen to the soft swishing sound of the waves breaking on the sand. That's when the bagpipers broke into several different songs and I almost fell out of the window. There was a convention of them and they were milling around under my window, practicing for a competition. It took about a week for my nerves to recover and I still tend to shy away from plaid shirts."

Daughter looked skeptical, something she does often and well.

"You're making that up," she said, "I don't believe you. But what else happened that was worse than no pool?"

"Well, once your uncle and I went to a chalet-type motel in VT, where there were wooden floors. We got a ground floor room and settled into our beds to read and a crowd of square dancers began to dance in the room above our heads. The floor shook so much that dust fell down on us and we had to shout to hear each other. We left a couple hours later and went to another motel where there was only one vacancy, which we felt lucky to get, because all of the other motels we called were full. A couple hours later, we didn't feel so lucky when a tractor trailer truck parked under our bathroom window and the driver hopped out, left the truck running and went into his room for the night. Between the diesel fumes and the noise, we got almost no sleep. We called the desk clerk, but he said there was nothing he could do, because there was no place else for the truck to park and the driver was one of his best customers. So we closed the windows and roasted all night."

"But that was only one night," Daughter said, "That's not as big a deal as not having a pool. We did come here to swim, didn't we?"

"Well, I went to those motels to relax and that didn't happen. I went to another motel to work on some writing and a motorcycle club showed up, rented all the other rooms and drank and fought into the wee hours in the parking lot under my window. Then there was the time we had that room in Brattleboro, remember? The one where the person in the room over us kept pacing back and forth all night until finally the bathroom fan light fixture fell into the sink and broke at 2 in the morning? That was a pretty lousy motel stay."

"I remember that," said Daughter, "So the next night we moved to that expensive motel and they were running the fans to dry out the room next to us where the rain had leaked in and the place was full of drug agents and their dogs. Remember the dog that kept sniffing your suitcase when we checked in? And I laughed and the agents all looked at us funny. That was weird."

"Yeah, you could almost call it an arresting experience," I said, "It was lucky for us that I was able to show the agent that it was my hemp energy bar that was attracting the dog's attention. Who knew it would have that effect on drug-sniffing dogs? And then every time we left the room, we had agents looking at us suspiciously. That was certainly not what I'd call a relaxing vacation."

"But at least we had a pool to swim in. We can't even go home and swim, because it's raining and cold outside."

She was right. It was raining and cold and there was nothing to do but make the best of it, so we put our heads together and came up with a plan. When I suggested that we do something totally out of character - something that we'd never do ordinarily - Daughter had a brainstorm. An hour later, we were tucked up in our respective beds, eating puff pastry, drinking mocha lattes and reading trashy 'bloids, something we've never done in our lives.

As we compared notes on who was anorectic - waving our pastries to emphasize our points - and who was too fat - between swigs of our heavily sugared lattes - we agreed that this was one of the best motel stays we've ever had. Who knew that dissing the rich and famous-just-for-being-famous could be so much fun. I doubt we'll do it again, but for one night, it sure beat another wheezy chorus of "Amazing Grace" or diesel fumes or bikers rioting.

And I didn't even get to the part of my motel stays where the nudists were holding a convention and ended up in the pool at the same time that I did or the time that the folks in the next room were so loudly appreciative of each other that they broke the bed and she threw him out in the hall without his clothes, but with his condom still in place. Reading about Brit's bloopers is one thing, but there are some things I'd blush to share with Daughter until she's old enough to rent a motel room, herself. On the other hand, if she inherits my karma, she'll find out for herself.

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Don't Blow Your Nose on Henry's Wife

2007-09-06T10:31:00.000-04:00

Well, our first official day of somewhat structured learning was yesterday and it was all we'd planned and more. It included multiplication, Ancient History, high dudgeon, writing, a wedding, gastritis, and putting a fingertip back together.

Like the grasshoppers we are, we frittered away our summer, lounging on the deck, wandering through the fields of Black-Eyed Susans and Ox-Eye Daisies and not giving much thought to what we were going to do this fall. Then we had a night where the pellet stove went on because it dipped into the thirties and my momometer went off. (That's the gauge that measures how good a job I'm doing at helping my kids grow up happy and competent to handle life now and in the future.) Here it was September 1st and we didn't have a plan.

We brainstormed and the kids came up with what they wanted to work on with (cover your eyes, Radical Unschoolers) workbooks or books. I'll be honest, if left to their own devices like they have been in the past, my kids would opt for days full of playing video games, drawing, watching tv and videos, eating junk food, arguing with each other and me and asking me to buy them things. However, we tried that for the best part of two years and it just doesn't work for us. They weren't happy and neither was I.

Son finally realized that it wasn't working for him and we had a conversation about how he could learn what he wants to learn to get where he wants to go without "going over to the Dark Side" of doing school at home. He needs lots of free time for art, but he's found out that math and writing are also necessary if he's going to go to Art College, make a life around art by selling it and interact with other people in socially accepted ways or as he says, without looking like a complete jerk. We found Painless Writing and The Only Math Book You'll Ever Need, used and in a bargain bin respectively, and he was good to go.

Daughter, on the other hand, isn't into learning from books. She's going to be a famous fashion designer/elephant rehabilitator/artist/hair stylist/mother of nine, so why would she need to learn anything from books? She's already watched Animal Planet for years, can put her hair in a ponytail herself, draws constantly and knows where babies come from, so what's to learn?

The girl has a point. I can't think of anyone else who's watched more episodes of Growing Up (she's watched the elephant one ten times), but I think a little more of an education wouldn't hurt. Hey, she can use it to teach those nine grandkids she's going to present me with. (Aaargh!) Even her sharp brain needs exercise and there's nothing better for that than math. (Well, maybe crossword puzzles, which is my favorite exercise and I have the rumpus to prove it.)

She embarked on the first two pages of Spectrum's Easy (of course) Multiplication Facts with much muttering and mumbling and many black looks in my direction. Five minutes later, she was done and pronouncing it "easy-peasy" and baby stuff, so I asked her if she wanted to do another page or stop and look at our history book or write something. She just kept going and did three more pages, stopping when she got to the 3 tables.

"I hate 3's," she announced, shutting the book, "They're so uneven."

Can't argue with that, so we segued onto the beginning of civilizations. Daughter caught right on to the whole BC/AD thing, which always puzzled me. I mean, how can time go backward, I used to wonder when I looked at birth and death dates for someone born in BC. I couldn't help but get this mental picture of an elderly person morphing into a baby. It was the bugbear of third grade for me. Not so for Daughter.

"Oh, you just go backward from when Jesus is born and then you go forward past it. But what if you're an atheist? Then what?"

That brought us to the alternative CE and BCE - Common Era and Before the Common Era - which is my preferred method of dating time and she was fine with that too. As a matter of fact, she said she'd use it and kept substituting it in the book every time we ran across BC or AD. We went over how people had begun to harvest grasses, then started planting them and returning to the same stands of grass annually and that this is how villages and cities and civilization started. Then we read about how women could only carry one baby when they were nomads, so they had to leave second babies behind or even kill them and this was NOT OKAY with my daughter.

All through our readings on Jericho, Catal Huyuk, early religious beliefs, and the rise of Sumer, she fumed and fussed about those moms who ditched their bibbits, as she put it. She would have carried both babies somehow. She would have made a little sled and pulled it behind her. And, she wanted to know, where the heck was the dad in all this? Why didn't he carry one of the babies? No amount of explaining about the life of a nomad family could mollify her. It's at times like this that I wonder if there's something to that whole past life thing and maybe she used to be Carry Nation or Queen Victoria or one of the more irascible Hindu goddesses with more arms than patience.

Anyhow, we finished and went searching on the net for ragdoll patterns. Daughter is up to her poke bonnet in the American Girl series of books and wanted to try to make a cloth doll. We found a pattern, but it was too complicated, and then we stumbled onto handkerchief dolls. This she could do and she produced one and had its face and dress decorated with pastels before you could say "Little House on the Prairie".

That's how we came to have a wedding on our first day of Not Back to School. Henry, Daughter's favorite stuffed toy, is a white elephant made very simply out of organic cotton. Five minutes after Rose, the handkerchief doll came into being, Henry was asking her for her hand, er, hem in marriage. (She doesn't have hands really, just arms.) Anyhow, Daughter said I was matron of honor and she was flower girl and justice of the peace and they got married. During the reception, a low-key event with rice milk and rice cakes for refreshment, because of my gastritis attack (probably brought on by a stomach bug and it's getting better, but I'm sticking to bland food until I'm sure it's gone) their daughter, Valentine, another handkerchief doll, was born. Henry's pretty fly for an elephant, no?

Daughter was feeling really crafty, in a good way, so she decided to make some more dolls and that's when things erupted into full-fledged chaos. I was reading Don't Know Much About Mythology and the Geek was reading a union flyer when an unearthly shriek (are shrieks ever earthly, I wonder?) tore through the house, Daughter came flying downstairs, and ran into the bathroom, holding her hand and yelling that her finger was going to fall off because she'd cut it with the scissors. Daughter is apt to get a tad hysterical over every little thing, so I wasn't concerned that her finger was going to fall off until I went into the bathroom.

One look at the amount of blood in the sink and the ashen face and almost gray lips of my youngest and I was ready to shriek, myself. However, mothers are not allowed to shriek in a crisis, so I told her these things always look worse than they are, looked at the finger and told Geekdaddy to get the car keys and a blanket to wrap Daughter in. I changed from pjs to real clothes and we headed for the ER.

It was a good slice and I knew it'd need a butterfly bandage on it, if not stitches, something I didn't want to contemplate with an hysterical 10 yr old. We were lucky and got in touch with her pediatrician's practice, where one of our favorite Nurse Practitioners, Anne, took us in right away and basically superglued the thing shut with something called Dermabond. This is a wonderful thing, in my book. Next time your kid needs stitches, ask if Dermabond is available.

So that was our first day of Not Back to School. This Saturday, we're going to go to an SCA event, where we'll see if the kids have enough interest to make it necessary for me to start wearing a dress for the first time since I married the geek. I'm just not into dressing up and play-acting, but if they really want to, I'll go along with the wheeze. I like the camaraderie and intentional community aspect of it, but I just hate costumes and as the geek says about me, I'm not one to suspend disbelief for longer than it takes to balance my checkbook.

Henry and Rose will probably have more children and although Daughter says that she's never picking up a pair of scissors again, I doubt it. After all, without scissors she'll never be able to have that career as a hair stylist or fashion designer, so I guess she'd better hit the books for a little while longer. I can't wait to see what our second week of living and learning through the fall of 2007 is like.

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More Than an Art Lesson

2007-09-01T08:27:00.000-04:00

My kids are both artists. Son has already sold a portrait in colored pencil. Daughter spends about half her waking hours drawing little people and creatures and making up stories about them. I'm not an artist. As the old saying goes, I can't even draw water. Words are my art form and I use them the way my kids use shapes and lines. However, I'm a great audience and enthusiastic supporter of their art.

That's how we all wound up at an art class in an old building over a craft shop this week. Son was sitting in on the class to see if it was advanced enough for him. Daughter was there to see if it was too advanced for her. I was there to lend support - moral or otherwise - if either of them needed it. Daughter did.

We'd no more than sat down when the instructor introduced herself, whipped some paper and pencils down in front of everyone, taped a piece of paper to her easel and proceeded to draw a face. First, she drew a vertical line through the middle of the paper. Then she drew four horizontal lines across the vertical line at regular intervals. By the time she started to draw two ovals for eyes, Daughter was frustrated, red-faced and lost and we had answered the "is it too advanced" question. She pushed her paper away and said, "I'm not doing this."

However, both kids had agreed to stay for the whole class when they asked me if they could try this class, so I moved over next to her and pushed her paper back in front of her. "You can do just your best," I said, "It doesn't have to be perfect."

But for Daughter, it does have to be perfect, which is why she erases until there are holes in the paper sometimes.

"I'm not doing it," she said again, "It's too hard and I can't do it like the other kids."

Since the other kids were all at least two years older than her, that wasn't surprising.

"Just do your best to follow the directions," I said, "I'll help you."

Her look could have curdled milk.

"Mom, you're a horrible artist. I have to help you draw. Please don't embarrass me. Let's just leave."

I wasn't leaving. The teacher, Kate, took pity on us at that point and came over and helped Daughter draw the lines. Daughter cooperated, albeit with bad grace, and Kate told her that the class wasn't really for beginning artists.

"I'm not a beginner," Daughter said, "I've been drawing for years. I just don't draw your way."

"Well," Kate said, "If you want to get better at art, you might want to try to follow this method of drawing a face. Even great artists have to learn the basics."

Daughter bent her head over her paper, but I could see a mulish glint in her eye and knew that she wasn't buying this line of reasoning. Reasoning isn't something she's keen on anyway. Like a lot of very creative, sensitive little girls, she operates on feeling and impulse much more than on reason. I smiled at her, encouragingly, as Kate went back to the easel and continued the lesson.

Daughter did stay for the whole lesson, but somewhere around the nose, she thumped her hand on the table and turned her paper over. As Son and the other four kids chewed their lips, frowned in concentration and tried earnestly to reproduce the face the teacher was drawing, Daughter doodled. At first, her face was drawn into an angry scowl. She huffed a few times, sighed and tapped her feet. But gradually, as her paper filled with little creatures and girls and words, her face relaxed. By the time she had almost filled the sheet, she was smiling to herself and humming.

When Kate was done drawing the face at the easel, she went around to everyone and commented on their drawing. When she got to Daughter, Daughter looked up with a defiant look, as if daring her to take her to task for doodling.

"Ah," Kate said, "You're doodling. I love to doodle. Can I see what you've done?"

Daughter passed the paper over to Kate, sat back and folded her arms.

"What a gift you have for drawing!" Kate said. "Your little creatures are so alive! They look like they could jump right off the page! You need to keep drawing like this and expressing yourself. You're a very good artist with a unique talent."

Daughter looked startled and then she grinned at Kate.

"I'm sorry I didn't do the face," she said, "It was just too hard."

"It was too advanced for you right now," Kate said, "Maybe when you're older, you'll want to try it again. But for right now, just keep doing what you're doing. You're fine just the way you are."

Son decided the art class wasn't advanced enough, so he's opting for Kate's adult painting class. Maybe Daughter will want to take the kid's clay sculpture class someone told me about, because she's even better at clay sculpting than she is at drawing. We're looking into it. With her, everything depends on the instructor. It takes a special person to see through the defiant, arrogant-appearing surface to the little girl underneath who is always afraid that she's not measuring up.

That's why learning at home is such a good fit for her. Unlike her last teacher, I don't think that learning under pressure is something everyone has to master, especially when they're in second grade. Nor do I think that there's only one way to learn or that every kid should learn the same things at the same age. Daughter may never learn to draw a face using vertical and horizontal lines to anchor the features. She may not make her living with art. She may decide to run a daycare, something she talks about a lot.

Whatever she does, she'll do it with a unique touch and bring to it something that no one else can. Speaking of which, the photo at the beginning of this post is what she drew during the art class. Some of the little creatures are labeled "moing moings". They're something like rabbits and people get upset with them a lot. They're not bad, Daughter says. It's just that they always have to do things their way and sometimes that gets them into trouble, but they don't mean to cause trouble for other people. She says they're really lovable and all they want is for people to let them be themselves. Don't we all?

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Driving in the Deep End

2007-08-24T09:45:00.000-04:00

A few years ago, my brother told me that I wouldn't know what worrying was until I had a kid who was driving. What a worry-wort! Worrying because your kid is starting to drive is like... Well, like... Okay, it's like no other worrying you've ever done is what it's like. Frenziedly panic-stricken doesn't even begin to cover it. Biting your nails to the elbow is a pale shadow of what you do when your 17 yr old son drives off for the first time with the driving instructor. And when you find out that they're not going to stay in the almost-empty parking lot, but are going to go out into an actual neighborhood with actual cars and pedestrians and squirrels running across the road every ten feet! Well, it just lends new meaning to the phrase "crash course", if you ask me. He did it, though, without hitting anything. The only complaint the instructor had was that he drove too slowly.

"The speed limit is 25 mph," the instructor, Joe, said, "But I couldn't get him to go over 20."

"20!" What the hell was he thinking letting him drive that fast in a residential zone? The kid has never driven faster than 15 and that was in our laneway with an old pickup truck, taking out the trash cans. He could have killed someone! Doesn't this jerk know that the speed limit is only the top speed that you can go - not an absolute number that you have to shoot for? As a matter of fact, I think this world would be a much better place if everyone would make an effort to go five miles under the speed limit, especially with my kid on the road.

How different it was when I got my permit and then my license 40 years ago. For one thing, I already knew how to drive. My brother, Johnny, who was ten years older than me, came up with an old 55 Chevy for my younger brother and me to drive on our private road, which was almost a mile long. We were 10 and 8 at the time and had to sit on several pillows and have blocks on the pedals (and there was a clutch pedal too).

If I remember correctly, there was a problem with the gas tank being rusted out, so my resourceful but slightly crazy brother installed a two-gallon can under the hood, and we filled the can with gas by siphoning some from our mother's car. This became problematic when we drove up onto rocks in a field and almost tipped the car over, which spilled gas all over the motor and caused a small fire, which we put out with sand. We were resourceful little brats.

We drove that car up and down the driveway to catch the school bus, through fields and into the woods on old trails and had a heck of a time. Apparently no one worried that we'd kill ourselves, although we often came close to it. I guess the old saying, "What doesn't kill me makes me strong" about covers the experience. It was good practice for my first official driving experience, which occurred when I was 16 and driving with a permit.

In those days, driver's training was just class-time in the school cafeteria, then you got your permit and then you started driving around with a white-knuckled parent. Or, in my case, with your husband-to-be who happened to hunt deer at night for a living, which was illegal. It was a perfect match. He needed a driver so he could shoot out the window and I needed driving practice so I could pass my driving test and get my license. I don't know what kind of experience my friends got driving around the supermarket parking lot with their parents, learning to parallel park in their driveways, and inching carefully along the curb on housing estates, but I got an intensive driving course while my mother was working third shift. (This has a lot to do with why I dropped out of school halfway through my junior year.)

I learned how to corner on dirt roads while going fast enough to elude the game wardens, who drove those old Army surplus jeeps that tip easily. Lenny's 58 Ford cornered way better than they did at 55 mph. I learned to whip into a field, grab the flashlight with one hand and shine it out over the roof, steering with my knees, while shifting into reverse with the other hand so as to be ready just in case a warden showed up. It helped that I was young and foolish and believed Lenny when he told me that the wardens wouldn't do anything to me because of my age. (After 2 years of marriage, I was a lot smarter and left him and our life of crime behind forever.)

When I went for my driver's test, I aced everything except for parallel parking. Even stopping halfway up a steep hill and having to use the clutch to keep the car from rolling back didn't bother me. (I had perfected that little trick while hiding from the wardens halfway up a dune in the Desert of RI.) However, one rarely has to parallel park to shoot deer in fields, so parallel parking plumb evaded me. Luckily for me, I had an examiner who didn't think that should keep me from passing my test and I got my license. To this day, I avoid parallel parking and would rather spend an hour driving around the block to look for a place I can just pull into.

My son is going to do parallel parking when he drives around the downtown area on Sunday during the Folk Festival which attracts thousands of people, most of whom have cars. I've been waking up at night after nightmares of him being crushed by a tour bus filled with Zydeco musicians or Tuvan throat singers or something. Tonight, he's driving down the main street to a busy and poorly laid-out neighboring town where he'll be making left turns against traffic. On Saturday, he'll be driving around the mall area and practicing changing lanes.

I think it's all too much, too soon, this driving on the road before you really have the feel of driving off the road in a safe area. I think I'll talk to his instructor about revamping the lessons and taking it a little easier with our precious teenagers. Maybe, since Maine is so big on hunting, they could combine driver's ed with firearm safety and send the kids out to get a deer and have the wardens chase them to tag it. The ones who make it home without getting "tagged" get their permits and the other ones go out for more practice. It would definitely be safer than the way they're doing it now.

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The Week That Was

2007-08-19T14:15:00.000-04:00

Sometimes I just want to lie down on the floor, pound my fist on it and laugh hysterically. Or cry hysterically. Or both. This week has been like that. A few nights ago, in his neverending quest to have the most bizarre injury in the annals of Maine, Geekdaddy managed to get bitten by - we think - a small brown spider when he put his hand on the cellar door. (This is the same cellar door that the EMT's took him out through on a stretcher a few weeks ago, when he sprained his knee.)

I found a spider on the door and captured it in a glass, but I didn't know if it was the spider that bit him. It was the only insect I could find in that area. We looked it up and it looked like a Brown Widow. He called the ER and they said to come in if it gets swollen or painful or there's necrotizing tissue around it. That didn't sound too encouraging. I found a number for a place in NH that answers questions about spider bites. He called them and they said there's never been a confirmed Brown Recluse bite in Maine and they didn't know from Brown Widows. They gave him the same advice as the ER folks.

I told him he should have told them that he's the guy who got bitten by a cat and had to have rabies shots. He's the guy who tried to build a playhouse and got hit on the head with a board and had to have his eight yr old kid call 911 so he could be treated for concussion. He's the guy who got his hand smashed in a door by a two year old and then had to get the two year old to open the door so that he could get his hand out, because he was in too much pain. And let's not forget that he's also the guy who "died" during his colonoscopy (his heart stopped) and then we had a rollover accident on the way home and got sent back to the same hospital.

While I was looking things up and worrying my head off, he medicated himself with his standard treatment for trauma: two benadryl capsules and a couple of light beers. Twenty minutes later, he was snoring and I was checking his hand with a penlight every half hour. He woke up fresh as a daisy and I came to in my chair, muzzy-headed, sticky-eyed and haggard looking. Geeks are very resilient, which is a good thing.

I'd like to say that the rest of the week was without incident, but I can't. Besides taking Son to driver's training three days a week, I've been very busy doing some strange things. Strange even for me, that is. Last Monday, for instance, my late son's birth mother and I finally met.

It was exhausting emotionally for both of us, but it was necessary and I think it was a good thing. Mike would have been happy to know that both of his mothers managed to find common ground and some kind of closure to one of the diciest relationships two women can have. I gave her some of his ashes and she gave me a picture of him when he was hours old, and a lot of information about his birth family and her other kids.

The next day, we signed the papers to list our house with another realtor and yesterday, we had a windstorm that blew a branch onto the power lines and caught on fire. I was driving home from town and looking for meteors, when I saw a burning bush. Unlike Moses, I didn't talk to it or listen for edicts, I just raced home and told the geek to call the power company. The power company said we should call the fire department, so we did. Then we grabbed a flashlight and walked up to the end of the driveway, but not too close to the wires.

We heard sirens in the distance, but it sounded like the trucks went right past our road. A short while later, we heard sirens coming back and then they stopped at the end of our road, which is a half mile down from our driveway. We could hear the radios and walkie-talkies, but then the trucks started up again and left. We were baffled, so the geek called 911 again.

They told him that the firefighters had gone to the residence and the danger was over. This was news to us, because the fire wasn't at our residence and no firefighters had showed up anywhere near our residence. The geek relayed this to the 911 dispatcher, who patched him into the fire department dispatcher, who said that the trucks had gone to the beginning of our "private" road and then stopped. This is interesting, because our road isn't private. It's a discontinued town road, which means that the town still owns it, but they don't maintain it.

Obviously, come Monday morning, we need to talk to our selectpeople about this, because we would have been in deep trouble if it had been our house burning instead of a maple tree. As it happened, the fire put itself out, so everything was okay, except that we still didn't have electricity until the power company guys showed up, cut the power to our road, cut the limb and turned the power back on down the road. This, gentle reader, is why we have a huge generator that runs off a huge tank of propane gas. Apparently, we should also consider a high-pressure hose or two to cover us until we get the private/public road issue sorted out.

I just looked at the calendar for this week and there's something written on every page. Three days of driver's ed classes for Son and then road-lessons on Thursday and Friday. We have books due at the library on Monday, art and theater lessons to look into in a neighboring town for Daughter. The car's front end is making a loud squeaking noise again and it's due for its last free maintenance before its warranty runs out at 100,000 miles.

I'd really like to make it to the ocean again before summer is over and two of the cats and the dog all need their annual checkups and shots before the end of the month, which is fast approaching. We have no idea whether the house will sell or not, so we have to simultaneously plan to move/stay. The geek has no problem with that, because he can hold two completely opposite thoughts in his mind and believe in both of them, but I'm not quite that flexible.

I'm just hoping that we get through a week without anything weird happening, or at least, with only a couple of weird things happening. Well, okay, I'll settle for a week where we don't have to call 911. As we all know, I'm a willow. I can bend. But there's a limit.

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Frugal is the New Cheap

2007-08-14T08:35:00.000-04:00

My late father was a cheapskate. He was also way ahead of his time, because he practiced dumpster-diving before there were actually dumpsters. Every Saturday, we'd go to the local dump and scavenge for goodies. He'd stand there in his cheap suit (he always wore suits, a white shirt and a tie) and point out what he wanted us to get. Like little otters-slash-retrievers, we'd dive into the pile and come up with three-legged chairs, slightly moldy couch cushions, handle-less tools and pieces of bent chicken wire. He'd throw it into the back of our Nash Rambler station wagon, bring it home and fix it up so that we could use it.

Unfortunately, he wasn't very handy, so our house always looked like it was decorated by a manic bag lady. Not only did the couch cushions sag, they also produced mushrooms when the roof leaked. Eating was like an Olympic event - and don't forget, we didn't have steroids - because it took superhuman skill to balance on the tottering chairs and get food onto the bent forks and spoons. Luckily for us, my mother wasn't a very good cook and we never had a lot of money for groceries, so we ate a lot of sandwiches and finger food.

However, one November, my father announced that we were going to have Indian Pudding for Thanksgiving dinner dessert and he produced a very dented can of the stuff that he had found when he'd stopped by the dump on his way home from work. The can bulged, suspiciously, but he said that wouldn't matter. He was wrong. It mattered enough to almost put us all into the hospital. We were so sick that we all lay around on the floor, each with our own little basin or bowl, for two days. Even after that, we tottered around weakly all through our Thanksgiving vacation from school and my father called in sick for three days. Because he didn't get paid if he didn't work, he lost three day's pay, which was certainly more than the cost of a can of Indian pudding.To me, this is a very good illustration of the difference between being frugal and being cheap to the point that it impinges on your quality of life. It's okay to be a cheapskate in some areas, but risking death to save fifty-nine cents isn't cheap, it's mental illness.

However, with gas prices up, food prices up, our taxes more than double what they were when we bought our house six years ago, our income the same and a 17 yr old getting his license and going onto our auto insurance, we know that we have to cut down. We also realize that we have to get serious about selling this big old house with its 60 acres, so that we can buy something smaller and easier to keep up.We've found a realtor who thinks she can sell the place more successfully than our first realtor did and we've all been scouring the Net for frugal tips.

One site that has tons of links, advice and resources is The Dollar Stretcher. Another good place for frugalistas and wannabe cheapskates is The Frugal Underground. The Simple Dollar makes a lot of cents (pun intended) and then there's the godmother of squeezing your dollars 'til the eagles scream i.e. Frugal Living at about.com. This site is where they have an article titled How to Ditch Your TV and Save Millions and a section called Frugal Living as an Extreme Sport. (I think the Thanksgiving Day Disaster with the canned pudding would have qualified my father for that.)

I save money on food by checking out the sales circulars and being aware of how much things usually cost. If I see something we use at a much lower price, I stock up. If I have coupons for it, that's even better. I shop the bakery outlet (or the Used Bread store, as my kids call it). I know when the organic meats are marked down (Wednesday and Sunday at our favorite supermarket) and I show up then, fend off the other aging hippies who are jonesing for cheap organic vittles, buy a bunch of chicken haunches or pork butts and freeze them.

Like to eat out? Who doesn't? But it's really pricey, especially if you have kids. The simplest solution to that is eating out without the kids. (Hey, I finally found an advantage to sending kids to school instead of homeschooling!) At most of the chains, lunch is a lot cheaper than dinner. At Pizzeria Uno and probably at other places too, there are snack hours - 4-7pm and 10pm to closing for Uno- when appetizers are really cheap. At our local Uno, you can get a snack-sized Mediterranean flatbread pizza for $2.99 and cheap drafts. Takes me right back to my 20's when I hung out with my friends, drinking drafts and eating bar snacks.

Look for lunch buffets with discounts for kids. Asian restaurants around here usually have a day when they take a dollar off the buffet price or kids eat cheaper or they have drink specials. We drink water at Asian restaurants, though, and the free hot tea . The best way to save money on eating out is by bringing your own sandwiches and drinks and just buying a really cheap dessert. Think Little Debbie or Hostess.

Even jaded kids can put up with a picnic from home, if they get to pick out Twinkies or Snowballs or some other sweet treat that practically glows in the dark with sugar and chemicals. I admit that I have a weakness for those raspberry Twinkie clones, even though I know that the coconut is probably just some kind of shredded wood fiber impregnated with faux coconut essence and the only time raspberries are that color red is when they're infected with botrytis mold.

I guess being frugal is just being more creative and less impulsive with money. Delaying gratification and being more mature about financial choices. No wonder I have so much trouble with it.

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What I Did On My Summer Vacation

2007-08-05T10:02:00.000-04:00

"Well," the tourist from Oregon said, "I think what I've enjoyed the most about my Maine vacation is being able to see a beautiful sunrise every morning. Oregon is on the West Coast, so we don't get sunrises, only sunsets. There's all of the rest of the country in the way of us seeing the sunrises, ya' know?"

I know. During my vacation over the last week or so, I've come to know a lot of things. The woman from Oregon was browsing the self-help books at Border's. Very appropriate, I thought, if there's a book titled, Getting a Grip on Reality for Dummies. How in the world can you believe that sunrises aren't visible on the West Coast? Maybe she's slept in every morning of her life in Oregon? I'm baffled.

Then there's the woman I met at the auto supply store. She's from Massachusetts and was shopping for wiper blades. "I only need the one," she told me, as we both looked up our cars in the chart they have, "It's the driver's side wiper that wore out, as usual. I guess it's because I drive alone most of the time, so that's the side I use the most." Oddly enough, my own intelligent mother held that belief, and she also firmly believed that using her headlights would run down the battery, so she used her parking lights until it was really dark.

I see a lot of people driving with their parking lights on, which makes me wonder if they have that idea too. I mean, what's the point of driving with just your parking lights on if you don't think that it draws less power from the battery? It's not dark enough for headlights, but it's a little bit dark, so you need a little bit of light? Hey, we're not rooting around in a closet here, holding a penlight and looking for that button that popped off your gray jacket. We're driving.

Headlights are designed to light the road in front of us and to make us visible to other drivers. Parking lights are for - well - for parking. If your son yells that he's gonna throw up from eating two bags of Cheetos and a bag of marshmallows, you pull over and put on your parking lights so that other cars don't crash into you while he goes behind a bush and barfs. (You don't keep your headlights on, because then everyone would see him throwing up and he'd be embarrassed, which he should be after eating all that junk when you told him it'd make him sick.)

I didn't spend all my vacation time talking to tourists. I also made some much-needed improvements around the ol' homestead. I weeded selectively so that our bright blue, wooden garden bench is now surrounded by wildflowers: Queen Anne's Lace, Ox-Eye Daisies, Brown-Eyed Susans, Yarrow, a Swamp Honeysuckle Bush that smells so nice in spring and lots of tansy and comfrey to make the bees happy. One of the wonderful things about wildflower gardens with native wildflowers is that they're already here. I just have to encourage some and discourage others to get it looking the way I want it to look.

Daughter and I also planned our gardens for next year, figuring that we'll do the digging and delving this fall when the weather cools off a bit. I asked her if she had any ideas for what to plant around the big rock that Son dug up and placed in the middle of the backyard.

"How about if we put crustaceans around it?" Daughter asked. "That way, we could still see most of the rock, because crustaceans aren't very tall. And they're red, which would look nice against the rock."

I shook my head to get rid of the mental image that filled it: a dozen boiled lobsters artfully arranged around the rock with seaweed for foliage.

"Uh, I think the smell would get to us after awhile," I said, "Maybe we could plant some pansies or geraniums or something a little more traditional?"

"I like crustaceans," she said, "We could put some in baskets and hang them on the deck too. That way it'd be like a theme. You know, like we saw in that garden book we were looking at the other day. They had crustaceans in window boxes and hanging all over that big white house. It looked really neat."

I was getting dizzy. Admittedly, my memory isn't too hot, but I think I'd remember lobsters in window boxes and hanging all over a house.

"Are you sure it's not carnations or chrysanthemums you're thinking of?" I asked her.

"Mom," she said, "I know what carnations and chrysanthemums are. That's not what I want around the rock. I want crustaceans."

I know when not to pursue things, so I just let the subject languish. Later that night though, I dug out the garden book and found the page with the big white house. It was gorgeous. However, unless lobsters lurked beneath the flowers, there were only nasturtiums in the window boxes and hanging planters.

"So," I said to Daughter at breakfast the next morning, "It's nasturtiums you want around the rock in the backyard."

"Yup, red ones," she said. "Like I told you yesterday. I'm surprised you remember."

So am I.

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On Vacation

2007-07-24T10:05:00.000-04:00

Before summer (four days, so far, that weren't gray/rainy/chilly or all three) is over, I'm taking a break from blogging and writing for a week or two. I may or may not post as the whim hits me. I will definitely be reading all of the forty-two books I took out of the library yesterday. I will also be playing many video, board and card games with Daughter, who managed to fall off her sandals and pull ligaments and tendons in her foot. (The same sandals, I might add, that I counseled against because "you'll fall out of them and break your ankle". As she snidely pointed out, I was wrong. She didn't break her ankle.)

Except for picking up Son from his volunteer camp counselor job twice a week, I will not be doing any traveling unless it's for something I truly want to do. The ocean comes to mind, although not until Daughter is seaworthy. The Farnsworth Museum of Art is on my list and we could always put Daughter in my late mother's wheelchair and push her around amongst the Wyeth paintings.

Whatever I do, it will be something designed to relax and refresh physically, mentally and emotionally, because I'm feeling a bit frazzled. For a while now, I've been too serious about writing, blogging and life in general. I've spent way too much time reading books that teach me how to do something, or have to do with problems or politics or depressing subjects. I'm not designed for that.

So, I laid in a supply of books that don't deal with any of those subjects: Christie, Wodehouse, Perelman, Pratchett, D. E. Stevenson. All old fashioned, familiar and restful and just what I need right now. But today, I'm going to finish Shirley Jackson's biography, Private Demons by Judy Oppenheimer. If you're not familiar with Shirley Jackson, you might want to read Life Among the Savages and Raising Demons before you read the biography. If you've only read her short story, The Lottery, as most of us did in high school, you might be surprised to find that its author had another, much funnier, side. (Think Erma Bombeck on nicotine, alcohol and sleeping pills.)

Thanks, Deborah, for reminding me of her again. Shirley Jackson is the reason I was almost banned from the town library when I was 12. The librarian ordered me to come back with my mother before she'd let me take out one of Jackson's books. Only my father was home and he told the lady that his daughter could read anything she wanted to.

"But surely you don't want her exposed to smoking, drinking and adult humor?" she said, aghast.

"Too late," said my father, a chain-smoker and expert at sarcasm, "She's already been exposed at home. Let her have the book."

She did and from then on gave me no trouble about my choice in reading matter.

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Soft Soap

2007-07-22T18:39:00.000-04:00

Every once in a while, I look around our house and realize that chaos is more than a theory. I'm not a neat freak, but when I can't find a flat surface to eat on I get edgy. Our dining room table would make a good subject for archeology students as long as they've had all their shots. They could sift the layers for weeks and learn a lot about the eating, reading and playing habits of the modern family.

At the moment, there's a pile of junk mail that goes back to ads for Memorial Day. Daughter's old Gameboy Advance lies discarded with its battery compartment agape, because the AA's were needed for the new Gameboy DS system that's permanently attached to her hands. Next to it, there's a pile of Neopet magazines, a credit card offer for the house's former owner (we've lived here for six years), a stuffed elephant named Henry with a homemade stretch bracelet around his trunk (the letter beads spell out "ILPB" which stands for "I love peanut butter"), four potholders, a paintbrush that's as stiff as a board, an empty egg carton, a coupon that expired in February for a brand of toothpaste that we don't use, and one of the dog's yellow tennis balls.

Every other table in the house, every counter, every bureau, every tv top, hamper cover and flat-topped appliance, including the dormant pellet stove, is encumbered with enough flotsam and jetsam to fuel a landfill. It looks like a chain store exploded or someone's yard sale flew in through the windows. This has GOT to stop!

I suppose I could get someone in to do housework a couple hours a week, although that didn't work out too well before when we had a local woman come in on Friday mornings. Her name was Genie and she came highly recommended by a former friend. For the ridiculously small sum of twenty dollars, she offered to do four hours of whatever I needed done in the way of cleaning and organizing. Except windows. Genie didn't do windows unless you paid her ten dollars an hour and I wasn't about to do that. So I told her I'd make a list and she could do as much of it as possible in four hours.

She arrived with buckets, cleaning supplies, a mop, a broom and her own vacuum. When I saw what she used to clean with, I assured her that we wouldn't be needing her supplies, because we preferred the natural cleaning solutions that we've always used. This did NOT sit well with Genie.

"I can't guarantee your house'll be clean if I don't use my stuff," she huffed. "That natural stuff is junk. It don't clean like my chemicals do."

"Well, natural cleaning supplies work for me, Genie," I said, "And that's what I'd like you to use. Can you live with that?"

She huffed again. She was a huffer.

"I guess," she said.

I showed her what we had under the sink: white vinegar, baking soda, liquid glycerine soap concentrate, Kool-Aid.

"What the heck is the Kool-Aid for?" she said.

"Toilets," I answered. "It has citric acid in it, so we put it in the bowls and let it sit overnight and then brush them in the morning and they're nice and clean."

"I guess it's okay if you got a kid that drinks out of the toilet bowl. My grandson used to do that. I think it's pretty wacky, but if that's what you want. You're the boss."

That became Genie's mantra. When she asked where the Jet Dry rinse aid was and I told her we used white vinegar, I was the boss. When I made her stop pouring bleach down the drain from a secret stash she had in her huge pocketbook, I was the boss, even though she could tell me horror tales about what bubbles up onto your lawn if you don't kill the germs in your "septic cistern" as she called it. "Something green comes creeping up out of your drain and poisons a kid, don't blame me," she told me, as she poured vinegar onto baking soda to bubble the drains clean.

Genie was a hard worker, but she was a talker. Even when there was no one in the room, we could hear her nattering on about this and that. Very often it was of a religious nature, which didn't bother us, although we're not. Of a religious nature, that is. Apparently, she wasn't aware of this, because she took our glycerine soap bottle to heart. We use Dr. Bronner's Magic Soaps, whose bottles are covered with extremely esoteric religious slogans. I've read most of them and I get the impression that the late Dr. Bronner was a good man, if somewhat grammatically challenged, but his philosophy is a bit murky.

The label is full of references to Rabbi Hillel, Marx, Jesus and even Einstein. When I read it, I feel like I could almost make sense of it, if I only had a little more knowledge of the Shema, the Torah, Rudyard Kipling, The Communist Manifesto and the Rosetta Stone. I think that a rudimentary understanding of soapmaking basics wouldn't hurt either and it would probably help if I had a few electric shock treatments like Dr. Bronner had back in the 40's when he was arrested and committed to a mental hospital. Luckily for all the castile soap fans out there, he escaped and moved to California lock, stock and soap mixing barrel. That might have something to do with why his soap is now made with hemp instead of jojoba, although that's just a wild guess on my part.

Anyhow, Genie loved to read the Dr. Bronner bottle and often quoted whole paragraphs of it as she swept and straightened and made our house much easier to live in. Although she still thought we were lunatics, she put up with our strange ways and we'd still probably have her cleaning every Friday, if she hadn't decided to give her pastor, a very fundamentalist kind of guy, a bottle of Dr. Bronner's Soap for Christmas.

Maybe Pastor Bob has better eyesight than Genie and read the wackier ravings of Dr. B, which is in very small print. Maybe he has higher standards than Genie or has heard that we're atheists. Actually, when my kids went to school, some of the little lambs in Pastor Bob's flock used to chase them at recess and call them satanists and tell them they were going to hell, so who knows what Pastor Bob thinks of us. Not much, I'd say. He told Genie that we belonged to a cult (that brainwashed people with castile soap?) and she was risking her immortal soul by working for us.

When Genie called to tell me that she wouldn't be available anymore, I thought of finding someone else to take her place. Somehow though I didn't. Time went on. Things piled up on the tables and chairs and counters. The daily hunt for keys, glasses, clean underwear and library books started up again and life got back to normal. When we ran out of liquid soap the other day, I toyed with the idea of getting a different brand, but then I read the ingredients on the new stuff and it was jojoba all the way without a trace of hemp. I really think the hemp adds something to Dr. B's, so that's what I'm going to get. I may put it into another container though, just in case I decide to get some help with the housework.

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Unschooling Who?

2007-07-16T15:52:00.000-04:00

We were all driving home from a grocery shopping expedition last weekend. Even the geek had been pried away from his beloved computer tweaking and was ~~only reading one book and talking on one of his cell phones~~ giving us his full attention.

"What does ish mean?" Daughter said.

"Sorta." Son said.

"Well, in a Dr. Who episode, -Ish was a sentient word which was trying to remove all meaning from language, but thanks to Dr. Who's transgalactic babel masters, language is saved and -Ish is sent into conceptual space with the longest word in the world and the man who loves that word. And Dr. Who gets into trouble over money." Geekdaddy said.

"It's a suffix meaning somewhat or about or reasonably. Like if you're going to meet someone, you might say that you'll meet them around nine-ish. Or you might be just a little hungry, so you say you're a tad peckish." I said.

"So, if you're really hungry, you're peck?" Daughter asked.

"Maybe that's not the best example. Can anyone think of a better one?"

"Butterdish." Son said. "Like my toast is when you put the butter on it in that thin little layer that sinks into the bread and it's like eating saltines. It's not buttered; it's buttered-ish."

"Well," the geek said, looking thoughtful, "That last VW van I had was so decrepit that it was just van-ish."

I tried to get things back on track. I really did.

"How about new-ish? You know, not brand new, but pretty new."

"I have one," Daughter said, "How about sweet-ish?"

"Right," I said, "Not really sweet, but sort of sweet. That's a good one."

"No," she said, "I mean from Sweden. Swedish."

"Well, that's a word, Sweetie, but it's not an ish word."

"It has ish on the end."

"But the ish isn't the ish that means somewhat or about or reasonably. It's the ish that means of a nationality or the language of that nationality."

"You didn't say that when I asked you what ish meant. That's cheating."

"It's not cheating. I just didn't mention that meaning, because I thought of the other meanings first. I would have gotten to it."

"You didn't mention the Dr. Who episode either," Geekdaddy said, "I can't believe you missed that one. It's a classic. They almost found the transcendental word."

"Is that something to do with braces?" Daughter asked him.

"It's philosophy," Son told her, "It's where they lock you in a room with hundreds of other people all weekend and take all your money and you can't pee unless they let you. But they teach meditation so you don't care."

"There's a little more than that to Transcendental Meditation," I said, "True, it costs a lot of money, but a lot of studies have shown that it can relieve stress and even lower blood pressure. There's something to it."

"What kind of medication do they give you?" Daughter wanted to know.

Before I could set her straight, the geek was off on a rambling discourse about some guy named Swami Suityurself, or something like that, that he met at a geek convention in Dallas. He said the guy was really impressive. Everyone at the convention was signing up for his courses.

"They had Transcendental Meditation courses at a computer convention?" I asked him.

"No, he was a Skype tech. Or maybe he worked for Google Adwords. I dunno. But he was good."

"What does this have to do with Transcendental Meditation?" I asked.

"Or ish?" Son asked.

"Or the other ish?" Daughter asked. "And who is Dr. Who?"

Suddenly, I felt reality slipping out from underneath me, and I knew that the next sentence uttered was going to be someone asking who's who.

"Who's who?" the geek asked, looking up from his cell phone which he was programming to play lawnmower engine sounds as a ringtone.

"She wants to know about Dr. Who," I said, "And you can tell her as soon as we get home."

"Ha!" he cackled, as we pulled into the yard, "Tell her? I'll do better than that. I'll show her the -Ish Episodes. I'll even let her wear my Dr. Who scarf while we watch. And you say I'm not into unschooling."

He went off to find the Dr. Who episodes and I sat down on the back deck to do some Transcendental Medication with a glass of Riesling and ponder whether it's possible for unschoolers to have substitute teachers. After a few sips, I decided that it was not only possible, but admirable.

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