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Saturday, March 31, 2007

a little help?

Our family needs your assistance. It's hard for me to ask like this, but I feel I must. We are having serious issues and your contribution is vital to our emotional health.

We need you to weigh in on a very important issue. (whew! you thought I'd gone all Dickens-orphan on you, didn't you? No, the aid we need is solely of an academic nature.)

OK, there's this song. Or was. By Nena. And everyone who was born before say 1980 knows it. Yes, I'm talking about "99 Luftballons/99 Red Balloons".

I'll wait while the wave of nostalgia passes. Are you back? OK.

T and I have a little debate going on. It's not a serious debate -- nowhere near the level of the does-every-object-with-mass-have-its-own-inherent-gravity one (which I won) or the how-do-rockets-propel-themselves-in-space one (which T won). One of us has always thought the gist of it was that these two lovers bought these balloons and let them go, and they got picked up on radar and via an enormous mis-step, it brought on World War III. The other (and I'm not going to tell you who but this person may or may not possess a Y chromosome) thinks that the balloons are just a symbol for our lost innocence, and that they happened to be floating by while the world pretty much ended, in a truly-on-purpose nuclear holocaust. I must admit that his idea sounds more... song-ish. Also that he was 13 when the song was popular, and I was seven.

So what do you all think? Am I a total dork? (Wait, don't answer that.)

Tuesday, March 27, 2007

and it breaks my heart

This is our Fix-A-Sentence from yesterday (the Before version; I was going to photograph it After too -- in fact that was pretty much the whole idea of getting out my camera in the first place -- but the kids erased it before I could. Rest assured that this little paragraph was properly punctuated, capitalized, etc., when it was done).

This is a really fun way for the kids to practice their grammar. And of course since I write them, I can propagandize any way I want. Yay homeschooling!

Customized Family Games

OK, I don't know what's happening here. I am actually about to post about something sort of useful and factual. I think my body has been taken over by my 2005 self, or something. If you don't hear anything frivolous and completely useless from me by next week, please come rescue me. Or wait, I was thinner in 2005. Nevermind.

Anyway. I was Stumbling (stumbleupon = single greatest timewaster ever invented, aside from computer Solitaire and the Internet itself), and I came to this site where there was a discussion of customized rules for games. I don't KNOW those people, so I don't want to post there ;), but I thought, hmm. THAT's an interesting topic for a blog post. Everyone plays games, right?

(ooh, goody, a list!)

• The most major updates we've given to any of our games are in the game of Life, which C got for Christmas. We make three changes, based on actual ideological/economic issues with the game. First, we noticed that having kids is absolutely no benefit at ALL in that game, other than the one LIFE card you get when they're born. They cost you money for college and daycare and they ride around in your car with you, and that's it. Since money is the only way of gauging your quality of life in that game (!), we made each child worth 50,000 when you retire. We've thought about making a square where you had to spend all your savings on a nursing home if you didn't have at least 2 kids to care for you, but we haven't tried it yet.

• Also for Life, we found their real estate program to be completely unrealistic. That you could buy a house in your twenties and sell it at retirement for only about one and a half times what you paid for it at best was ludicrous. Come on, we live in California, we know how this goes. So we decided that if you keep your house from the first "buy a house" square till the end, you double the amount printed on the card when you sell it. If you buy it at the second "buy a house" square, or if you sell and buy again, you use the amounts printed. Also, you pay $10,000 rent per payday, which you no longer have to pay once you have bought a house. (there it virtually no benefit at all built into the game for homeowners).

• Some friends of my parents taught them to play "dirty UNO". I am not crazy-fond of the extra rules, but I am in the minority on that, so when we play, we play "dirty", as follows: Whenever anyone plays a zero, then everyone passes their cards to next person in the direction of play. Anyone who plays a 7 may trade cards with any player. If a card of the same color and number is played on top of a card that you placed (say, you play a blue 9 and the next person to put down a card plays a blue 9), you draw that number (9) of cards.

• We adopted the "doubles" rules from Star Wars Monopoly for all games of Monopoly, which makes the game a lot more fun. (I really don't much like Monopoly, personally, so every little bit helps). If you roll double 1s, you can move to any space on the board. Double 2s, you get $100 from the bank. Double 3s, you get $50 from each player. Double 4s, you get a Community Chest card. Double 5s, you get a Chance card. Double 6's, you can challenge any other player for any one of his/her properties; each rolls a die and the higher one gets/keeps the property. And of course we put money from taxes etc. into the middle, and anyone who lands on Free Parking gets them. Who doesn't do that? I was shocked when I found out that wasn't an official rule.

• T and I have a more complicated version of Battleship where you fire a salvo of shots on each turn depending on how many ships you have on the board -- I think it's one shot per undamaged ship. We've talked about working movement into it -- where you can move each undamaged ship one space per turn -- but that would get so complicated and long and frustrating that we've never actually done it.

• LT came up with the idea to step up our Clue games a bit by adding more people and more weapons, and by designating more "rooms" on the board (the staircase in the middle, and maybe some areas in the hallways). The thing is that we have to get more cards just like ours to customize, if this is going to work, so that the backs of the cards all look the same. Then we found out that Clue had done essentially that for us in the late 80's, with their Master Detective version, which was, inexplicably, only made for a few years. We're hoping to buy a copy on eBay.

There are so many websites with ideas for this kind of thing; this is only the teeniest tip of the iceberg of possibilities. So what do you do to make games more fun?

Saturday, March 24, 2007

An actual post. With pictures!

I actually feel like writing a post. I don't know what's going on but I figure I might as well take advantage of it. I just finished wandering around my house taking a few pictures, so you'll get to see those. (actually, I won't lie, after the first one, I thought, hey, I could post about that. I wonder what else I can inflict on those poor few people who still come to my blog?)

These are the cars that T and the kids made for the Awana Grand Prix race next weekend. T does the cutting, the kids sand and sometimes paint; then they decorate them. From near to far, you are looking at: T's General Lee (he wanted to do his Dart, since he's done Chargers for the past two years, but the kids begged him to do the General Lee and no they haven't seen the recent abomination, just some of the episodes of the old TV show), my Dart (which, I will state here on record, I did no work on whatsoever; it's all T), LT's Plymouth Superbird Nascar car (he's never seen a Nascar race in his life, but he has a Plymouth so he likes Plymouths. Also, he likes the movie Cars. He did his own painting this year) and C's version of my parents' van and "little house".

Close-up of my Awana Dart. It has windshield wipers, door handles and locks, a little Dart Swinger logo (partly obscured by the tire), an accurate-looking grille and headlights, taillights, bumpers, gas cap, and even my icthus on the trunk. The man missed his calling, no?

This is the stack of index cards from which I will be studying for my next history test.

C's best friend is having a birthday party tomorrow. C has been counting down days for a month. Today she wrapped the presents all by herself (no, really?). The bag, which contains homemade marble magnets that make up the friend's name -- google 'marble magnets' if you have no idea what I'm talking about -- says "[friend's name], stick theese [sic] things to your refridgerator [sic] and see what happens." She's seven, rather disorganized, and left-handed; the handwriting cards are stacked against her, so to speak. (she can be much neater than that when she tries, though.)

I have finished knitting all the pieces of C's sweater (now that she's nearly outgrown it. Not to mention that it's only getting warmer for the next six months or so). Now I get to weave in about a million little ends (what was I thinking, when I did the stripes? augh!), stitch the pieces together, and do the trim at the neck, and I'll move on to my [next winter's] hat.

When I was taking this picture I noticed how grungy the backs of my couches look. The cats love to sleep on them. I'll have to get one of those lint-roller things... I'll add it to my Mother's Day list.**

**other options on the list, in case you were curious: a blender. A good nonstick 5-quart saucepan. Or a whole set of saucepans, as all of mine are rather ratty after thirteen years of hard usage. Clothespins. Dishtowels. Dinner out (pleasepleasepleasepleaseplease). Bookmarks. iTunes gift cards. You never know what the kids' budget will be from one year to the next -- it depends on the recycling market. ;) Usually I get (and want) kitcheny stuff, but one memorable year they came through with the porch swing I'd wanted since before they were born.

close-up of the sweater. The blue is milder than it looks on my screen; it's a lightly-faded-denim-y kind of color. Also, for some reason, my white rows (but not the blue ones or the yellow ones!) got this kind of zig-zaggy back-and-forth thing in spots. I don't know why it only happened with the white. I hope it sorts itself out a bit when I block it.

Tuesday, March 20, 2007

oh joy

This evening after history class, as I was gathering my things and preparing to head to the pizza place with Debi and another friend of ours for breadsticks and diet Cokes (well, Anita wouldn't touch diet Coke with a ten-foot pole, but you get the idea, on with the story, Rachel), T and the kids walked into the room. It was a nice surprise; they had finished with Boy Scouts and thought it would be fun to see Mommy at school. (Mommy going to school is a hugely amusing idea to the kids, actually, or to C at least.) I introduced them to the instructor as we were on our way back out the door, and he did what every homeschooling mom loooooves so very much. He started essentially quizzing my kids, starting with C. Asked what she learns in school, she said, "Math, and reading and science, and we used to do history." [ask me if I wanted to find a convenient hole in the floor and crawl in at this point -- we used to do history every day but we backed off and now only do it, on a full, formal, sit-down basis, every now and then. Still, we have less formal discussion on the topic all the time, and I guarantee my kids are learning stuff about history that they would never in a million years be learning in public school in the fifth and second grades, respectively. I bet HIS junior high students -- remember, the instructor's day job is at a middle school -- couldn't do nearly as cute an impression of the difference in fighting methods between the Europeans and the Indians as C does, either.] Then he asked if she was doing double-digit multiplication in math. She is seven. She is in the second grade. She hadn't a clue what he was talking about but she hesitantly nodded; I had to correct her. He asked if we plan to homeschool through high school, we said yes, with some community college classes thrown in; he said 'good luck with that' in a 'you lowly uncredentialed idiots, you'll need it' tone, and we thanked him and left.

All in all, really not that disastrous, right? So why is it that my stomach is still clenched up and I am still apostrophizing him from time to time with "just let me walk up to some of HIS students on the street and ask THEM to tell me what they know and we'll see how quick THEY are on the draw" and similar comments? Why do I feel like I need to prove myself to someone like him? Jenn would tell me I care too much what people think. (Thank you, Jenn, you're entirely right, I do.) I need to turn off the nameless dread and let it go. I'm doing a fine job and my kids are bright and intelligent and respectful and loving and they're even at or above grade level in all their subjects except that their handwriting is rather atrocious, and how many times do you ask a public-schooled kid what he learned in school that day and get the answer "Nothing", and does that mean the school is worthless and he in fact learned nothing, of course it doesn't, sigh.

Still and all, to make myself feel better, we'll have a rousing discussion about the Revolutionary War tomorrow. We'll have a great time. And Mr. "Good luck with that" can stick it in his ear.

Friday, March 16, 2007

really? that high?

You Are 45% Normal

While some of your behavior is quite normal... Other things you do are downright strange You've got a little of your freak going on But you mostly keep your weirdness to yourself

snippets

Today I did a bit of spring cleaning on my hard drive (I can never manage to muster the motivation to do the same for my actual house these days). I found some funny and interesting things that I'd completely forgotten about, like a wav file of LT singing the VeggieTales theme, and my old email folders. My goodness gracious I used to get a lot of email. I never understood why people gave me a hard time about it until I looked at the sheer volume of folders I had for sorting it. I think at one point I was on thirty or so different e-mail lists. It made me tired just to see it.

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Speaking of learning things about myself: I am discovering part of the reason my peers were so annoyed with me when I was a kid (and teen). In history class, I find it very hard to shut up. I am interested, is all, except that because I'm interested I always have something to say. Parts of the class (most notably the current events portion) are kind of a free back-and-forth discussion, and I noticed that I heard my own voice way too often in those discussions, and the instructor was starting to give me That Look, which I never fully understood in school -- the Look which means, "for crying out loud, woman [or child, whatever], will you LET SOMEONE ELSE SAY IT?" So this last Tuesday I tried an experiment: I would not speak in class unless I was directly addressed. Because I knew this would be difficult and because I have a very insistent inner child when it comes to treats, I promised myself a milkshake after class if I succeeded. Also, I allowed Debi (who sits behind me) to monitor me and slap me around if I started to lose control. It was touch and go a few times, but I managed to make it without duct-taping my mouth closed. And really it was a fantastic experience. The class discussion was actually really interesting when other people had a chance to participate, and I felt all virtuous and there was no shut UP Rachel self-flagellation on the way home, like there usually is. Was. Whatever.

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I am toying with the idea of posting some of my reaction papers -- those weekly current-event essays for history class -- in this space. Goodness knows there's not much other content these days.

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Monday is T's and my thirteenth wedding anniversary. I've been thinking of us as having been married for thirteen years since the beginning of the year, so I'm used to the number now and it doesn't seem, you know, old and wise anymore, for our marriage to have made it to the ripe old age of thirteen. We are not really doing anything to celebrate it this year. Gas is over $3 a gallon here, so even a 'free' trip to the aquarium would cost $60 or $70 just for the drive, and that's just not happening, especially when you factor in lunch money and parking money and all that sort of thing.

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LT has just joined the Boy Scouts, and T has signed up as assistant scout master for his troop. LT is a changed boy already. His confidence level is skyrocketing, and he's noticeably more considerate and patient and cheerfully obedient about things like helping out around the house. He even voluntarily came out to the clothesline tonight to help me bring in the laundry. He is also as gung-ho as any freshly-shaved Marine recruit, and he spends much of his spare time studying his handbook and working toward his Tenderfoot rank. This includes exercising, and today we paced off 110 yards from our house so that he could run his daily quarter-mile by going out and back twice. I tried it myself. It took me two minutes (nine seconds less than LT), which made me feel kind of old and decrepit. I've never been a good runner, but I used to be able to do a passing-grade under-eight-minute mile, something I don't see happening again anytime in this lifetime.

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Also re: LT: We took him to the pediatrician a while back because his toeing-in had gotten a bit worse (he has toed in to some degree since he learned to walk; an orthopedist we saw about it when he was a toddler said he would outgrow it, but he never did) and his spine was looking crooked. It turns out that one of his legs is very slightly shorter than the other (so slightly that it's taken us nearly eleven years to notice it). We're supposed to be getting a referral to a pediatric orthopedist about that.

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C is getting over a sore throat and ear infection, which came on the heels of a day or two of headache and fever. The poor princess was awake almost all night on Tuesday with the earache. As a result, of course, so was I, and I'm still feeling a bit off-balance as a result. The freakish early time change is not helping, although I love the longer evenings. It helps that we're in the middle of an uncanny-seeming warm spell -- it's been gorgeous weather. High 70's, fresh breezes, wildflowers popping out, green grass, puffy clouds, bliss.

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If I were more awake I would try harder to think of an apt and coherent closing for this space, but I give up. The End.

Monday, March 05, 2007

music meme thingamabob

I have been plotting this meme for a while. It's not really a meme, because I'm inventing it, but hey, maybe it will become a meme, and then my life will not have been in vain and all, and wouldn't that be fun?

The idea is, you take your iPod or similar device, and you hit SHUFFLE SONGS in the first menu, so that it randomly selects songs one after another from your entire library, except for the ones (audiobooks in my case) that you have told it NOT to select during shuffle. Or, if you have no iPod, you can do this with the song files on your computer and your favorite listening software -- just make a big playlist with everything you have and randomize it. Or you can use your favorite mix CD. Or that tape you made on that lazy Saturday in 1988. Man, remember when high-speed dubbing was just so awesome?

OK. Anyway. You do this shuffling random songs thing with a timer set to go off in a given amount of time, and you discuss each song for the length of the song or until you hit skip, at which time you go on to the next song. So you could end up with a doctoral thesis on Vivaldi, say, or little snippets about twenty different songs. Who knows?

In case you're wondering why I ever thought this was a good idea... I have no clue. But I'm going to do it anyway. Here goes.

Endangered Love, from the Veggietales. We always call this just "Barbara Manatee". We like it a lot; in fact at least one of our many family nicknames comes from this song (it's C's). This was the Silly Song on the first Veggie Tales video we ever had, and we thought it was... really silly. And it is. Even LT sings along with the entire thing. OK, next song.

Blind Man's Bluff, from Tales from Childhood by Schumann. Not much to say about this except that it is gorgeous piano music and I downloaded it for free from musopen.com and it's really short because it's already over and I had to pause the next song which I think might be cheating.

Love Bites, Def Leppard. Oh my goodness. This was my very favorite song in the eighth grade; it was from the very first album I ever owned for myself. On cassette. It was a clear cassette, which I thought was the coolest idea. I can still smell that just-opened-the-cassette-box smell; can you? At the first school dance when I was in eighth grade, this was the last song, and I asked this boy to dance who was geeky and skinny but seemed nice, and after he made sure that the girl he really liked didn't want to dance with him, he shrugged and danced with me. I developed an enormous and embarrassing crush on him that lasted the entire school year, and then we were a couple for a year and a half after that. And this was Our Song. It was fully a year after he broke up with me before I could hear that (utterly unintelligible) opening bit without feeling like I'd been punched in the stomach. I used to torture myself by the hour with this song, à la Marianne Dashwood, except with electric guitars and screaming instead of decorous pianoforte melodies and Shakespearean sonnets. Ah, young luuurve. Now it's just a song that evokes a time period for me, and I still think it's pretty cool-sounding. But then I like tapered-leg jeans too. Bring back the ankle zippers! OK, skip.

Sometimes Love Just Ain't Enough, Don Henley and Patty Smith. Don't really like this song too much. I downloaded it years ago when I was specifically making a CD set of songs from my high-school and junior-high years. It's just... kind of cheesy. It made it onto my iPod because compared to the size of a Librivox audiobook, it takes up no space at all, and someday I might want to listen to something cheesy. Who knows. Skip.

Amazing Love, Rebecca St James. I love this song. It makes me cry in a good way and sometimes it gives me chills. You know, I'd never listened to it on my iPod before and I don't think I knew that it was a live recording with the audience singing along. But now I do. T dislikes this song because she changes the lyric "how can it be that you my God should die for me" to "... you my King should die for me." Doctrinally important, yes, but musically I think it's just a quibble. If he'd never heard the original version, he'd still think it was fine. When we sing it in church, my dad changes the line about "in all I do, I honor you" to "in all I do, I WANT TO honor you", because as he aptly points out, a lot of the stuff we do actually doesn't honor God. Scuse me while I just listen quietly to the rest of this song. Thank you. I needed that.

Adagio from the Brandenberg Concerto #1 by Bach. Um. I like Bach? Bach makes me smile? All of this is true but it's not exactly an 'epoch in my life' kind of song. It's not even my favorite Bach, by a long shot. And I can't listen to it properly while I type anyway. Skip.

Orinoco Flow, Enya. You know, this has been one of my favorite songs since it was new. I just love the sound of it, and it's just such a joyful song. Must turn it up. The whole family likes this song. It was actually really popular when I was in, what, high school? I don't think Enya gets a lot of play at high-school functions nowadays, more's the pity.

Dies Irae from the Requiem in D Minor by Mozart. I can get so carried away by the sheer musical perfection and intricacy of just about anything by Mozart. The Requiem always makes me think of the movie Amadeus, where it has a part in possibly my favorite movie scene of all time, from a pure cinema-appreciation standpoint. The way the scenes with Mozart in bed are constructed around the creation of his music -- the heartbroken despair of Salieri as he sees firsthand the genius that he has quite literally killed in his jealousy -- the passion -- the brilliance -- the beauty of the music itself -- agh. OK, I know what I'm watching while I knit tonight. AAAA-MEEEENNNN.

Another Def Leppard one from Hysteria: Pour Some Sugar On Me. Jennifer and I used to shout the beginning thing at each other all the time. Also, we would put on loud rock music and clean her house (she had a borderline-wicked-stepmotherish aunt who generously allowed Jenn to live with her but also made Jenn do what I still think was far more than her fair share of the housework -- i.e. all of it) and it made cleaning Jenn's house fun. If Jenn lived next door to me we would probably take turns going over to each other's houses to crank up the music and help each other clean. I do not understand the point of any of the lyrics of this song, except to know that really the lyrics were not the point. I'm thinking that they're not talking about pure cane sugar from Hawaii, though.

Four minutes to go.

Ooh, In the Mood, performed by the Boston Pops. Was this Glenn Miller? We played it in high school band but my fond memories of it go back to that hilarious scene in Cannery Row, with the crazy dancing, and even more than the movie itself, I remember my dad's utterly abandoned laughter while we watched it. Musically, I didn't appreciate the brilliance of big band music till late high school. Now I torture my kids with it for long periods of time. It's my favorite music for dancing around the house. Well, it and the Bangles.

And there's my timer, so now you have it: thirty minutes in the life of Rachel's iPod.

Saturday, March 03, 2007

books for February

This month I only completed three books and they were all re-reads. I think I might have even reviewed all of them in here somewhere already.

1. Emily Climbs -- L.M. Montgomery -- 3.5
   
   • I like this book but don't LOVE it. However, it has parts that I love.
2. Emily's Quest -- L.M. Montgomery -- 3.5
   
   • Usually I like this one less than the other two in the series. It wasn't so bad this time -- maybe because I'm older, and early-30's doesn't seem like such an elderly age to be striking up a romance. :) I still intensely dislike Teddy, and find myself wishing that LMM had been allowed to leave Emily single like she wanted to. The Teddy bits seem to be tacked on. They probably were. And Teddy is more than a bit of a jerk.
3. Into the Wilderness -- Sara Donati -- 4.25
   
   • I KNOW I've reviewed this one in here; do a search if you're interested. :) I had been reading about the time period in which it's set in my history class and I got a hankering to read it. I'm glad I did. Elizabeth and Nathaniel are among my favorite literary couples. (You know who my favorite literary couple is? Admiral and Mrs. Croft in Persuasion.)
     

And that's it for February. I've been knitting and working on schoolwork, and, of course, LibriVoxing. :)

Thursday, March 01, 2007

my life in list form

• Snow. It started while I was at my history class on Tuesday and stopped around midnight. It melted almost completely yesterday.

• Pukey child. Poor C caught a tummy bug and threw up every hour all night long on Tuesday. (the better to keep tabs on the snow, I guess). She spent Wednesday enthroned on the couch alternating between watching videos one after the other -- she only gets to do this when she's sick -- and sleeping. Her marked improvement happened Wednesday evening while I was at the store spending fifteen precious dollars on Gatorade and sundry other sick-person food, having been unable to do so earlier due to the combined forces of the sick child (couldn't see myself bringing her in the store) and the snow. She has now completely recovered and is in high spirits. Meanwhile I'm still a bit off due to lack of sleep.

• Good history test score. Yay! I am making a bit of a game out of this class. The idea is to see how well I can do in a class when I really try. Goodness knows I never found that out in high school.

• Ahem. The rough draft is not started yet. Not even one sentence. This is problematic. At some time when my kids aren't banging on the piano (making 'scary music', I think, is their goal at this precise moment), I will have to sit down and just dive into it. It's never as hard as I think it will be.

• I have not one but two memes in the works. I'm plotting them, anyway. You would be surprised, judging by how often I actually write in this thing, at how often I think about writing in it, but don't. Also, I should do my books today; I just realized this. They were all re-reads; it's been that kind of comfort-read sort of month.

• I actually wrote a pen-and-ink letter and mailed it. I haven't done this in ages. I should do it more often.

• Librivox is fun. I'm progressing with O Pioneers! and trying to talk myself out of diving into a bunch of O. Henry stories.

• Knitting is going along pretty well, actually. I finished the back of C's sweater (or... whose-ever sweater, since I'm not sure it's going to fit C and yes I checked my gauge but then she grew) and am about halfway done with the front. Then I will do the sleeves. THEN I will see how hard it is to assemble it. Maybe it will end up being my grandchild's sweater, knowing how good I am at assembling completed projects.

• That 'whose-ever' is so wrong. I know. But how else can you denote that? 'The sweater belonging to whomever' doesn't exactly flow either.

• Apparently a lot of people have the same problem with their iPods that I did, judging by my search hits in the last month. Dude, people, just thank Apple for the warranty and send the suckers back. My new-or-refurbished replacement is doing fine thus far.

• We put off the Beth Moore study for a while. We'll do it someday when our lives are less crazy. Like in, say, 2059. (Or this spring. Whatever.)

• Over the past few days, LT and I have finished all twenty-five levels of Silversphere. Click that link at your own risk; I will not be held liable for undone laundry or torn-out hair.

• And I think that's all. At least, that's all I have time to write.