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Tuesday, February 26, 2008

we are not immune.

If these are not the very first words you've ever read in my blog, you probably already know that my school years were not happy socially, especially in elementary school and let's not forget seventh grade which was, if possible, even worse than sixth grade, but I'm not sure that IS possible. And if these ARE the first words you've ever read in my blog, you know this now. So if I were to tell you that I take my kids to a homeschooling moms' Bible study where the moms study and talk while the kids (a substantial number of them, maybe... fifteen? twenty?... most of whom the kids know from Sunday School and AWANA) run around outside and play, and that the kids there had, in the two times we've gone, been mean to my children in various ways, you might have some idea that it would maybe break my heart a little. Or a lot.

Now, let's be clear and say that homeschooled-kid-with-mom-in-the-next-room "being mean" is not quite on the level of three-hundred-kids-on-the-playground-and-one-has-Rachel-Germs "being mean". And it's handled much differently once authority figures catch on. Last time we were there, two weeks ago, the girls, led by the two cute little alpha-females in the group, told C to wait outside a gate while they went in a paddock to "get things ready" for part of an elaborate game of pretend they had going on, and then they just let her sit out there and never called her to come in. (OK, my heart just constricted AGAIN.) Within half an hour of our arrival home, before C had even told me much of what had gone on, one girl's mother had called to allow her daughter to apologize to mine, and the other did the same the next morning, just as I was on my way to the phone -- literally -- to call her. So yes, dealt with differently, but still oh so painful. This week C says the girls were very nice to her -- although in watching her run around with them she still had an 'outsidish' kind of look -- but it was LT's turn. The boys -- these boys are preteens, by the way -- played hide and seek. From him. Without telling him that was what they were going to do. He is taking this far less hard than I (internally) am, but still, he doesn't like it.

Did I pass some kind of Socially Unacceptable gene on to my children? Are they just "the new kids", and they don't fit in yet but they will soon? How many times should a mother let her children experience this kind of thing before she concludes that the world is simply not fit for associating with and steps decorously away from it? I tell you, it makes me want to circle the wagons and just keep them home where nobody will ever hurt them like that, even though I know that's not really the best idea in the long run. I know this is my own history speaking, and my own Issues rearing their ugly heads. Home was my haven, but I just couldn't stay there all the time, no matter how much I wished I could. My kids... could, theoretically. I know, I know, it wouldn't be healthy and we need to find ways to work through these kinds of troubles in a constructive way and all that, but right now my injured-mama-bear self just instinctively wants to pull them in close and keep them away from a cruel childish world that is out there just waiting to break their hearts like it broke mine for so long.

Monday, February 25, 2008

I am so, so bad.

As the delurking Mandy pointed out (hi, Mandy!), I have, um, kind of not been doing monthly book posts. I missed the first one back in December (I think) because there was the move and the stress and augh and I hadn't been reading much and it was all repeats anyway and how many times do you want to read my review of my Mitfordy comfort-book crack? Then I didn't do one for January either, and I felt kind of guilty, but nobody noticed, and I figured if anybody HAD noticed (and cared, which was somewhat less likely), they'd know that I was moving, and making home improvements, and pursuing higher education, and all kinds of totally valid excuses like that.

Right?

OK, I'll try to catch up the memorable ones (good and bad) through February, and get back on track next month with the regular posts. Because I really have missed doing them, and they're some of my favorite posts to look back at later.

Seriously, in December it was pretty much all Mitford books, when I could keep my eyes open at night long enough to read. But there's a new Jan Karon book out, and I read that one:

Home to Holly Springs -- Jan Karon -- 3.75

• Technically, this is not a Mitford book; it's a Father Tim book, a distinction which was lost on me when I first picked it up, but it was clear by the end. Overall, there's nothing in the Mitford books that I wouldn't want Claire to read, if she should happen to be interested in the lives of people her grandparents' age who get really het up about things like the local Grill having to go out of business. Apparently the Father Tim novels are going to be more... adult in nature. Not that they're smutty, or anything, but there are considerably more adult themes covered. Timothy takes Barnabas to the town where he grew up, and meets a few people who knew him as a boy, and learns unpleasant things about his dad, and, oh, becomes a bone-marrow donor. The End. It was good, but not quite good enough to be a 4. There you have it.
  

January was another month of little reading and mostly rereads (picked up some LMM), but I did read the newest E.L. Konigsburg. I can't remember the name of it. It has a picture of kids holding frames on the front, and it's really hard to follow, and it has character cameos from her other books which I found a bit confusing, and it turned into a preachy kind of After-School-Specialish Book About Serious Issues at the end, which is one of my most serious literary pet peeves. I actively did not like this book, which is sad, because I wanted to like it. A woman who can have written two Newbery winners thirty years apart deserves more than an eye-rolling attempt to get through to the last page of her latest work just for the sake of finishing it. But there it is. Oh, yes, it's The Mysterious Edge of the Heroic World. You might like it. I didn't.

This month I actually got some stuff from the library (well, I got a LOT of stuff from the library, because I'm writing a history paper on the International Geophysical Year, but I got some stuff that had nothing to do with school, for a change). The jury is still out on Julie And Julia by Julie Powell. I gave up on The Buenos Aires Broken-Hearts Club -- looked interesting, but it turned out to just be trashy and very, very first-novelish -- and I wasn't awfully impressed by Jodi Picoult's early effort, Harvesting the Heart. It wasn't bad; it just wasn't as good as she got later, with the knowable characters and concisely perfect descriptions. It came across more like an ordinary soap-operaish kind of novel. No annoying twist at the end, though! So there was that.

As a family, we've listened to The Lost World by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and The First Men In The Moon by H.G. Wells, both read by the highly skilled Mark Smith. We really REALLY liked the first one, and liked the second one pretty well, although it dragged in spots and didn't end the way we wanted it to. Meanwhile I'm slowly but surely making my way through The Shirley Letters for LV, a book which is pretty much required reading for anyone interested in (or forced to study) California history.

Other than that, it's all been rereads. I'm on Rilla in the Anne series, but I didn't feel like starting with the ones I had pretty thoroughly memorized, so I picked up at Windy Poplars, back in January. I did buy new books with my Christmas gift cards, but I haven't been able to sit down and really get into them. One of my favorite finds in a late-night Barnes and Noble shopping trip was a copy of Problem Solving Through Recreational Mathematics, which is a college textbook full of logic and algebra puzzles, for NINETY CENTS. Here's the problem that has had me stumped since I first read it. The solution is RIGHT THERE on the tip of my brain but I just can't quite grab it. Math geeks, please give me hints: There's this woman, see, and she's rowing up a river. She passes a piece of driftwood. Half an hour later, she decides she wants the driftwood, so she turns around and rows back to it. She catches up to it a mile downstream from the point where she first saw it. How fast is the current of the river? This has been tormenting me in the odd minutes when I'm not studying, sleeping, transcribing, teaching the kids, cleaning up dog messes, cooking supper, doing laundry, tidying the house, planning the garden, walking the dog, shopping for groceries, or mediating sibling conflicts that make me want to tear my hair out by the roots. It makes me feel very, very stupid because I am sure I should know it. Any helpful math geeks who want to put me out of my misery are welcome to do so.

Friday, February 22, 2008

Rachel + company dinner = at least one humorous disaster

We had company at our new house. Real company -- in other words, not somebody related by blood or marriage, and not somebody who's here to check an appliance or install a threshold. In fact, we had LOTS of real company: Our entire Bible study group converged on our humble home on Wednesday for a potluck.

If you're wondering why I am still sitting here and sanely typing, so am I.

Really, everything went pretty smoothly. I worked steadily all day, cooking and polishing, and the day was almost disaster-free, which, considering who I am and what my life is usually like, was really a positive change. OK, OK, so I'll tell you about the "almost" since I know you are just dying to hear. Our washer drains into a deep sink, which is not a system I love, mainly because it seems so unhygienic, but also because I am always afraid that something will fall into the sink and cover the drain and then the washer will fill the sink and drain onto the floor and ack I'm so paranoid, right? Except that finally, after forty days and probably fifty loads of laundry in this house, while I was scurrying around all efficiently preparing my modest little rectangle of a house to contain seventeen people, some of whom actually, you know, decorate for seasons, the dreaded event happened. Just for your information, if you have a similar system in your house, there are a few things that should probably not be hanging out on the floor directly under the edge of the sink that might possibly fail to properly dispose of a substantial quantity of warm greywater. On that list of inadvisable objects, somewhere between "family heirloom quilt" (which fortunately in this case I do not own) and "expensive electronics equipment" (ditto), would be "cat litter tray". So my utility-room floor wasn't just covered in unsanitary laundry water, it was covered in warm cat-litter soup, brewed in a hearty unsanitary-laundry-water broth.

Before you decide that you will never, ever come to my house no matter how hard I beg, I must point out that I had JUST COMPLETELY CHANGED the cat litter, so it was not as nasty as you might have just pictured. It was just more expensive.

Everything else was fine. The house was clean well before everyone arrived; Scout was quietly crated because she is scared to death of people and who knows how traumatized she would have been if she'd been out among all those strangers; there was enough food; the roast didn't burn; and though things were cramped for space, there were enough chairs and tables to go around (thanks to helpful family members). So. Aside from that one mishap, I can't complain. Which means, of course, that I have to milk that one mishap for all it's worth.

Wednesday, February 20, 2008

conversation at my house, ca. 1996-2001

xkcd: nerdy. hilarious. (and frequently way over my head.)

Sunday, February 17, 2008

the garden: details

I have a transcribing job (from hell, so far; it's the kind where one person is almost inaudibly quiet and slow, and the other person is much louder and much faster, which means I'm always having to adjust volume and speed), a history test to study for, and a chapter's worth of nutrition homework, all of which pretty much NEED to be done tonight, which explains why I'm sitting here blogging. Ho-hum. But seriously, Denise asked a question about THE GARDEN, so how could I resist?

Denise (and anyone else who is interested, or, heck, not interested, for that matter): We are growing lots and lots of things. In fact, me being me, I made... a spreadsheet. (It's only because we're ordering the seeds by mail and I'm now officially too lazy to total up 25 rows of low-dollar amounts with paper and a calculator. I swear. Well, maybe that and the fact that I am a pseudo-geek who loves spreadsheets, especially if they involve mathematical functions.)

Hmm. I am just now finding that one can't just copy and paste stuff from Excel into text windows. Who knew? (Everyone, Rachel.)

We actually have really nice soil -- dark brown, just fluffy enough, not rocky, etc. (This is a positive change from our previous house, where we had red clay that was impermeable to everything up to and including water, except during really wet storms when it would become the world's reddest mud-slick.) In our nice soil, we are desperately attempting planning to grow beans, broccoli, carrots, corn, cucumbers (pickling and eating), tiny little cute kiwis with no fuzz that you eat like grapes, melons, onions (red and brown), peas, three kinds of peppers, spinach, three varieties of summer squash and two varieties of winter squash, pumpkins, tomatoes (cherry and standard), two kinds of watermelon, and some herbs -- dill because I want to try pickling, basil, oregano, and cilantro for salsa with the tomatoes, onions, and peppers.

Gosh, just LOOK at all the things I'm going to kill this spring. I am so in over my head.

We aren't growing lettuce, even though I would love to, because it reportedly does not like our long, hot, dry summers, and I am, as has been established, a gardening newbie, aside from the occasional corn-and-tomato patch, so dealing with temperamental plants that are going to freak out in the 110-degree heat that occasionally lasts for five or six weeks here is maybe not such a great start to a thriving career as a vegetable-growing granola earth mother*. I did find a spinach variety that was advertised as more heat-tolerant than most, so I'm giving that a try. (We'll see how tolerant it is of the terrifying Rachel Kills Green Things Curse! Bwa ha ha ha!) We are using all heirloom varieties, because we want to start saving seeds. It's a preparedness thing. It also means that we have to be very careful about putting multiple varieties of some species too close to each other, to avoid cross-pollination which makes the seeds Not So Good. In other words, planning the layout of the garden was like one big logic puzzle, and it was so, so much fun. Now if I can just maintain this level of enthusiasm for six or eight short months, the whole project might turn out to be something other than a complete waste of time, energy, and money. (Don't hold your breath.)

*This sentence just kept growing. I'd add a phrase here and a word there until, by the time I realized that it was getting out of hand, it was almost like a game to see exactly how bad a sentence I could make without technically creating a run-on. In other words, I totally did that on purpose. Yeah.

Saturday, February 16, 2008

But THIS time it will be different.

I feel all homeownery and grown-up. Not only do I have a veritable novel-length projects-to-do list, divided by priority and subdivided by expense and whether it's something I can do on my own with the kids* or whether it's something that requires a Man, but I am actually planning a vegetable garden. It is so much fun. I love planning, and I love vegetables, so yay! a garden! Maybe even a homemade greenhouse! This particular project was initially more T's idea than mine, but once he presented it to me, I kind of took the idea and ran with it, with a typically excited New Project attitude**.

Please note that now, in the height of my enthusiasm, is not the time to remind me that All Green Things I Touch Must Die. And anyway, maybe my record will improve. To adapt a quotation from Philippa Gordon (is that her last name?) in Anne of the Island, "when I begin in good earnest to learn to cook [garden], don't you think the brains that enable me to win a mathematical scholarship [um, keep a blog sporadically? get good grades as long as I only take six units at a time? read lots of novels?] will also enable me to learn [gardening] just as well?"

I can hope, anyway. And hey, if I fail, I will probably do it in a spectacular and possibly humorous fashion, which always makes for good blog fodder. So stay tuned.

*LT is oh my gosh such a helper. Everyone should have an eleven-year-old son to help with outdoor projects. And C makes up in enthusiasm for what she hasn't quite yet gained in skill, especially if she picks her own projects -- she loves cleaning the lawn, for example. Which, with a dog*** on the property, becomes very important.

**See also: Why I get halfway through a knitting project and then let it linger all lonesome on the needles while I giddily start a new project, at which I work doggedly until I get halfway through and let it linger all lonesome on the needles... and so on ad infinitum.

***She's doing a lot better but I'm still not sure she was a good idea. She still has a tendency to poop indoors if she isn't taken outside at pretty much precisely the right moment, and now that she sees the kids and me as Her People and the house as Her House, she barks and pseudo-growls at T whenever he enters a room where she is. She settles down when he gets close and touches her, but it is annoying and a little unnerving. OK, OK, dog, maybe a good-sized guy with a beard abused you in your past or something, I dunno, but how long exactly is it going to take you to differentiate between that bad man and this very good one, who, hello, built you a doghouse for when you're outside, and funded your vet visits and all the other VERY EXPENSIVE THINGS you have needed, and just wants to be your friend? T has started to carry treats in his pockets to give to her every time he sees her. He figures it works for the crooks in all the mystery stories, so why not.

Monday, February 04, 2008

four things

Thing one:

Crate training proceeds apace. I can see a tiny light of sanity at the end of the tunnel. (This dog, T points out, has cost us more than a vacation to the beach would have. More than we spent on our first child in his first, oh, three or four years of life. More than I could have reasonably spent in an absolutely dizzying expedition to a bookstore. Or, to get all practical and also to tie in a reference to my other current obsession, possibly more than it would cost to have our driveway graded. She had better plan on saving someone's life, Lassie-fashion, at some point.)

She has just emerged with a very guilty expression from my bedroom. I had better not find any dog-logs in there, missy.

Thing two:
C is sick. She is puky, and flushed but so far not feverish. Poor princess. Here's hoping it's a 12-hour bug. (And also that I don't get it, because tomorrow is a Very Important Night in history class, and also who would take the dog out to poop?)

Thing three:
looklooklooklooklooklooklook:

Not even a single solitary chance of rain. BLISS. I am no longer a person who loves winter. I cannot wait for spring. Heck, I cannot wait until I'm taking the dog for a walk at 8:30 in the evening in a tank top and capris, instead of freezing my toes off in my jammies, jacket, and canvas shoes taking her out for her morning potty. (seriously, we will need some more moisture before the annual drought sets in or we'll all catch on fire around Labor Day. But a break is going to be very very nice.)



Thing four:

HEE.

Saturday, February 02, 2008

test post

Back in the early days of my Internet experience, my primary focus was on e-mail lists. This was, believe it or not, before there was any such thing as Yahoo Groups. I was on several lists covering different topics, and frequently a person would want to bounce a post off the majordomo software to make sure that they were still subscribed, so there would be a post that came through to EVERYONE ON THE LIST that just said "test post. seeing if I'm still subscribed." I always thought, geesh, people, what is up with pestering us all with that? Could you not come up with any content? Even just a little?

Like, say, this scintillating content. Test post! Just seeing if my feed-reader is on crack or not.

OK, ok, ok, content. Um. We are now hopelessly addicted to jibjab.com! There's more snow coming tonight and tomorrow, which makes me want to scream! I desperately need to go to the valley to buy groceries and would like to take the whole family but can't! Because last night while we were gone for twenty minutes Scout completely wrecked some of the curtains I had slaved over so patiently not three weeks ago! So today I am buying a crate! Because everyone recommends using a crate for her if we are gone for short times! Because it's better than an outside run in this nasty snowy weather! And she will dig right out of our nicely fenced yard, it turns out! And because we are not generally gone for all day at a time!

Seriously, the crate will address the symptoms of the separation anxiety that has caused Scout to, in the short space of a week and about four brief absences, do the following:

• unplug and then chew -- I presume in that order -- the cord of the lamp by our door
• tear up the aforementioned curtains
• pee on the couch, because she stands on it to watch us leave and presumably whine and fall to pieces as we drive out of sight. Yay for super excellent odor-removing stain-removing upholstery cleaners.
• poop on the couch (ditto.)
• poop on the floor.
• get up onto the counter
• twice. Once she knocked over a full go-cup of cold coffee, and the other time she
• drank some (very little) cooking oil that was sitting there cold in a pan and then puked on the floor
• twice, and only once was on the easy-clean laminate flooring.

... but I have no clue what to do for the problem itself. Anyone? Anyone? I'm beginning to get a glimpse of an idea as to why Scout may have been abandoned. Not that I even think of doing that, but it might not have been just that someone was moving into an apartment where they couldn't have a dog, which had been my previous assumption, because this is one very nice friendly dog with, as far as I can tell, no faults. Except that apparently she requires absolutely constant human companionship (we tried a little experiment yesterday with Roman and it was a dismal failure, so T is spared any further pestering for a second dog) or she goes completely bananas. Poor thing. Poor us.