Life, With (Optional) Video Games

It's so hot I've largely ceded the computer to my children for gaming, but that and the fact that we should have the Wii hooked up in another month* have me thinking quite a bit about computer games: my own past with them, what my children think of them, and how they'll fit in our homeschooling household.

(*The target date for finishing the den and installing a TV is the Republican primary.  My husband wants to see just how much they think they can get away with up close.)

I loved computer games in the 1970s and 1980s but my coordination is lousy, and it was even worse as a teenager.  I could handle the "shoot" button, although I'd never be a high scorer.  Then Nintendo invented the "jump" button, and I washed out of arcade-style games.

That left PC puzzle games which I preferred, up to a point.  The entire trajectory of my life as a abuse survivor had been about realizing I don't have to do what other people want me to do.  It's served me well in general, but not in puzzle gaming.  I'd get stuck in a game and think, "Why am I expending all this energy pleasing someone who isn't even here?  This is not who I am.  This is not what I do."  At that point it was easy to walk away.  I still liked the concept of computer games though, and I got excited over the developments of RPGs and motion controls.

Our children have no such hangups, and enjoy playing PC games.  When we moved into a bigger house and prepared to get an up-to-date TV it only made sense to pick up a Wii.  Now I'm wondering how I can incorporate this console into our homeschool.

Turns our other people are wondering the same thing.  New Mexico University has an entire department researching how to integrate games in education, especially exercise games.  They summarized their findings in a video, the presentation drags but it has some useful ideas.



And since schoolteachers put everything online, it didn't take long to find free exergame lesson plans.

Indoor exercising in the only way to go in this heat, that's for sure.  And it might be a good idea to keep a dance game pulled up for between-lesson breaks to help "get the sillies out."

The temperature is finally staying below 100F most days, but the rains have  moved in.  While this is good for the garden, the air is so super-saturated with moisture that the air conditioning can't remove the water.  The air flowing from it just blows on the sweat on your body, but it doesn't remove it.  We're going outside as little as possible during daylight.

House Update July 2012

I haven't posted much lately largely because I've been tired out from remodeling.  (Dh just told me to write, "My husband has the summer off, so no one got a vacation."  It's true.  Last-minute Pell Grant "reforms" killed over 2/3rds of the summer school classes and left him little to do but carpentry.)  It's been over 105F for two weeks now, so we're doing a lot of the outdoor prep work between 9pm and midnight.  Here's what we've finished since the last house update in January.



Kitchen

The electrical outlets have been refurbished.  The facings of the upper cabinets are complete except for the decorative bit and the tricky bit.  The paint's been retouched.  The vent hood is installed, so now we can fry food for the first time in almost 2 years.  The drawer slides are here and hopefully we can get on to making the drawers soon.  I need a safe place to store my candy thermometer so I can make homemade yogurt. It's too hot for anything but a cold breakfast, cornflakes get old fast, and it's even too hot for homemade baked goods first thing in the morning.

(Have you seen what yogurt costs in the stores?  Yeah.)

Den

My husband has taken great delight in turning the gloomy former mancave into a sunny playroom.  ("Mancaves are for pathetic losers who can't do anything.")  We finished priming the walls and painted the ceiling.  Extra outlets were added.  The pantry floor is in place right over what was apparently once the garage shed, and the framing has begun.  The built-in cabinets are framed, floored, and have their sub-counters on.  We saved the doors and drawers from the former kitchen lower cabinets, scrubbed them out good, and we'll recycle them here.  Still, the cost of the lumber to finish the room was the biggest expense after the mortgage this month.

I'm slightly annoyed by the work, as I use the den to exercise in and all the commotion has thrown my schedule off.  The 12yo is extremely annoyed that we haven't made the den a priority since we're going to wait until it's finished to buy a new TV (our first since 1995, and our first flat screen) and set up the Wii we got last Christmas.  I pointed out that the delay has given us time to round up extra games, remotes, nunchucks, and a charger, but that only placates her so much.

We haven't been able to buy anything else for the new house or to bring anything large down from the old house, except for a bookcase full of baby and children's books that is now in the girls' room.  They were happy to become reacquainted with old favorites and to introduce them to the 3yo.

The sheds

Much of the outdoor work has been spent finishing one shed and refinishing another.  One shed was left unfinished over a decade ago.  The material to build it was piled behind it and left to weather outdoors for at least 12 years.  Only one wall was completely finished; it held a warped but intact set of 1950's knotted pine upper kitchen cabinets taken from a neighbor's house during their remodeling.   We finished the outer facing, the wiring, the insulation, and the inner facing.

The other shed looked like it had been set up at one time for children's crafts, probably during the house's "day care" era.  It had since been turned into a storage building for at least one other damaged set of upper kitchen cabinets (and possibly part of another set), some lower cabinets, and a huge pile of interior finishing remnants at least 12-15 years old that don't match anything we've seen in the house.   We've cleaned and sorted it out,  The damaged sheetrock was chopped up for Predator bandages flat casting molds. The walls are being prepped so we can install the upper cabinets and return it to it's former function.  If necessary we can run pipes out to it and turn it  into a cabin, should we find ourselves needing to house extra adults in a few years.  We've also scraped the carpet off the ceiling (a 70s fad) and painted it.

The gardens

Last  year's site for the vegetable patch turned out to be a bog, so we're trying a dryer place this year.  Of course that means we're having a drought.  Still, the site has been a good one.  We're just growing enough to eat fresh this year.  We don't have time to can anything.

The flower beds are doing good.  The 11yo likes to birdwatch, so I've pitched the flowers towards butterflies, hummingbirds, and birds, with a lot of red and pinky-purple wildflowers all arranged in drifts according to height, just like they would be found in Nature, provided Nature had the aesthetics of a school photographer.  It's produced a bumper crop of butterflies and dragonflies, and one tiny hummingbird.  The bird feeders we cleaned up and set out, and the bluebird houses the girls made, have also brought us bluebirds and cardinals to watch.

One odd bit came from a cheap bag of "daffodils" we planted out last fall that turned out  to be giant ornamental alliums instead, a much more expensive plant that I never had any fondness for.  (I love to look at alliums while thinking how good they'll taste on my plate.)  Still, we've got them and the butterflies like them, so I'll find a place for them in the back row this fall.

The azaleas are on Year 2 of a 3-year plan to prune them into shape.  They can only be pruned by 1/3 at a time, and they started out as monsters threatening to eat the house.  This year I've got them down to the right height, but they're still spread out everywhere.  I've also started pruning the rest of the shrubs this year.

The floirbunda rose we planted last year did well, so this year it was joined by 15 David Austens:  Harlow Carrs, Braithwaites, a Sharifa Ousma, and a Scentimental.  The Scenitmental and one of the Carrs died, but the rest are doing fine.

We also planted a pear tree and a Japanese persimmon this year.  The persimmon had been sitting in it's pot for two years when we bought it, and had naturally acquired a "bonsai look".  It's doing fine and has even set fruit.

The herb garden has long since outgrown it's spot by the kitchen door and spread out in all directions.   Depending on how you count them, I've now got between 30 and 60 different varieties, including 9 different mints, 6 or 7 different thymes, and IDK how many different dianthus and bee balm.  The regular lemon balm I planted last year is now "golden leaf" lemon balm, which doesn't seem to take the sun as well unfortunately.

While pineapple sage loves my yard, regular sage doesn't.  I've planted three different varieties so far, and two have already died.  Grey-leaved plants don't take to the South, so I'm currently trying a gold variegated sage to see if that will do better.  I wish someone would make a green or golden leaved lavender that would do well down here.

Everything else is doing well, by which I currently mean "hanging in there in spite of the heat".

Mishaps

The people who had this house before us knew a lot about wiring and about heating/cooling installations, but not so much about plumbing.  One problem took out the entire front half of the house (including the laundry and kitchen).  The plumber took one look at it and disappeared for three weeks.  After three weeks of doing dishes and laundry in the bathtub I called him up and fussed at him because I'd had to cancel a talk I was supposed to give at (the UU) church.  He came out to fix them the next morning.  No service provider can afford to be bad-mouthed at church.

Immediately after that the bathroom sink stopped up, and while trying to fix it we found that the house had extra pipes for nonexistent rooms that had never been properly capped -- when it started raining inside the house.

In between those two mishaps the stove element blew, and in the process took out the rest of the wiring in the stove.  (Remind me why we need a computer in a simple appliance.)  After a week of trying to fix it we realized that the cost of all the new parts we needed exceeded the cost of a new stove, and replaced it.

The good news is that it looks like we're about to get a break in the weather.  The forecast is saying that we'll have a big storm next week which will knock the highs down to 95F, which is currently the temperature at midnight.  It's due to arrive on Thursday, the same day the lumber gets here.

Computer Geek's Question Time: Nook Tablet

I want something that will connect with wifi when I travel, basically so I can check into a hotel, hook up the wifi, surf local restaurant reviews, and get directions to obscure places the front desk has never heard of.  Anything that relies on the cloud for storage, like Kindle Fire, is out because I also go to places in the countryside that don't have any wifi access at all, but I'd like to still be able to use what's stored on my machine.

I tried a Nook Tablet in B&N, and immediately ran into problems with the browser.  I couldn't scroll past the bottom of the screen to see what was on the rest of the webpage, and I couldn't get the keyboard to pull up every time I wanted it.  Both problems are sale breakers.

Is there any way I can either fix these problems or install a workable browser on the Nook Tablet?  Or is there some other machine I should be looking at instead?

Poltergeists Explained

My 11yo middle child is in the throws of puberty, and the changes occurring in her body have turned her into a complete hypochondriac.  Since New Year's Day she's had a complaint about some ache or pain every few minutes from when she wakes up until she goes to sleep.  She's been known to wake us up in the middle of the night, or at dawn.  No amount of reassurance or scientific information has made a dent yet, although more books on puberty from a child's perspective are on the way.  Giving her a daily 10 minutes of uninterrupted "complaint time" when she has my undivided attention hasn't worked.  Debunk one complaint and show how that can't possibly happen, and she'll use the same complaint again in 10 minutes.  Exercise hasn't worked.  Sending her out to play with other children hasn't worked.  Mockery hasn't worked.  Nothing has worked. Her ability to drive us all bonkers has gone through the roof.

And suddenly I understood poltergeists, because this almost-pubescent child is so annoying as to make even dead people want to throw things at her.  Gah!

Reading Pratchett's The Bromeliad Trilogy, Fromm's The Anatomy of Human Destructiveness, and Lakoff's Moral Politics at the same time makes for quite a word cocktail:

Most people are not especially sick in the head or especially healthy either.  Most people are just people translates as Most people are somewhat sick in the head but still functional.  Deal with it.

New Neighbors

Earlier this spring the girls made bluebird houses, and we mounted them where they could be seen from the house.  Saturday morning bluebirds moved in, and we enjoyed watching them build their nests.

Saturday afternoon we realized we had another new neighbor -- a young copperhead snake that was trying to move into our yard.  It found a much less friendly welcome at the end of our shovel.

I don't mind new neighbors, unless they bite.

The War Against Western Youth

This is one of the most disturbing articles I've read lately, and that's saying something.  I'm not sure how to prepare my children for a world that eats its young.

A-Day Redux

We celebrated the one-year anniversary of our first trip to Tuscaloosa with another trip to Tuscaloosa, this time sans tornadoes. Technically it was a year and a day, as we didn't want to get caught in the A-day traffic again. We went to a Target for the first time, which was underwhelming; and to Los Tarascos restaurant for the first time, which was overwhelming (great food but none of us are ever ordering a full-size lunch there again).

But the main event was the UA Arboretum Spring Plant Sale. I wanted a golden lemon thyme, a perennial celery (lovage), a Madalane Hill mint, and a ginger mint. I found a golden lemon thyme, a wild celery (smallage), a curly mint, and a berries and cream mint, so no complaints. I also scored a couple of asters and a yarrow for the flower bed.

We wanted to check out a local park, but the 3yo wasn't feeling well. Still, we saw where there was a playground we could visit on future trips.

Adventures in Decorating

Around the time my husband and I married, while we hashed out the guidelines of our future life together, we decided that debt and credit cards were a scam and we would avoid them as much as possible. This led us to buy a 70s-era mobile home and fill it with hand-me-downs and castoffs, but we dreamed of dream houses where everything was "just right". Which, being poor but creative college students looking for cheap entertainment, led to a lot of talking, library book-reading, and window shopping.

We were immediately attracted to Art Nouveau and the Arts & Crafts movement, especially when we realized that the graceful, well-designed houses our older relatives lived in were the Craftsman "bungalows" we read about. In terms of utility, design, aesthetics, comfort, and convenience they were so far ahead of the modern "ranch" houses I and most of our age-mates grew up in that they might as well be from another planet. (I could spend thousands of words ranting about the "ranch" house, but writing time is too precious to rant about anything small. Suffice to say it's impossible to overstate the role of the "ranch" house in the death of the Cowboy Mythos for my generation.)

(And before anybody makes any remarks about being attracted to everything and hating to be categorized, keep in mind it saves a lot of time if you know what bin in the record store you're most likely to find music you like in so you can look there first.)

(And I just realized I dated myself terribly by even knowing what a record store was.)

Last year we bought a 1920 Bungalow and set out to upgrade some of our decrepit furnishings. We soon realized there were some things we didn't know:

1) Craftsmen replicas are hideously expensive.

2) They're very brown. We'd been looking in old books with black-and-white illustrations, and we'd grown up seeing Southern, Colonial-style bungalows which have lighters colors than the older bungalows made up north and out west. We're summer-toned Southerners, we like brown as an accent color but never as a dominant color; and we like jewel toned-accents even more than brown.

So I set about looking for something with Craftsman sensibilities but a more vibrant color scheme. The goal was to find something eyeball-friendly, without the overwhelming, eye-bleeding patterns of the Laura Ashley look or the vast, anxiety-inducing expanses of white of the Modernists. I wanted to give the eye something interesting to look at when it's bored and some blank spaces to gaze into when it's tired.

The "cottage" or "shabby chic" look had potential, when it avoided looking like vast expanses of Modernist white punctuated by puffs of pink. (As with fashion, it turned out the more sedate interpretations of experienced amateurs look much better than the more extreme interpretations of attention-seeking professionals.) I kept hearing the same code phrases parroted over and over again, and I knew there had to be a guru out there somewhere. Turns out she's Rachel Ashwell, and apparently she sells ice cream-colored furniture (WTH did that come from?) and linens through....Target?

Uh-huh. Until we moved, the nearest Target was 3 1/2 hours away. (Now it's only 1 1/2 hours away, but we still haven't been there yet.) No wonder I wasn't aware of the latest trend in "country" decorating. I lived too far out in the country!

Oh, apparently the ice cream-colored furniture is something rich people did in their vacation homes in order to disguise the fact that the their furniture was originally stained *gasp* different shades of brown! Oh, the horrors! Aren't rich people simply too precious for words? I'm not fond of brown, but I don't have a problem with furniture that comes in different shades of brown. It looks more interesting that way.

Besides, I suspect Target is really selling ice cream-colored furniture to disguise the fact that it's probably particle-board crud that will fall apart as soon as it hits the hot, humid Southern air. Cynical, moi?

Still, I could see painting the occasional piece that was too badly damaged to restore. I found a couple of banged-up old tables in the shed out back. I can give those to the girls to decorate, and get at least two weeks worth of art lessons down as well as new furniture. Win!

One of the other things cottage style has going for it is that it's pack-rat-friendly, which is inexplicably rare in contemporary styles. Isn't everyone a pack-rat these days? Er, I mean "collector" of course. I've been collecting decorative boxes (They're both pretty and they organize messier collections) for years, and I love displaying them.

I've seen cottage style photo spreads highlighting just about every collectible you can think of -- except one. The one thing I've never seen photos of collections of in cottage style, or any contemporary style, are books. You have to go back to the old Arts & Crafts layout to see pictures of libraries, yet private book collections are more popular now than ever before in history. I wonder what's behind that disconnection? Whatever the reason for other people's hangups, I realized by age 7 my primary interior design challenge would always be having enough bookshelves.

(Pet peeve time -- if you're going to put up a picture of a room you call a "library" or even a "study" there damn well better be some bookshelves in it. If it doesn't have any bookshelves it's not a "library". 'Nuff said.)

Even with Ashwell I'm hearing something regurgitated from somewhere older, and I suspect, less enamored with vast expanses of Modernist white punctuated by puffs of pink. A bit of digging turns up the Bohemian style, of which Ashwell is an anemic, watered-down descendent.

Apparently the contemporary Bohemian style is a particular outgrowth of the Arts & Crafts movement that started in the 1920s and accreted around the painter Augustus John and his friends and lovers. Hmmm, I wonder how many of the fans of "shabby chic" realize they're following in the footsteps of polyamorous proto-hippies?

Further research shows that boho fashion has apparently been in and out of favor in Britain for several years now, although it gained little traction in the US. Pity that, it's my favorite form of dress. Then again, I've been too busy to dress up any in the past few years.

One of the Immutable Laws of Fashion (don't laugh, a handful really do exist) is that anything that's been fashionable in clothing for over five years becomes a form of interior decor. After a decade of on-again, off-again Bohemian fashions there had to be Bohemian decor, so I googled up some pics.

Ooh, I see color. Lots of color. Sometimes, quite frankly, too much color, but at least there's plenty of jewel toned-accents.

There's also plenty of bookshelves. I approve.

My husband looked at the Google pics over my shoulder and said, "Those look so comforting. Even if I don't like a particular room, it's comforting to see people confident enough to express their individuality like that."

This is starting to look like a win. Of course the fact that I could probably achieve "the look" by simply tossing my scarf collection around the living room is a plus.

The trick is to use strong color while avoiding looking like a rainbow clown wig. Then again, at the craft fair earlier this month I passed up tons of multi-colored pottery and bought an arched tree branch that had been formed into a candle holder. It is easier for an item to be "just right" when it is simple instead of fussy.

I could go with a Colonial Bungalow style with touches of Bohemian. And since one of the other Immutable Laws of Fashion is that when grown-ups become successful enough to dress as they please they invariably head for whatever was in fashion when they were young, as soon as the children of the 90s get some money they'll make sure Bohemian fashion (and by extension Bohemian decor) stays around for many years to come.

This looks like the start of a beautiful relationship.

Contraception: The Breath of Modern Life

Much fuss has been made lately of the contraception fiasco, especially the statement by Republicans that contraception is not a big issue for women. But if that were true, why doesn't the issue go away? Why does it continue to dominate women's thinking and actions in a way that no other political issue has come close?

For women, contraception is like oxygen. In our day to day lives we don't think about it much. How often do you think about the air you breath? How many millions of breaths do you take without thinking, expecting the oxygen to be there for you when you need it, one thoughtless inhalation after another? The oxygen is there doing it's job, allowing you to focus on your life.

Contraception is like oxygen for women. As long as it's there it allows us to focus on our lives. Whether that focus is currently on furthering our education, our careers, figuring out what we want to do about an aspect of our lives, or on the child or children we already have, contraception gives us room to breath.

And just like the air we breath, contraception is not something women focus on all that often. We don't want to focus on it. We don't see why we should have to focus on it. It should be there in the background so we can make other things a priority.

But what happens when something threatens your air supply? Suddenly nothing is more important than drawing that next breath. Nothing focuses a person's attention so swiftly and thoroughly as not being able to breathe. Panic sets in, followed by an adrenaline surge. Nothing is more important than removing the obstacle which threatens your breathing. And nothing makes you angrier than the possibility that someone took away your ability to breathe deliberately.

That is the kind of reaction a threat to contraception sets off in modern women (and smarter men). And that is why women won't stop until the threat is ended, and until they can once again breathe freely and get on with the rest of their lives.

Aaargh!

Please tell me that somewhere they still make a refrigerator with a freezer that has shelves instead of pull-out drawers. I'm so tired of not being able to stack anything efficiently, everything spilling out on the floor anytime I go to get something, and all my freezer storage boxes breaking.

Reading Moral Politics : How Liberals and Conservatives Think. Most interesting. Will have to blog about sometime when the 3yo isn't pulling on me.

Squee! My Little Pony blanks!

It's hard to say who loves My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic more, my 12 and 10 year old girls or their 3 year old brother. But we're all going crazy over Hasbro selling Decorate Your Own Pony blanks.

Genius marketing move, that.

Health Update Part 2 -- The Jock Stuff

The first time I tried an individualized morning exercise program was in college 25 years ago. In order to help me get up and get to the gym, I turned on Mississippi Public Radio and promptly discovered Morning Edition. That scuttled the exercising, but I've been a fan of the show ever since. These days I keep the radio and the exercise equipment in the same room. It works a lot better that way. :)

Anytime you're doing a solo fitness routine the first question is, "How do you measure your progress?" I'm fit enough that I can't tell any immediate benefit from exercising. My body type doesn't lose weight easily, if at all. There's no spasms from muscles that have never been asked to do "that" before which clear up in a few weeks.

I'm not yet lifting heavy enough weights to feel it the next day. I buy another set when I can, but that's usually monthly. So far the best indicator I have that I'm actually making progress is that I can do certain exercises, like pushups, and certain dance moves, like "walks" and "layers", for twice as long without straining as I could six months ago.

As far as the cardio goes, I doubt my ability to reliably self-monitor. This month's fitness purchase is a heart rate monitor watch which should arrive tomorrow. I needed a new watch anyway.

Following the recommendation in Coopersmith's book, I've folded the yoga into the daily warm-ups and cool downs to make more room for cardio and strength training. This means longer sessions. Unfortunately the day isn't getting longer to compensate. I'm just doing the most basic yoga poses. I might well be ready to try some more advanced ones, but I'd like to have a trained spotter around the first few times. Living in the middle of nowhere stinks sometimes.

Brighteyes (12) loves getting me up in the mornings to exercise, which helps keep me motivated. She prefers jumping rope to dance. Sunshine (11) prefers to sleep in.

Health Update Part 1 -- The Geek Stuff

The good news is that my knee joint is fine. It's the ligaments that are damaged, apparently from picking up a screaming toddler and carrying him away from something he shouldn't have been on. Since the ligaments heal slowly, I simply have to avoid picking up toddlers or walking up long staircases for about six months and I'll be fine.

Right. Like I can avoid picking up Owl for as long as sixty minutes. I heard James Levine speak about the importance of non-exercise activities the other day. If he's right I already have the greatest exercise machine known to man -- a three year old. I don't know if I've lost any weight pulling him out of trouble, but I can do a full pushup for the first time in my life.

And about that weight, apparently I've lost quite a bit of it in the past six months. I've always refused to own a weight scale on principal. (I'll break that principal for the Wii only for the exercise games.) However, the scales I have been on show that I'm within 10-20 pounds of where I was a few years ago when I exercised every day. Back when I exercised every day for two years I lost two inches off my hips but I didn't lose an ounce of my weight -- the fat converted to muscle which weighs more. So, you know what I'm going to call that weight my baseline weight and not worry about dropping below it, and I don't care if BMI calls it "obese" because they're too inaccurate to be trusted. I'm just going to be concerned about getting back to it.

I'm continuing with my fitness program, although not today. A long staircase sidelined me and gave me the time to write this post. Being a geek I'll start a post about jock things by talking about -- books.

BTW, is it just me or are books written by fitness experts terribly flighty? The ones I've read tend to be poorly organized, and not just because they're "how-to" books. I own over a thousand "how-to" books and none of them are as bad as the average fitness book. I have to sit down with a notebook and annotate them so I can find the information I need, just like I was taking a class.

Let's start with my baseline book, Geralyn Coopersmith's Fit and Female: The Perfect Fitness and Nutrition Game Plan for Your Unique Body Type. It's a good starter book with plenty of entry-level information, well collated if not well organized. As is common with fitness books for women, it begins in a "confessional" style designed to do three things:

1) convince the reader that the writer is a "real girl",

2) convince the reader it's not her fault, it's society's fault for having unrealistic expectations of women, and

3) convince the reader that her genes will set hard limits on the amount of weight she can lose safely.

It's 2012, are there still women who don't know these things? Don't answer that.

I must give the writer credit for acknowledging that different women's bodies have different needs, and for devising different diet and exercise plans for those different women. Her plan for my body type (endo-pear) appears good so far, although her weight training exercises are pretty wimpy. She's got some youtube videos (apparently an exercise DVD is coming) but I haven't watched them all yet.

Fortunately for the strength training I've got Karen Andes trilogy, A Woman's Book of Strength, A Woman's Book of Power, and A Woman's Book of Balance. Andes has written 5 very good books and made two dozen exercise DVDs, the ones that I've seen have been good quality with an emphasis on fun and many have won awards. It's a pity Andes has no respect for her own work or for her fans. Once she finishes something, she shrugs, says "I'm done with that", and moves on. There's no compilation of her work and no consideration for a young woman who might need the information she's "done with" and "moved on" from, she makes no effort to keep anything in print, won't even keep a list of her prior works on a website so we can look for them, and on top of all that changed her professional name after 20 years in business to "Aruna"(!)

Aaargh.

I love the writer's work, but there's simply no excuse for that level of managerial sloppiness. The underlying assumption I'm getting is that she assumes no one respects her enough to want to follow her career, and that she has a similar lack of respect for her audience. The former is not true. I don't know about the latter.

Meta-rants aside, she's got some very good and very fun strength training exercises, which I have to annotate before I can thoroughly use so I'm not having to stop in mid-session to look up something that might be in one of three books.

But this is fitness, you don't want to know what I'm reading but what I'm doing. That will be in the next part.

The War on Women Comes to DC Comics

For those of you living under a rock or working for DC Comics, Wonder Woman is a superhero invented by a psychologist to help women and girls feel good about being women and girls. That is her prime directive.

Anything that makes women and girls not feel good about being women and girls does not belong in a Wonder Woman comic. Simple, no?

Even with literally dozens of misogyny articles appearing every day, this crap came the closest to making me want to throw up.

A Bright Spot Amidst All the Madness

For those of you playing offshore, here's Rachel Maddow with a concise (if incomplete) synopsis. She's missing that Kansas is about to pass a law that will cause it to lose it's ability to train acredited OB/GYNs or that Colorodo is trying to pass the "personhood amendment" a third time against the vigorous opposition of the voters who have slammed it down twice in increasingly resounding defeats.

I read a quote from a statistician on one of the major news outlets saying that the number of young women voting in the Republican primaries was "statistically negligible". That's what, less than 2%? No young women, no future. Which leads to this lovely PSA from MoveOn.org:



I wonder if the Ad Council will do a radio version to play on Rush's show, since free PSAs are the only things you hear between his rants these days.

There is a bright side. The backlash against this could be so fierce that it could sweep enough feminist politicians into office that we could finally pass and ratify a new ERA.

It's a personal fantasy of mine.

ETA: Just after I posted this entry, a piece came up where Romney tells a woman who wants mammograms and HPV vaccines (so she doesn't, y'know, die a painful lingering death from cancer) to "vote for the other guy".



If I tried to make this up, y'all wouldn't believe it. Does he think women don't count? Does he think we have no menfolk who love us and will vote with us? Does he even think at all?

Somewhere Obama's ad agents are scampering with joy.


________________________


I'm sorry I haven't had time to post anything longer or more personal lately. Right now with the 3yo, homeschooling the girls, and spring gardening/cleaning I can barely find time to sit down. I've got one chunk of free time when my brain is halfway active. I can either blog or exercise. I'm trying to exercise. Hopefully the time crunch will clear up and I can blog more.

World Ending Sign #2: Republican Congressman Proposes Taxing the Rich

(I normally don't run this much political commentary even during a Presidential election, but this year is off the scale.)

Freshman Republican Rep. Rick Crawford will propose a surtax on millionaires Thursday morning, a crack in the steadfast GOP opposition to extracting more money from the nation’s top earners.

Crawford will propose the additional tax— expected to be north of 2.5 percent — on individual income over $1 million as part of a broader fiscal responsibility package.

“He’s watched the Gangs of Six and 100 and deficit commissions, as well as leadership’s budget and tax plan, and he feels there will never be a deal that will pass the Senate without a revenue component,” a Crawford aide said, describing the legislation without attribution because it has not yet been officially announced.

************

According to a source close to the Arkansan, the lawmaker “feels that if were going to make any progress in addressing the deficit and the debt eventually, then we need to find compromise.”

What's next, a Republican Gay Pride Parade?

ETA DH's comment: "What did you expect? An Arkansan knows you can't bring home the pork without slaughtering some pigs."

The World Is Ending: Ann Coulter Compliments Democrats

There's been a lot of signs lately that it's the End Times for the political world as we know it with Santorum, birth control, Rush et al; but none surer than this one: Republican hate-monger extraordinaire Ann Coulter said the Democrats are better than the Republicans at something important -- keeping con artists and charlatans from stealing the limelight.

At a Lincoln Day Dinner event in Florida, she was asked about the possibility of a brokered Republican convention.

“One of the ones promoting that is Sarah Palin, who has suggested herself as the choice,” Coulter replied. “I think as long as it’s between us girls, I’ve been observing something about her. I don’t think it’s likely to happen. I don’t know what these people are cheering for.”

***********

“And just a more corporate problem is I think our party and particularly our movement, the conservative movement, does have more of a problem with con men and charlatans than the Democratic Party,” Coulter continued. “I mean, the incentives seem to be set up to allow people, as long as you have a band of a few million fanatical followers, you can make money. The Democrats have managed to figure out how not to do that.”

“Dennis Kucinich, he’s a nut, he has fanatical followers, [but] he doesn’t gets a show on MSNBC. He doesn’t get any kind of gig on MSNBC. He’s road kill. Howard Dean doesn’t get a show. Howard Dean was fairly respectable for a Democrat. No, you embarrass us and drag this thing out, and you are finished in the Democratic Party.”

She noted that Republicans had been asked to sign a number of controversial pledges, such as Grover Norquist’s anti-tax pledge and The Family Leader’s marriage pledge. But the only pledge, Coulter joked, that she would support was one that said: “If I lose the nomination, I pledge I will not take a gig with Fox News or write a book.”

Looks like a death match is brewing between the Randian Republicans and the Fundy Republicans. Coulter has picked her side.

Don't Step On My Jaw

After all I've been through it takes a lot to gobsmack me, but good old Sara pulled it off:

Palin: Obama Seems To Want To Return To The "Days Before The Civil War" When People Were Not Considered Equal

So, Barak Obama wants to return to the days when he, his wife, and his daughters would have been slaves? Facing legally mandated rape and torture with no recourse every day? Is that what she's saying?

You figure it out:



I know the Paul Revere remark should have been fair warning, but....

This Shouldn't Need to be Said.

There is only one place in government where sick perverts who force doctors to rape their pregnant patients should be, and that's under the federal penitentiary.

The Valentine's Day Spyware Surprise

On Valentine's Day we found spyware on our computer. It was a huge, nasty, keystroke-collecting thing apparently installed year before last by hand when someone broke into our house looking for our medical insurance records (and audio-taped themselves doing it, the dorks) and set it to auto-download on V-day. We don't think it activated last V-day because we weren't doing much online then as we were still busy moving.

This is an infuriating, intolerable invasion of our privacy.

Sometimes the Gods Are TOO Helpful

Here I was wondering how to start a conversation with my preteen daughters on non-reproductive sex (They know where babies come from) when an obsolete and insulting attempt to hobble enslave devalue force women into a second-class status through taking away their contraceptives drops right into our laps. Hoo boy.

With all the poverty going around, you'd think they would concentrate on that issue, but nooo, they gotta find one that hits even closer to home, an issue that literally gets under the skin of every woman. This is evil work attempted by people who can't be bothered to care about the lives and well-being of the majority of the world's population. It will not succeed, of course. But that it was even attempted is a moral outrage.

Part of me wants to make the most of this wonderfully appropriate "teachable moment". The rest of me wants to do whatever it takes to make sure no such idiot-fueled "moments" ever happen again.

Spring is here already?

The South's native tiny purple violets have flowers about the size of the big end of a chopstick. They are the most conservative indicator of spring, never blooming until all danger of severe cold weather is past. Their flowers began covering my yard in the first week of February. This is ridiculous. It hasn't even gotten cold enough to knock the leaves off the bushes, which has played havoc with my pruning schedule.

More worrisome to Southerners is that it also hasn't gotten cold enough to kill most of the insect larva. Popular opinion is that we're going to be eaten alive next summer.

The other surefire indicator of changing weather has also surfaced. For some reason a warming trend tears my stomach up. This put a dent in my exercise schedule for a few days, but I'm trying to soldier on. More about that later.

House Update January 2012

We've been concentrating on getting the kitchen cabinets completed, and the shelves are finally done. The stovepipe's in place, and the vent hood is almost ready to install. We still need to make the cabinet facings, drawers, and doors, but the hardwood's been ordered to start that. But we can use the shelves to spread our stuff out. My Christmas present, a Kitchen Aid, in unpacked and in use. Estimated completion date -- early spring.

In the den we've installed extra windows and put primer over all the walls so it looks like a room and not a dark cave. We've started laying out both the pantry and one of the built-ins. We still have to finish of those and put down flooring. Estimated completion date -- late spring.

The handyman finished putting up the trim in our bedroom, the kitchen, and the hall. He also did enough of the living and dining room that we can start moving in our furniture. When we can afford movers, that is. He took a bite out of the budget.

We painted a shed in the color scheme we're thinking of. It's okay, but needs work. It'll be a while before we can afford exterior house painting anyway.

The herb garden is going good. The tender perennials are all down for the winter, but they look like they might return come spring. The bee balm went down, but it's coming back. Everything else just slowed growing but haven't stopped.

Last year's vegetable patch was too wet. Next year we'll try it in a drier place, but I worry about how much sun it'll get.

No plants died except for a juniper that had been planted too close to its neighbors by the previous owners. The junipers on either side are so big I doubt it'll be missed once the stump is removed.

We found some old bird feeders in the back. I need to get them cleaned and out where my junior birdwatchers can see them.

I'm supposed to have some roses coming in the mail in a few weeks. I hope they do well and the deer don't eat them all. They nibbled on both the rose and the fig tree earlier, and deer have to be mighty hungry to eat fig leaves. The deer population is exploding faster than the hunters can kill them. At the rate it's growing not even a widespread cull may make a dent in their numbers. Nobody wants to think about the kind of ecological damage that will cause.

Past vs. Present

I don't talk about my childhood much. It wasn't a happy time, and the further I get away from it the happier I become. I would rather not think about it, but that option hasn't been available lately.

Most of you probably already know that I was abused as a child, and that I have chronic depression and Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder as a result. I first became aware that I was what I now recognize as clinically depressed while thinking about my upcoming fourth birthday. I can't remember back to a time when I didn't have these conditions which plays havoc with my sense of normalcy.

The suicide planning started around ten. Every night when I went to bed I reviewed my options for killing myself. Every night I came to the conclusion that I couldn't be absolutely sure they would work. Then I went over my list of reasons for living. I joked to myself that the first one was finishing whatever book I was reading at the time. One night that was the only thing on the list.

I still haven't written David Brin that thank-you letter.

The runaway planning started in my teens and followed the same routine. I had no backup, no resources, and no illusions about my ability to survive on the streets. I always came back to the same conclusion -- tough it out, get a scholarship, and get out.

I say this not to garner sympathy, but perspective. You need to understand the significance of my next statement.

I was the lucky one.

I just came away with a chronic depression, PTSD, and suicidal tendencies. My little sister came away with anorexia nervosa and a slew of addictions.

One difference between us was in how we responded to our adopted* mother. Mom was a big factor in making our childhood Hell.

(*The first thing my husband-to-be said to me after meeting her was, "Thank God you told me you were adopted. If I thought you were blood kin to that woman I'd head for the hills.")

Mom was a former schoolyard bully who never emotionally matured past the age of 13. The best way I know to describe her is to describe her funeral. There were no flowers. A lot of people came to the viewing just to look in the coffin. The preacher's eulogy (no one else spoke) was a masterpiece of it's genre -- "She always had strong ideas about Heaven. I'm sure she's learned a lot since then," and "When her Sunday School class heard she was in the hospital a fight broke out among the ladies over who would go see her." Even at that the back row was ducking for cover, afraid the Lord would strike him down for lying from the pulpit on her behalf. (I always wonder why people pay good money to see black comedy. Don't they have families?) No one will repeat what she said about me and my family on her deathbed. All they'll say is to go on with my life and think no more about "that evil, selfish witch".

I got real mad at that last bit. It would have done me a world of good if somebody had had the nerve to call her that to my face back when I was a child trying to understand why the center of my universe, her, was so off-kilter.

Because if adults who didn't live with her reacted that way, then you can imagine what life with her was like for her children.

I first concluded that it was my fault and I should do everything I could to please her, but that only made things worse. Resentment was Mom's default state, so if you succeeded at anything in an attempt to please her she resented you for that success, unless she could use it against someone else. This is a woman who bragged about standing up and cheering when she heard the news of JFK's assassination. And RFK. And MLK. She never spoke an uncatty compliment except through gritted teeth.

My fallback position was to reject everything. I rebelled against everything, including the stereotypical forms of rebellion which looked like traps set up by TPTB to ensnare those who tried to escape.

Sis tried to please her longer.

Mom hated herself of course. She took that hate out on everyone else for every excuse that she ever heard. She hated Blacks, Jews, Catholics, Hispanics, et al, but most of all she hated women. She was the biggest misogynist I've ever met. She made white Southern men of the 1970s look like die-hard feminists in comparison.

Of course she hounded us to be extreme versions of stereotypical femininity: dumb, charming, graceful, completely self-negating and yet somehow accomplished. And skinny. Preferably skinnier than Twiggy.

I tried to be skinny for her sake, but I'm a) an endomorph, and b) a pragmatist. Skinny is not in my DNA. Neither is tilting at windmills. So I sat out to be a healthy, curvy girl.

That wasn't good enough for Mom of course, and I got an earful of abuse over it on every occasion. I did what worked; I labeled everything she said as garbage and rejected it. But I still heard it.

Sis is an ectomorph. It didn't take her long to develop full-blown anorexia nervosa. She got skinny enough for Mom to use her to berate me about my weight, but somehow that was never skinny enough.

(After one too many remarks from Mom about how "healthy" Sis looked in comparison to me I said, "She's two years younger than me and looks ten years older! People who knew us as children keep getting us mixed up. You can see ever bone she has; she has fur on her arms, sunken eyes, and cauliflower ears. The next stage is for her teeth to fall out!"

"Oh, she's got a good dentist. He'll take care of her teeth. You should get a good insurance plan like she has."

See what I mean about black comedy? Why do people pay for it when lines like that are for free?)

When I reached adulthood I had a lot of health issues to work on, starting (obviously) with mental health. After 25 years I've got most of the mental ones in line at least. I've accepted that they're chronic conditions, can recognize the symptoms, and know how to avoid the triggers. I've buried a lot of ghosts and come to terms with a lot that happened. That's the hardest work I've ever done in my life. I think I can safely say it's harder than many people ever attempt.

When it came to my physical health I encountered two stumbling blocks. One was the extraordinary amount of misinformation, much of it from "official" sources, about women's health issues. Sometimes it seems like as much as 99% of what our culture thinks is true about health, especially women's health, is actually false. Coming from a background involving mental illness, a field long subjected to all sorts of snake oil, only exacerbated this awareness. I doubt I need to go into detail; other people have ranted about this issue before and this post rambles enough already.

All that misinformation only got distilled and concentrated by the second stumbling block, Mom. Whenever she got the chance she did it in person, but now that she's gone her mental construct lives on in the back of my head ready to nag 24/7. This means that on those occasions when I have tried to diet I have to deal with her ghost nagging me about it. Dieting feels like I'm giving in to her, following down my sister's path of self-destruction, being sucked into one of Mom's many traps, negating all the hard work I've done to become my own person and losing myself in her hateful image issues. That sets off my well-honed anti-Mom response, overwhelming fury at whatever load of crap she was pushing this time, and I act out my rage by -- breaking my diet.

Hey, that response literally kept me out of the insane asylum. But right now it's doing nothing for my weight.

That's not to say I ignored my diet. I relabeled it. I practiced healthy eating with a menu high in protein, fresh fruit and veggies, and low in pre-packaged food. I ate only at regular, pre-planned intervals. I hardly ever ate out. I exercised -- for stamina and to control my depression. As long as I didn't think about it as weight control or do anything overtly associated with weight control (weighing often, counting calories, and so forth) I was all right. While I never got skinny I never had any health problems either.

That worked until I reached middle age and Baby #4 came along. Between taking care of him and dealing with that nonsense I had to deal with recently I gained a lot of weight. While pulling a tantrum-throwing toddler off something he shouldn't have been climbing on I injured my knee. Having to repeat that act on a regular basis hasn't helped it heal.

There's a lot of areas where I can debate anti-fat bias in medicine, but joints are not one of them. It's lose the weight or lose the knee.

Actually taking weight off comes up against some difficult physiological realities. My body type holds on to weight the hardest. Simple portion control won't do the job, I'll actually have to count calories. As far as exercise goes, a few years ago I exercised every day for two years in a balanced routine of stretching, cardio and strength training. It converted the fat into muscle so while I shrank two dress sizes I didn't lose an ounce. That would strengthen the muscles of the knee, but it's not the muscles that are the problem. That means more overt weight-loss activity than I've been successful with before, and that gets triggery.

Exercise at this point in time comes up against some practical problems. With three kids constantly underfoot it's extremely difficult to find the time, and I'm almost always exhausted. I have no TV to play my exercise DVDs. The space in front of the computer to exercise in is taken up with building supplies for the remodeling we're doing. It'll be three months before that's available, up to a year before we're ready for the TV. I did get a Wii this Christmas (an older model you can hook a dance mat up to), but it's in the closet for now.

There's no local exercise classes. We spoke to the PE instructors at the local community college about non-credit night classes, but there's no telling when or even if that will come to anything. The nearest classes are over an hour's drive away, and I have small children and no day care. That's also the problem with walking outside. So I'm dodging construction material in our unfinished den dancing and doing yoga to music CDs. Still, it's hard to stay motivated.

And then there's that damn trigger. I've been slowly working on this for a month now, easing my way into setting up an exercise area, cutting back on portion size, and starting to examine my diet, and it's already making me fretful. To my surprise I haven't done anything to give the trigger a good whack yet, but it's still there.

So here's the question, is there a place online where women gather together to motivate themselves to lose weight in a pro-feminist manner, without descending into language that self-loathing, anti-fat and anti-woman? I've measured my bones and my skeleton, with no meat on it whatsoever, is a size 14. That's as skinny as I can get unless some dress manufacturer cooks the numbers (Which has been known to happen, but that's a separate rant.) I'm never going to be a size 8. I'm always going to be what our society considers plus sized, I'm always going to look "fat" to ignorant eyes, and I'm okay with that. I just want to improve my health. But if I have to listen to other people carry on in stereotypical "dieting" language, I'm going to lose my cool.

Third-World Muslims Are Smarter Than Ric Santorum

Ric Santorum doesn't believe birth control should be used under any circumstances, even to prevent the death of the mother (except when it's his wife). Contrast his attitude with that of conservative Muslim clerics in one of the world's poorest and least educated countries, Senegal.

Guardian UK:

On the poor outskirts of Dakar, Senegal, we sat before six imams in an airy mosque. They are holy men, respected community leaders, and, lately, birth control champions. "Family spacing," they called it, as they cheerfully explained why Islam supports it. "What's good for a woman is good for her family, and for her society. We want healthy societies."

Voice of America:

...more and more, families are seeking contraception to space or limit births despite the associated taboos in the country, which is more than 90 percent Muslim.

"Some people say Islam is against family planning, but life is getting more and more difficult," said Mamy Diop.

Historically, the only acceptable application of family planning has been birth spacing for the health of the mother and the child. But religious leaders increasingly are invoking the Quran's message of financial responsibility.

"Islam has discussed this," said Imam Niasse. "If resources are limited and the family size is too large, there will be problems for the family. We are already living a situation of scarcity and we should talk openly. We have many children here, but what kind of children do we have?"

'nuff said.

Translation, Please

Yesterday while talking about linguistic differences between Republicans and Democrats I received a bizarre email that's so deep into Republican-speak I can't make heads or tails of it; and I'm 45 years old, born just one year past the end of the Baby Boom. To me it looks like there's so many false assumptions here it's hard to know where to start on it (Who under 50 can afford to live in a big fancy house?) but apparently it resonated with the person who sent it on. All I can tell is that there's a boatload of resentment present, and a lot of, "You damn kids get off my lawn!" Oh, and apparently they kinda forgot to give their own children a decent education along the way. They acknowledge that, then turn around and blame the kids.

Can anyone tell me what this is supposed to be saying?

They like to refer to us as senior citizens, old fogies, geezers, and in some cases dinosaurs. Some of us are "Baby Boomers" getting ready to retire. Others have been retired for some time. We walk a little slower these days and our eyes and hearing are not what they once were. We have worked hard, raised our children, worshiped our God and grown old together. Yes, we are the ones some refer to as being over the hill, and that is probably true. But before writing us off completely, there are a few things that need to be taken into consideration.

In school we studied English, history, math, and science which enabled us to lead America into the technological age. Most of us remember what outhouses were, many of us with firsthand experience. We remember the days of telephone party-lines, 25 cent gasoline, and milk and ice being delivered to our homes. For those of you who don't know what an icebox is, today they are electric and referred to as refrigerators. A few even remember when cars were started with a crank. Yes, we lived those days.

We are probably considered old fashioned and out-dated by many. But there are a few things you need to remember before completely writing us off. We won World War II, fought in Korea and Viet Nam. We can quote The Pledge of Allegiance, and know where to place our hand while doing so. We wore the uniform of our country with pride and lost many friends on the battlefield. We didn't fight for the Socialist States of America, we fought for the "Land of the Free and the Home of the Brave." We wore different uniforms but carried the same flag. We know the words to the Star Spangled Banner, America ,and America the Beautiful by heart, and you may even see some tears running down our cheeks as we sing. We have lived what many of you have only read about in history books and we feel no obligation to apologize to anyone for America.

Yes, we are old and slow these days but rest assured, we have at least one good fight left in us. We have loved this country, fought for it, and died for it, and now we are going to save it. It is our country and nobody is going to take it away from us. We took oaths to defend America against all enemies, foreign and domestic, and that is an oath we plan to keep. There are those who want to destroy this land we love but, like our founders, there is no way we are going to remain silent.

It was mostly the young people of this nation who elected Obama and the Democratic Congress. You fell for the "Hope and Change" which in reality was nothing but "Hype and Lies." You have tasted socialism and seen evil face to face, and have found you don't like it after all. You make a lot of noise, but most are all too interested in their careers or "Climbing the Social Ladder" to be involved in such mundane things as patriotism and voting. Many of those who fell for the "Great Lie" in 2008 are now having buyer's remorse. With all the education we gave you, you didn't have sense enough to see through the lies and instead drank the 'Kool-Aid.' Now you're paying the price and complaining about it. No jobs, lost mortgages, higher taxes, and less freedom. This is what you voted for and this is what you got. We entrusted you with the Torch of Liberty and you traded it for a paycheck and a fancy house.

Well, don't worry youngsters, the Grey-Haired Brigade is here, and in 2012 we are going to take back our nation. We may drive a little slower than you would like but we get where we're going, and in 2012 we're going to the polls by the millions. This land does not belong to the man in the White House nor to the likes of Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid. It belongs to "We the People" and "We the People" plan to reclaim our land and our freedom. We hope this time you will do a better job of preserving it and passing it along to our grandchildren. So the next time you have the chance to say the Pledge of Allegiance, stand up, put your hand over your heart, honor our country, and thank God for the old geezers of the "Grey-Haired Brigade."

Author, Anon. Grey-Haired Brigade Member


Footnote:
This is spot on. I may color my hair but I’m still a Gray-Haired Geezer signing on. I will circulate this to other Gray-Haired Geezers all over this once great county. Can you feel the ground shaking??? It's not an earthquake, it is a STAMPEDE.

Have a Blessed Day

Ric Santorum Disses All Married Couples, Straight As Well As Gay

Ric Santorum, a Republican presidential candidate who is not afraid to admit in front of a national audience that he doesn't understand the difference between a dog, a child, and an adult, or between a parental relationship and a marital relationship, has said some incredibly offensive things about gay married couples. So offensive, in fact, that it's possible many people have missed his other offensive statements against straight married couples.

Ric Santorum opposes birth control even when used by married couples because it is "disrespectful" of women and families and so "hurts" women and society. Think about it. If a particular straight married couple honestly decide that they would make terrible parents and choose not to have babies and not to inflict their complete lack of interest in children or child-rearing on the next generation, Santorum thinks they are being "disrespectful" of children and families. Really.

More commonly, if a married couple who want to have children choose to delay pregnancy for a few years in order to increase their own maturity and/or achieve a more stable financial base for their family, Santorum thinks they are "disrespectful" of women and families. Honest.

Or if a married couple with children decide to limit the number they have so they can spend more time parenting the offspring they've already got, Santorum believes they are "disrespectful".

It's worth noting that the reason birth control was sought after in the first place was to prevent married women from dying in childbirth after their uterus ruptured from too many pregnancies, a horrible but common occurrence 100 years ago. Santorum apparently thinks dying in childbirth is more "respectful" to women than living to care for the children they already have (or doing whatever else they choose to live for).

Of course without birth control more married women would die in childbirth and leave behind more orphaned children, significantly raising the number of single parent households in America. Their surviving children would suffer all the problems associated with being brought up in a single parent family; but hey, they would belong to "respectful" single parent families! Better be brought up in a "respectful" single parent family where the mother died trying to give birth than to be raised by two loving parents who "disrespected" the mother by not risking her health.

So to all the gay people upset about what Santorum has said about gay couples, You Are Not Alone. Santorum doesn't just hate all gay married couples. He hates all married couples, period. There's only one thing you can say about a man who tries to win the Presidency of a country where over 90% of people marry with such an attitude. Jesus, what a moron.

Trombone Warning

I'm feeling an urge to talk about my childhood family relationships, something I normally strenuously avoid because I was an abused child. That was 25 years ago, and I've long since worked through most of my issues. Most of them. But there's still some barriers inside my head. I'm running into a few triggers these days that are starting to interfere with my life, and I really don't see any way past them but to write them out of my head and look at them on paper (or monitor in this day and age) and invite outsider opinions. One of the triggers turned up in Harry Potter of all things, another involves my health. So be warned, the waah-waah trombone will be playing shortly.

The Distraction

We went to an award ceremony today. One of my sister-in-law's students had won an art award. At the last minute he couldn't make it, and she as his sponsor had to accept the award in his place. We're all members of the art association, and we all showed up for the ceremony including our (usually) beautifully-behaved homeschooled children. (We get compliments all the time.)

Unfortunately our middle child, 10 year-old Sunshine, is a little -- absent-minded. In the same manner that Antarctica is a tiny bit chilly. She's sitting on one side of her aunt and I'm sitting on the other side. She's still eating her dessert when it came time for her aunt to make the acceptance speech. Everybody's looking at her aunt and her except for Sunshine. She's staring down her nose at her plate as she busily finishes her dessert, paying no attention to anything around her. I can't get her attention without distracting the speaker between us.

That's when her glasses start to slide.

They fall slowly down her nose, catching in her curls and slowing down but not stopping. They fall off the tip of her nose and hang in the air, suspended only by her hair. When they reach the level of her lips and would impede her eating she finally pushes them back where they belong, barely breaking speed in her effort to finish off the banana pudding. It was one of the most amazingly, hilariously embarrassing things I've ever seen first-hand.

If anyone remembers a word of that speech I'll be surprised.

Later we stopped by Hancock Fabrics in the faint hope of finding curtain fabric that isn't way overdone. Any restrained color or print is only available in the most ostentatious of fabrics. Almost everything on the market these days is gargantuan flowers or even bigger stripes, but I found an antique map print that will look awesome in the den. Now I just need access to my sewing machine. At the current rate of progress that will happen in about, oh, six months.

Question For Gamers

Is there an online gathering place for grownups to discuss video games that doesn't devolve into a level of juvenile acrimony that would make the worst comic book forums curl up and die of embarrassment?

Getting an early start on Christmas this year.

It's only the 7th and I'm already slipping into a seasonal depression. At least I'm taking my vitamin D and I've got most of the Christmas shopping done. So far it's manifesting as glumness and a desire to spends heaps of money on myself on Amazon. And grouchiness and a burning desire to bitch about my childhood. I'll try to curb that one.

It's good to be old enough to recognize these mood swings for what they are, and to know that they'll pass.

Go Team Go!

The football team at the local community college where my husband works won the NJCAA National Championship yesterday. Congratulations guys -- and remember to study for your biology finals on the ride back home. :P

Antici-paaaation! Fer-uhhhstraaaaation!

You know those stereotypical mysterious Christmas boxes labeled "do not open until December 25"? I never had trouble with them growing up, but this year I've got two boxes in my house I'm dying to get into, and thanks to the ongoing remodeling I have no idea when I'll be able to.

My official Christmas present has been sitting in the kitchen bold as brass since the week before Thanksgiving. It was going to be last year's Christmas present, then my birthday present, then my anniversary present, then I put my foot down this fall and got it. It's a Kitchen Aid stand mixer, which we never had room for in our old kitchen. I love baking and owning one of these babies is a dream come true -- or would be if I could get at it. But the kitchen counter-tops are not in place yet, so there's no place to put the big, heavy beast and it has to stay in it's box for another month or three.

Then there's the official joint Christmas present, the Wii. I wanted one of the older and more versatile models, not the newer and less flexible model they brought out for Christmas, so I had to go ahead and get one before they disappeared. It's sitting there in its case, but I have neither a TV to hook it up to nor a painted wall in my den to hang the TV on. (Remember the old days when a TV was a box you sat down on something instead of a frame you hung on a wall? I know, radical concept dude!) So unless it can be hooked up to the computer it'll have to stay in it's box until sometime between late spring and year after next. The children are Not Happy with that, especially the 3yo, who's thrown two major tantrums so far about it.

The presents we do get to open on Christmas are a breeze compared to those.

Children's Hand's-On Museum of Tuscasoosa: Recycling for Maximum Fun

We went to the Children's Hands-On Museum of Tuscaloosa over the break. It's a former early 20th Century downtown department store, with all the lovely spaces that go along with that type, that's been turned into an interactive children's museum. Most of the exhibits take old fixtures from various sources that were due to be thrown away, and recycles them into children's make-believe settings. Early 20th-Century house, bank, pharmacy, barber-shop, one-room schoolhouse, post office, and general-store fixtures let you play your way through a make-believe town. The former pilot's house of an old tugboat lets you navigate the river. A Japanese house that once graced an exhibit who-knows-where (The Birmingham Zoo and Botanical Gardens used to have one; IDK if they still do.) now gives children a glimpse into another culture. Bits and pieces from an old Ford pickup now have a cheerful plywood body that lets children "drive" plastic fruit in old peach baskets to market. There's also a puppet theater, some simple musical instruments and science exhibits, a nature section with aquariums and terrariums, a tiny mid-20th Century planetarium that looks like it was once the pride and joy of a small college, several rooms donated from the local hospital when they remodeled (including full-size reception, doctor's office, and patient's hospital rooms as well as all the outfits and equipment it was safe for children to handle), some spare NASA exhibits from the US Space & Rocket Center up in Huntsville, in addition to a farm, fishpond, gazebo, and Native American village sections.

The place was full of children having the time of their lives, but what impressed me powerfully was that all this fun was made possible by things that had been rescued on the way to the landfill. These beautiful things were all somebody else's idea of obsolete junk. My husband summed it up best. Looking around, he said, "This is the work of a very good artist."

As we left, the ladies at the front desk pointed out the work going on across the street. A building was losing it's plain, boring mid-20th Century Modern facade. As the workers peeled away the layers of bland mortar, a beautiful, intricate Victorian storefront was starting to emerge. It seemed the perfect metaphor for how the museum itself rescued the best of the past for future generations.

Signs of the Times

1998 -- We're living in Okolona, Mississippi, at the center of the US particle-board furniture industry, surrounded by furniture factories. Chickasaw County has the third-highest employment rate in the state. Work is booming. All the parents of the students at the public high school where my husband works who want jobs have them. The better students also all have jobs. The teens always have money in their pockets for snacks, and all wear designer clothing.

2008 -- The factories have almost all moved to China. Chickasaw County now has the third-highest unemployment rate in the state. The adults are now working the minimum-wage stocking and fast food jobs their teenage children used to work. None of the teenagers can find a job. None of them have money in their pockets. Most of them only eat during the week when they're at school. They wear shorts, windbreakers, and flip-flops in the dead of winter. The girls wear short skirts not as a fashion statement, but because they've outgrown their old ones and can't afford new ones.

My husband notices one girl frantically combing her pockets and purse for change. The Food Stamps and the food have all run out at her house. The rest of her family is staying with relatives who still have food, leaving her behind so she can eat at the school. She's looking for enough change to buy a bag of flour and a can of fish so she can go home and cook herself biscuits and fish for supper. She dreams of finding enough money to be able to afford a dozen eggs as well.

2011 -- The jobs are gone. The young people crowd into colleges and community colleges, hoping to get the certificates that will land them jobs elsewhere. My husband is teaching them. Last week a sophomore told him he would be gone over the weekend. The boy had to go home and kill some squirrels so his family would have something to eat through the week.

What do I think of Occupy Wall Street? I think it's about goddamn time people started getting angry and doing something.

"Like a Business"

A well-dressed woman introduced herself the other day, gave me a card and a pen, asked me to vote for her in the upcoming county election, and immediately began backing away.

"Thank you! We can always use pens. But what will you do if elected?"

"Oh!" The woman stopped dead in her tracks. "Well -- I'm going to run government like a business. That's what we need! My husband and I run a business in the next town. We took over my parent's sales business when they retired. Do you know where so-and-so is? That's our business."

"Oh," I nodded. The place she mentioned appeared from the road to have been closed down for several years. "What would you say our biggest problem is?"

"It's that we don't run government like a business."

"What about unemployment in the county?" The county's unemployment rate is around 14%.

"That's because we don't run government like a business. But I will look into that if elected."

"Do you know about the weekly anti-poverty meetings? My husband has been going to them."

"You mean so-and-so's group? I've heard about them. If they come up with any good ideas I'll look into them." She leaned in closer to me. "But you're new to the area. I've been in people's houses around here. You can tell some of them aren't really poor, they've just made bad choices."

I refrained from commenting on relative values (would my books count as 'bad choices'?) or asking her what she would do to educate people on how to make better choices. Or if she would do something useful and bring in more jobs.

I realize the term "running government like a business" became a meaningless catch-phrase almost 30 years ago but let's look at one of the more annoying false assumptions behind it. Implicit in the conceit is the idea that every businessperson is in such a cut-throat competative environment that in order to survive they must be good at their job. Hah! Maybe in Silicon Valley or Wall Street, but not around here. In the sluggish economy of small-town America, many businesses survive based on good fortune, a combination of luck, inherited capital, and the occassional act of collusion. Let's look at some real-life examples of businesses whose business experience makes their owners supposedly the best qualified to run our governement.

The Only Game in Town This business survives because it's the only one selling item X in over 50 miles. Their prices may be horrible, sometimes the sales crew is horrible, often the item you want is not in stock. But in an emergency you either do business with them or you have to spend an hour driving somewhere else and an hour driving back. So much for cut-throat competition preparing this person to run a government.

The Only Game is a Crooked Game The Only Game in Town is often an honest broker, but sometimes the Only Game in Town is openly a crook. Examples include the car dealership which tries to rewrite the deal you negotiated with them and never honors their warranties. In one local case a single mother negotiated an even swap on a smaller car with less mileage for a larger car with more mileage. When she came to pick up her new car they wanted $6000 extra. She demanded her old car back.

"We can't give it back to you. We already sold it."

"Then give me this car like we agreed to."

"No, and if you take it we're going to call the police and tell them you stole it."

"How can I be the thief when you're the one who doesn't have my car anymore?"

This business person is so obviously a more moral and virtuous person than the crooks who run the government now -- not.

The Owner of the Street The reason no one opens a business to compete with the Only Game in Town is often because of this person. They own every closed and falling-down business on Main Street, having aquired them through fire sales when the previous owner pulled out. (No, seriously, I can name three towns where this is the case.) They'll rent you a slot and charge a higher rent per month than the Main Street of the Big Town down the road, as is, you have to fix it up yourself. (More on that later.) Sometimes they're gettng tax writeoffs to keep them closed. In one case this summer the Owner of the Street, who had promised faithfully to keep all the stores open when she bought them, closed every one of them and had the Fire Department burn down two of the stores for the bricks, leaving nothing but a charred and gaping holes behind. We expect her to finish burning down Main Street next summer. This is an example of the kind of thinking we need in government to revitalize our communities -- not.

In another town the mayor asked the Owner of the Street bluntly why he didn't rent out more slots to open more businesses, bring in more money, and help out the town. The Owner of the Street bristled up and accused the mayor of not doing his job to make the town enough of a tourist attraction to justify the high rental prices the Owner of the Street wanted. He wanted the town to (no joke) dig up the downtown streets and install canals so people would come to see "the Venice of the South" (apparently unaware that New Orleans already owns that slogan). "But what about the mosquitoes?" the mayor asked. "It gets over 90 degrees every summer. We'll be overrun." "That's not my problem," the Owner of the Street insisted. "If you can't keep the the canals clean, obviously you're the one not doing your job." This is the kind of clear-headed thinking that such businesspeople can bring to government -- not.

The Landlord Du Jour This landlord accepts a deal from a person wanting to start a new business. The new business gets to rent a broken-down shop and gets a discount on their rent in return for fixing it up. The new business spends most of their time and capital fixing up the business over the next year, as well as promoting their own business. At the end of the lease agreement term, the business is starting to take off. The landlord admires all the work the business owner put into their shop, then turns around and doubles to quadruples the rent.

"But why?"

"I can get more for it now that it's fixed up."

"I thought we had a working relationship." You did. You had a classic landlord-sucker relationship.

The business goes under because the business-person no longer has the capital to invest in starting again at a new location. The newly renovated shop usually stays empty because no one can afford the landlord's higher prices.

This scam, which I've seen run in many different towns by many different people, is the single biggest cause of business failure among the startup businesses I've known.

And this is why this "successful" landlord would do a good job of running the government -- not.

The Censor I wanted to support local businesses, so I stopped in the locally-owned music shop. After purchasing the one interesting album in the whole shop, I asked if they would order a cd for me.

"Sure! Which one?"

"Libana's Fire Within."

"Who?"

"It's a women's choir. It's in print and available through mainstream distributors. I checked."

The man stared at me for a long time. Finally he asked, "Which church do you go to?"

I didn't get my Libana album there. Nor did I get any other album there again.

And this is the kind of businessperson who would encourage new ways to solve problems in our community -- not.

Real Men Don't Wear Sky Blue My husband doesn't understand masculinity problems. He is male, therefore, anything he chooses to do is by default "masculine". End of. He's also a Summer who looks best in jewel tones, pastels, and just about any blue except navy. It offends him that he can only find pants (not jeans, pants) in black, grey, tan, or navy. One day he's at the shop where he buys work clothes from overrun sellers, and he finds a some pretty sky blue work pants. Wow!

"How much for these pants?"

The owner stares at the garments as if they were covered in dung. "I hate those pants! I don't know why they made them in the first place. Everyone hates those pants!"

"I would like to buy them. How much?"

"Nobody wants to buy them! I hate them! I wish I'd never seen them!"

"I want to buy them. How much?"

"Everyone hates them! I -- what did you say?"

"I want to buy all these pants."

"Oh, they're $3 each. But that's because everyone hates them!"

Those were my husband's favorite pants. Many men commented on how good they looked and wanted to know where they could buy some, but he looked up the manufacturer and they had been discontinued.

And this storeowner is a prime example of the kind of businessperson who can seize any opportunity that comes their way that we need running our government -- not.

Daddy's Little Girls This is the storeowner whose capital and operating expenses are all being paid by another member of the family so they'll have something to do and won't have to go out and find a job. Usually it's a woman. Usually it's a gift shop. Usually the angel is their father or husband. Quite often they don't want anyone who isn't a member of their social circle coming through the door. Almost always they refuse to do business with local artisans and only order from the same two wholesalers as every other gift shop being run by every other Daddy's Little Girl in town, so they all have the exact same stock. But hey, they're a "successful" business owner so they must be magically able to run a government -- not.

The Busybody The mayor of one small town had invited the owner of a successful catfish restaurant in another town to open a branch is his town. As they're chatting in the mayor's office, the look out the window and see the Owner of the Street stepping up to the restaurant owner's car and photographing it from all angles, including the tag. The restaurant owner is so offended he leaves and never returns. The mayor confronted the Owner of the Street and asked him what the #$%& he thought he was doing.

"I've never seen that car before. It's not from around here. Maybe the owner is a criminal out to steal from us!"

This is the kind of outreach to new people and new business that this "successful" businessperson would bring to government.

The Cowards Shortly after Books-a-Million opened it's Tupelo store they received a visit from a couple of people who began clearing the shelves in a central aisle of books. The manager came over to greet them and see what was going on.

"Hello. We're with the American Family Foundation that's headquartered here. We visit all the new stores and check them out. We don't want items sold in our town. Take them down and don't put any more out." The books they had taken off the shelves included every Pagan, feminist, and LGBT-friendly book in the store.

The manager had the books boxed up and taken to the back, then called the corporate office. To their credit the corporate office ordered him to stop being an ass, put those books back on the shelves where they belonged, and don't do anything like that again. I'm not calling Books-a-Million cowards. But the same people had visited every other story in town and every other store had caved in to them, including the town's proud "independent" bookseller. And all those business owners would be automatically assumed to have the fortitude to be a "better" government leader than the people in office now.

I'm not anti-business. I'm just annoyed when people make the statement that business leaders would automatically be better government leaders than the people in office now without taking the time to look around and see who is actually running their local businesses.

Initiate Defensive Education Manuvers

Baby Owl is 3 years 2 months old. Yesterday he pressure fit a board across his sisters' bedroom doorway and stacked wood blocks atop it. This afternoon he took down the screwdriver and unscrewed their window latch.

Reading lessons began tonight. That brain needs something to do.

Halloween 2011

After living in a place where we had two trick-or-treaters total in 13 years, we finally live someplace where kids show up on Halloween expecting candy. And it was good. Real good.

Last year where we live now Halloween fell on a Sunday, and the weekly newspaper arbitrarily moved it to Saturday at the last minute, causing outrage and tears from those who love Halloween. So this year the people who celebrate it (only about 1 out of 10 but still better than before) went all out with the decorations, role-play and loot to make up for it. The children pronounced it way cooler than getting candy at the mall.

My husband took a handful of chocolate eyeballs to class with him for his students. He asked the Human A&P teacher, "What's that stuff inside the human eye?"

"Um, duh, uh, aqueous vitae?"

"Really?" He tossed her a candy. "Says caramel on the label."

The sewing machine is still packed up, but we made do. We found Brighteyes a classic trenchcoat for her winter coat at the thrift store this year, so she went as Nancy Drew, Girl Detective. Sunshine got some dragon fairy wings at the Ren Faire, and we cobbled together a dragon fairy costume for her. Owl picked out a monkey shirt and shorts to wear.

We only got two pumpkins out of the pumpkin patch this year, but that was enough for each girl to decorate her own. They looked spooky on either side of the door.

Next year we'll decorate a bit more. I'm thinking of hanging a ghost in the front yard. There's a perfect tree for it. And we should have more trick-or-treaters next year as well.