Rocky and I recently went to see "Faith Healer" at the Guthrie. It was pretty good. Not enjoyable, exactly. It was actually sort of bleakly challenging as a play. We were both really impressed by the ability of each of the three actors to dominate the stage. The story is told three times, not unlike the Akira Kurisowa film, Roshamon (sp?)...where different characters tell a story each from their own perspective. Anyway, what makes it difficult to watch is that the story is told as a series of four monologues.

Can you imagine being an actor who has to carry a 1/2 hour monologue all by him or herself? The actors did a very good job.

Anyway, I unfortunately had a coughing fit in the middle of the second monologue. Even though I had a cough lozenge in my mouth at the time. Those of you who have been to the Guthrie theater know that some attendees have an addiction to something called "fragrance layering" Basically, they bath in perfumed soap, put on perfumed lotion, spray themselves down with a perfumed body spray, and then dab a little perfume on their "pulse points". In short, they spend a lot of money to smell like Victorian era French prostitutes.

Often, if there is such a person near us, or if the residue of such a person is still on my seat, I will have a terrible time with coughing, sneezing, eye-watering, etc. This was such a night.

It was terrible, because I was trying desperately to not cough for a long time, and finally, I just couldn't help it.

A lady in front of us handed me a lozenge. Mortifying.

I had my own, but I took it rather than explain why I wasn't taking it. The coughing fit subsided, and I put it in my pocket.

When intermission came, she asked me how I liked the lozenge. I admitted that I had not yet tried it, but thanked her. She insisted that I must try it, that it was a very special lozenge, and that I would absolutely love it.

She was a nice-looking, conservatively dressed lady about the same age and style as my mother-in-law.
Prim, flesh-colored lipstick, sensible sweater of Nordic extraction over a turtleneck. A delicate gold chain with a scattering of little round shiny glass beads. Helmet hair.

Rocky mumbled something about getting me some coffee, and squeezed my shoulder to let me know that he was leaving, and I should try to catch him up when I was done with my conversation.

The lady went on about how great these lozenges were. I couldn't see a brand name on the one she gave me. It was bright yellow, round, and had an indistinguishable green image on the clear cellophane.

Her husband joined, in, singing the praises of the lozenge. They went on and on.

I excused myself as gracefully as possible, and fled. In line for coffee, I tried to explain the deeply creepy nature of the encounter to Rocky. He looked at me bemusedly, as if he were blowing off my perceptions as not quite credible.

We drank our coffee, and returned for the second half of the play. After the final bow, the older couple turned around and looked at me expectantly. "Thank you for the lozenge", I said, self-conscious of the fact that it was still in my pocket, and they obviously wanted to hear how much I liked it.

"Oh, you're welcome. These are VERY SPECIAL lozenges." (heads bobbing up and down in a way that was at the same time enthusiastic and prompting)

"Where did you get them?"

"We have a special source, you can't get them just anywhere. But they're really good." (bobblehead action continues)

"So, what are they?"

Hesitation; "We just love them. Don't you think it's wonderful?"

"Uh, yeah, so , uh, thank you very much...we have to get going, but thanks again."

I turned to Rocky as we exited the theater,

"See what I mean?"
"You threw it away, right?"
"I don't know, they sound pretty good..."
"Please throw it away."
"Roger that", I threw it away.

Rocky: I'm not going to get everything done that I wanted to before my conference call, but like you said; I should have got up earlier.

Me: I don't believe I "said" that. I believe that I snarkily implied it through an oblique but very arch comment.

Rocky: If you want to be technical, I suppose you're right.

Me: Well, we must be precise.

BTW, thanks, Karen for grabbing all of my flair from Facebook so I can use it in my blog!

Today, Marcus (the 12-year-old formerly known as Grasshopper) and I were discussing a local Charter School.  He would like to attend it, because he wants to learn Greek and Latin, and it is a Classics school.  I have to check into it to see if they offer Latin and Greek.

Anyway, I said that he could try to get into it, but pointed out that they have a uniform requirement, and that the school is very ridgidly administered.  He would have to learn to fit a very narrow mold.

He thought he could do that.  Then, I pointed out that the more free-wheeling style of the mainstream public schools in the district forces kids to take more personal responsibility, and that there is something to be said for learning to cope with chaos.  Tim (the 15-year-old) has become remarkably organized, and adept at dealing with problems on his own, and pursueing solutions to his difficulties on his own, for instance.

Marcus replied "Mom, I think that academics are more important right now.  I'm sure that I will encounter chaos when I am older, and I can learn to deal with it then."

My jaw dropped.  It just seemed like a funny thing for a 12-year-old to say.

I have a news feed to the headlines of my hometown paper.  I just got three news alerts at once, and two of them struck me as collectivly funny.

Bemidji man injured in collision with horse

Woman charged with ramming her boyfriend's car 20 times

Naturally, the stories are not actually funny...just the headlines struck me so as I scanned them.

I was just at the gym working out.  I was on the elliptical, and a young woman from India started working out next to me.

On the wall facing us, a bank of TV's play various things.  I find that I have an unusual ability to follow the close-captioning of more than one television at a time.  Not perfectly by any means, but pretty well.

I was listening to my music and watching CNN as Israel pounded on Gaza.  Not without provocation, but still a lamentable situation. CNN was just covering the situation, some hospital scenes, giving a lot of air-time to official statements from the Israeli government.   Fox was showing old footage of terrorists training, and an interview with a guy who was saying that as long as there are Muslims alive in Gaza, there will never be peace for Israel.

I was deep into reading the close-captioning, when I heard the woman next to me laugh.  A hearty belly-laugh.  I glanced at her in shock, and followed her gaze to the TV in front of me...

...and saw that she was watching Sleepless in Seattle.  They were at the part where the boy asks his dad if he is going to have sex with whatever woman he ends up marrying, and if so, is she going to scratch his back up.

I think she saw my look of horror, however, and was more subdued.  She no doubt now thinks that I am some sort of weird prude who disapproves of her laughing at a very funny scene.

But I'm OK with that...I'm just glad I figured out that she was not someone who laughed at blood-shed, carnage, and wholesale political defamation of entire peoples.  That would be an awkward sort of thing to think about someone.

PalMD has a nice plea for peace in our neighborhoods in America while this goes on.  It's so true.  I know there are some people with conflicting loyalties to their birth countries, and their adopted country...people from both sides.  But you are not in your birth countries.  You are here, and these people are your countrymen and your neighbors, even if their birth country is now the enemy of your birth country.  If you can turn on them in violence, you missed the point of America.

Just got back from my folks’ place.  It was a nice, relaxing time.  There have been some changes that had really helped diffuse the tension that I feel whenever I return there.  Everyone seems a lot calmer, more relaxed.  It’s nice.

My parents spent a lot of money on snowshoes for us.  Two pair.  One about the right size for Rocky and Tim, and one pair the right size for me and Grasshopper.  They are really cool.  Excellent exercise as well.  We will definitely appreciate and use them a lot.

My brother’s wife, Netti, made a big basketful of home-made jams and jellies.  Huge.  Many , many hours of work hand-picking the fruit, braving timberwolf cubs, bear, and biting insects, cooking, and processing.  They are really beautiful, and I hate to even open them.  She is one of those people who just seems to have an endless store of ability and accomplishment.  And she appreciates wry dry, oblique humor and doesn’t get all bent out of shape about my jokes.  In fact, she seems more amused the more obnoxious they are.  And she has asked to borrow some of my books.

My cousin, Ben made a hand-crafted cribbage board for our family.  It is really beautiful, and I know we will spend hours playing it…once we re-learn the rules.  There are a lot of gifted craftspersons in our family.  My cousins Jon and Ben are among them.  In some families, you get a groan, or a roll of the eyes at the mention of hand-made gifts.  Not so in our family, where if someone says they made something for you, you KNOW it’s going to be special.

I am looking at a gift from my aunt right now.  Home-made cloth coasters with really bright, arty pictures of coffee cups on them.  They even come in a little cloth box.  Ingenious, beautiful, durable, and like nothing else anyone I know has.  ‘course, she is a professional tailor and dressmaker/designer.  If there were a show like iron chef, but for clothing designers, she would win.

My sister gave us some home-made sauerkraut, and a beautiful squash that she grew in her garden.  It is a new variety that is so sweet, it tastes like pie without any need to add butter or sugar.  It’s just as good as its weight in gold to me.

I got Perfect Push-ups from Grasshopper.   On the theory that they will save on my bad shoulder.  Rocky got me a shiatsu massage machine that actually works.  No small feat!  It is great!.  Tim got me a DVD of MuLan.  Tim also got me a HUGE box of chocolate truffles.  Like, FOUR POUNDS of fine chocolate.  It is amazing.  It melts if you give it a warm, lingering glance.  Which I do.  Frequently.

One of the families that have been our houseguests this season brought us some fancy hard cider.  It looks really nice.

As soon as I get some time, I’ll tell you about the activities.  I have some southerners who occasionally come here (HI ER!)  So I thought I would give you a little look into the world of ice fishing.  I realize that some people have watched Grumpy Old Men, and Fargo, and think they know all about it, but you might be surprised by something.  For one thing, when we lived in Alabama, my assertion that we drove heavy, four-wheel-drive trucks out onto the ice to fish was greeted with a hearty “shut your mouth!”  I have proof.  That’s all I’m saying.

My friend Paula gave me a fantastic gift.  It was a "give card" from Network for Good.  She gave me a specific amount of money, and then I got to choose which charity I wanted to give it to.  I chose one that helps families of children with cancer.  The charity helps these families with bills up to $500.00 per month.  The charity is "Angels Among Us"

It seemed like a great thing.  I specifically chose a new charity because we already give to our "favorite" ones...and I have always thought that it would be good to give to one of these charities that helps families with bills...but I didn't want to cut into any of my other charities that I give to.

It was kind of neat.  It felt really good to be able to do something I've always sort of wanted to do.

Thanks Paula!  Great idea.

It's a good thing.

Rocky was telling me a story about a conversation he was in the other day.

A guy was talking about how we are in this financial mess because banks were forced by federal regulation to give out tons and tons of loans to people who didn't deserve it.

Rocky made many points counter to this, but I think the best one was pointing out that when businesses are "forced" to do something, they do it grudgingly.  They minimize it, and do as little of it as possible. 

And in reality, we have spent the last several years enduring ad after ad after ad on TV, in newspapers, on the internet, BEGGING people with bad credit to take out loans with this company or that.  People with bad credit were heavily lobbied to re-finance loans, and roll their other bad debt into their new loans on their houses.

I know some of these people.  Some of them owe us money that will never be returned, as the houses are gone and they still have massive debt to people with more power than we have, and more ruthlessness when it comes to getting it back.

I occasionally would complain about how these predatory lenders were sleazy scum-bags who should be against the law.

Naturally, I was sometimes denounced as a commie being against innocent capitalists just wanting to make an honest buck.

Anyway, Rocky had a pleasant, passing conversation with this guy, and seemed to have at least made some impression on him.

But later, in another conversation involving some of the same people, a new player came into the mix.  A guy who had worked for one of these companies.

"Well, you can blame me at least a little bit for this whole mess.  I used to work for one of these companies, and they told us to write to the government and tell them that they needed to deregulate us so we could do these loans." (Obviously, this is an approximation of what I remember Rocky saying he remembered the guy saying...not a real quote.)

The first guy got a stunned look on his face, like the rug had been pulled out from under him.

And, as much fun as it might be to smugly leave it there with a sense of superiority...

...none of us have all the answers all of the time.  Sometimes we need a reality check.  The best people recognize them when they see them and learn from them.  I got the feeling that Rocky thought this guy was that sort of people.

I finally finished helping Grasshopper organize/clean his room.  It took a little more than one day.  I moved everything out of his room, vacuumed, dusted, and then he helped me move stuff back in...just the stuff that had a place to go in his room.  Just the important stuff got to go back in.

Then, we sorted the remaining stuff into piles, stuff to be given away, and stuff to be thrown away, and stuff to be put in storage.

I got him to part with some of his "nature collection".

He got rid of three birds nests, a zip-lock bag containing the mouse bones and other solid waste extracted from dissected owl pellets (he was studying the owl's diet...I blame the school for giving him the idea)...some rocks, and some sticks and leaves and about half of the bird feathers.

Remaining is:  a much smaller collection of bird feathers, the dried skin fragment of an alligator gar (skin, and scales), the jaw-bone of an alligator gar, a collection of rocks and minerals, a couple handfuls of sea shells, a fossilized mausasaurous tooth, and a prehistoric squid fossil.  They all fit in a small shoe box.

We got the artwork down to a small pile of the favorites, managed to eliminate a huge number of toys that will be passed on to younger children, and just generally, got the toys and games and puzzles and projects corralled into various plastic bins that sit neatly on shelves.

There is a bin for the mis-begotten Lego’s creatures that slides under the bed.  He really DOES have monsters under his bed...they are just of his own making, but at least they are no longer collecting dust underfoot.  He assures me it will all be worth it when he becomes rich and famous for winning some design competition that he plans to enter with one of his best friends.

The Dungeons and Dragons manuals, NPC sketches, and the note-books full of master plans for campaigns that will "blow away" his friends with their diabolical complexity and sheer evil genius all fit on one shelf.

The novel-in-progress is in a binder...on a shelf.

Unless this child grows a sense of organization and order, he is destined for a future of only being able to function in a think-tank environment...

Finally!  A news alert from my hometown that doesn't have anything to do with the weather, a tragic accident, corruption, missing persons, or bodies being found!

Bemidji got mentioned in a sit-com on national television.

An old friend of mine from college just posted the above picture on Facebook.  Ah yes, that's me, class of '86.  My senior picture.  I hate having my picture taken, and I usually delete pictures of myself that go up on the internet, if I can.  What's weird about this, though, is I don't even recognize myself in that picture anymore.

The Joe-collage's-girlfriend-prep-look was never mine.  But it always felt like a costume.  I was assured that if I didn't go with that look, I would regret it later.  They might be right.  I liked wearing it to school afterwards, because it threw people for such a loop.  People would say funny stuff like:  "Did you just get back from a meeting with your probation officer?"

Silly people.   I never had a probation officer.  You had to be some sort of hoodlum super-achiever to even get really arrested back then.  They'd put the cuffs on you, and haul you in and make your parents come and get you, but to actually get CHARGED with a crime and sent to court and put on probation?  Nah.  People didn't take kids seriously in the olden days.

I had friends that would say "I have a court date".  To explain why they were leaving school later.  I always suspected they were actually going to the dentist...but you know, maybe not.

Back to the picture...the beads and earrings are a bit much, aren't they?

The photographer kept telling me to unbutton that last button.  I thought that was a little weird, as he was OLD.  Like, he must have been at least THIRTY.  I guess he was right, cause now that I try to picture it, having that last undone button done up would have looked pretty uptight, and it doesn't look nearly as slutty as it felt.  It's just, next to a black sweatshirt with the arms and collar ripped off of it, that neck-line looks positively PLUNGING.

Years later, I saw that pose he had me in referred to as "the zit-popping pose".

The guy who took my senior pictures was the best in the area, though.  You had to drive to a whole 'nother town to get to his studio, he was expensive, and it was kind of difficult to get an appointment.

I don't think I ever properly thanked my mom for going to such trouble and expense to get me the best photos possible.  But in my defense, how could I have really been expected to understand it as a kid?  It was pretty nice of her, though.  I know now how hard she had to work for that money, and how long in advance she had to save it just for that...how far in advance she had to call for an appointment...how much less trouble she could have taken for perfectly adequate and much cheaper pictures to be taken in town.

But she went to the trouble to get a good photographer who would take the time to get her skittish, self-conscious, camera-shy daughter to relax in front of the camera and get some decent photos.

That it was that important to her kind of makes me feel pretty good.

Samantha:  "Tense?  Me?  I'm not tense.  Am I?  When did you first notice?"

Jack:        "As. We. Met."

        - Carter and O'Neill, "Ascension" Stargate, SG-1

I have the Best. Students. Ever.  Tonight I got a Christmas present from one of my Kung fu families (the dad and two kids take the classes).

They gave me a gift card for a massage.

Like I said:  Best. Students. Ever.

UPDATE:  My, Christmas DID come early this year.  Pcomeau gave me a link to this Rodney video, which is Frickin'  PERFECT:

Random thought:  Putting Daniel, who is cutest when he is annoyed and uncomfortable together in an episode with Rodney, who is cutest when he is being annoying and discomforting was the most genius Atlantis-related idea ever.

Random Thought 2:  Is is bad that I also think that my husband is cutest when annoyed and uncomfortable?

First things first:  the turkey was delicious.  I made bleuberry and pumpkin pies, pea salad and calico beans.  My in-laws made the Turkey, the potatoes, and the stuffing.  There was much rejoicing.  Rocky and I took a moon-light walk along the lake with the dog.  We also went for a day-light walk along the lake with the dog and Grasshopper.

I climbed out on a tree over-hanging the lake.  Grasshopper reacted thusly:  "MOM!!  WHAT ARE YOU DOING!?!  That's stupid, and crazy and DANGEROUS!  I wanna do it!"  So he did, of course.  That's the WHOLE POINT of bringing kids up to the countryside, so they can get a taste of the crazy, stupid and dangerous stuff that kids are supposed to do. 

 We were up north-ish visiting my in-laws for Thanksgiving.  I sort of miss the small-town life sometimes.  I somewhat miss being able to just jaunt on down to the gravel-pit and shoot some cans, or being able to build a bonfire just however frickin’ big you want to build it without the pesky fire-marshal getting involved…not having to mess around with tricky, arbitrary ordinances whenever you want to do a bit of home-improvement or build a garden shed or a pole-barn or whatever.

 But then I occasionally have occasion to interact with people who live in said small towns, and I say “Oh yeah…” and my madness is cut short.

Well, like I said, we were visiting my in-laws, and we were in Rocky’s hometown because his mother loves a parade.  In particular, she loves to see her grandkids at a parade jumping up-and-down and getting excited about the floats, and running out to grab candy, etc etc.

 Some of you know that my Mother-in-law isn’t well.  She’s fighting cancer and related ailments; but she is tough and determined to get every bit of fun and joy out of life that she can. 

 This parade we were going to is a “fish-house parade”  It happens every year, the day after Thanksgiving, and it has become a bit of a family tradition for us to go see it.  It is a gloriously goofy, kitschy, hick sort of event.  People turn their fish-houses into floats, and dress up and do all sorts of silly stunts.

For instance, the area volunteer fire-fighters were pulled along a parade route in a hot-tub filled with ice-water.  They were wearing water-proof suits, but still…whoa.  That had to be cold.

 Anyway, we showed up early and snagged one of the handicapped parking spots, as my mother-in-law cannot spend a lot of time in the cold, or standing on the street.  She really needs to stay in the vehicle.  We got pretty much the last spot.  It was the same spot we’ve had the last couple of years, right near the beginning of the route.

 I saw a couple of chairs sitting on the side-walk, but didn’t think anything of it.  That part of the street had been designated as Handicapped parking.  Any reasonable person, when they realized their mistake, would move somewhere else.

 Silly me.  Naturally, the guy that the chairs belonged to felt the need to stand right in front of my in-laws van with his brood, obstructing my Mother-in-Law’s view.  The guy’s three kids were aggressive little urchins who scooped up every scrap of candy thrown their direction, and then, they ran down the way and also tried to snatch up all of the candy thrown toward Grasshopper.  Not that I was worried about Grasshopper getting candy, ‘cause lord knows, we can buy him plenty of candy…but it’s the fun of getting it that is the important part.

 My Father-in-law asked the guy politely twice to move out of the way so that they could see the parade, but the guy kept drifting back in front of their line of sight…and he was holding the youngest of the kids so that he was an extra obstruction.

 Finally, I asked Rocky if he would go and ask the guy to move down toward the back of the van, rather than standing in front of it.  The guy bristled like he was going to start something, but just as he started to realize how big Rocky is, Rocky’s Dad got out of the van.

“Is there a problem?”

The guy started to get up in Rocky’s dad’s face yelling about how he parked right in front of his chairs.  Anyone who’s ever met my father-in-law could have told him that was a bad idea.

You know how some people are just QUIET?  Like, the stiller and more focused and more quiet they get, the more you feel a certain need to be on the correct side of them?  Well, apparently this guy didn’t get that.

It took several minutes longer than it would take someone with half a brain for the guy to realize he was out of his depth.  My Father-in-law was calm, laser-focused, and exuded a steely confidence that you really, really shouldn’t ignore.

The redneck idiot was all-over the place, twitching and shifty-eyed, leaning forward, off balance, his physical movement and posture betraying no sense of discipline or training, or even a shred of mental focus...

 “What are you going to do about it?”  I heard the man ask.

“Well, for one thing, I’ll call the police, and they can sort this out.”

“I’ve got a cell phone right here”  Said Rocky, pulling it out and handing it to his dad.

“Well.  I’ve got one too.”  Says the redneck.

“Go ahead and use it.” Says Rocky,  “It should be interesting to see what happens.”

“This spot is designated for handicapped parking,” I say, “you don’t have any grounds.”

 Rednecked idiot has decided that he’s not getting anywhere with the big dude, or the old dude, so he decides to get up in my face next:

 “I don’t care, you got it?  I DON’T CARE.”

 I just smirked at him.  I can see there’s not even any sense in pointing out that the facts don’t change whether he cares or not.  He’s wrong.  He can care or not care, but if he pushes this, he’s going to lose.  I guess I was a typical liberal elitist, looking down on the poor stupid guy who just wanted to wish away inconvenient truths like Handicapped Parking signs.

 Typical.

 I watched the reality sink in as he watched my Father-in-law on the phone, though.

Rednecked idiot slunk away, and took his ill-mannered brood with him.

 The saddest thing is, though, I think the whole thing spoiled my mother-in-law’s enjoyment of the parade.  She put a good face on it, but it made me sad, too.  Because there ARE some fun things about small town life, but for every wholesome, fun, family event, there is some ignorant, self-centered, anti-handicapped-parking redneck asshole who wants to shit all over it.

And worst of all, here I am with just a little bit of an edge from being ready to get my fight on, and Kung Fu has been cancelled for Thanksgiving weekend.

If nothing else, Obama has made it easier to be an American overseas.

Rocky and I were just in Spain.

From our hotel window on the 10th floor of the AC Barcelona on Diagonal Ave, we could see this:

(although, from that angle, it looked like a characature of Richard Prior...this is a much better perspective)

Here's the story:  http://www.wtop.com/?nid=105&sid=1509947

If you read it, you will see that originally, it was intended to question the out-sized expectations and exceitment that is Obamamania.

You will also see that the creator of the piece is an Obama "fan"...but a cautious one.  Remembering that he is just a man.

The right has tried to inflate him to some out-sized anti-Christ, saying somehow he will march down our streets and collect our guns and Bibles, and have his Kenyan relatives put a witch -curse on us.

Some in the left seem to have forgotten that most of his campaign promises came with a "we will" in front of them, not an "I will".

But for one week I enjoyed walking around in Spain getting friendly smiles and thumbs-ups from strangers saying "Obama!".  Having strangers tell me over beer that America has a history of doing things that no other country would do, and now once again, we have done something that no other country would do, and it is good.

It was described to me as a return to greatness, a rise in the moral mandate of America in the world...a leader (America) showing the way into a better future.  It could have been the beer, but this recent election was spoken of with admiration and happiness to me by British, Norwegian and Spanish people.  They couldn't stop telling me about how great America was (and is), though they were a little worried about us for a while there.

A waitress with no English at all tried to give me a newspaper with Obama on the cover, announcing his election.  Everywhere I went, people asked me how I voted.  Even though Obama was not my first choice way back at the beginning, I was happy to be able to say I voted for him...but when the hype dies down, I hope that people remember how he talked about how this was going to be difficult, and not everyone would be happy with every decision, and how we were going to have to do it together, and something would be asked of all of us, and it would be more than just "take a trip to Disney World" or "buy yourself a flat-screened TV for Christmas."

(BTW, does everyone remember when the conservative perscription to fix the economy was "go out and buy stuff"...and now suddenly it's the liberals' fault that people were buying too much damn stuff?  What is up with that?)

Update #1 courtesy of Alan:

Speaking of going forward and not going back, vote with your wallet!  You can go here to find out which businesses and business owners contributed money to pass "Proposition 8".  In this way, you can then decide if you want your money to go to a business that will take some of the profits and turn it into funding for a divided, unequal America.

I heard about it here.

But right now I am reading this book:

I got it from Ben (The once and hopefully future Eclectics Anonymous)

thanks BEN!

And say, is anyone interested in a blog-based discussion of The Big Sort?

I was going to be alone all day, but lo, Rocky did come home early.

I was going to be without presents, and lo, there were chocolate in abundance.

I also got a beer glass from the Hard Rock Cafe.

We took a bike ride to Noodles and Company and lo, I consumed carbs.

It were a good day.

Would have been perfect had I not been turning 41.

Got up early today, and made pancakes.  Then ran to get Tim's best friend, who is visiting from Montreal.  Then, I took the two of them down to the Renaissance Festival (to meet Tim's girlfriend so they could hang out), and ran back so that I could get an early start on the latsest batch of jelly and make some bread.  Got the bread all mixed up and set in hot water in the sink to raise (the air is too cool and dry here right now to raise it on the counter), and went to pick more grapes...

...the houseguests finished eating, and drove off past me to go to the Renaissance Festival, and I rushed home in time to punch down the bread, put it in pans and start it raising again...

Only to find that someone had stacked their dirty breakfast dishes in the bread bowl (on top of the dough), and thoughtfully sprayed water on the whole mess to rinse the dishes.

Grumble.

Well, I'm grumbling now....before there was cursing.

So now I am making a whole new batch of bread, but my day just got much more packed.  Sometimes the little set-backs are the most aggrevating.

It's so easy to lose perspective.  It's not like that was the last of the flour in the house or anything.

I have a just walked sixty- plus miles in the Susan G. Komen 3-day Walk For the Cure. 

The actual total was 61.5.  Thank you to my sponsors.  Everytime I thought it would be easier to take the sweep van, I thought of you, and how I was representing you and the money you invested in my participation.  It kept me strong and helped me finish.  Thank You.

Yes, I walked every single mile, and the half-mile too.  This does not include all of the walking we had to do at camp in order to get through the thousands of tents to the one end of camp to get dinner…and to the other end of camp to get a shower…and then again in the morning for breakfast, medical tent the get blisters properly lanced and taped, etc.

The rest of my team finished as well:

Suzie Andert  (three-time veteran of the 3-day; friend, advisor, coach, and the prettiest darned supply pack-mule Ive ever seen)

Leslie Dwight (Who gets my "super-trooper of the year" award.  This woman is a walking machine)

Susan Grove (Who got swept once due to her sprained ankle, but the extra mileage made up for it..and anyway, getting swept takes nothing away from the fact that she walked around thirty miles with a sprained ankle…and was only taped for 17 of them)

And me.

 About half-way through, my ankle started hurting so I went to the medical tent and had it adjusted by a chiropractor.  Apparently, I’d walked 15 miles with it out of joint.  I’m glad the chiropractor knew what to do…all I knew was that I had a large purple-and-magenta bruise on the blade of my foot, and my ankle was swelling.   And adjustment and some support tape made all the difference.  Then I just had the pain from the inflammation to deal with…but it was less than half what I’d been dealing with the day before.

 The bottom of my right foot has three large blisters…one that actually covers the entire ball of my foot, and two the size of quarters on either side of the heel.  There is no epidermis left between any of my toes.  On my left foot, I have two small blisters on either side of my heel.

I’m not stiff and sore, though…a testament to a well-designed training schedule and the power of frequent, disciplined stretching.  Also, I think the fact that I slept on the hard ground rather than an air mattress helps.  Don’t know why, but I find that I am less stiff and sore after a big physical event if I sleep somewhere firm.  Air mattresses or soft mattresses kill my back and hips!

#1 important re-cap point!  Rocky watched the kids all weekend, including our God-daughter (Sue's daughter).  He managed the house very well.  It looked great when I got home.  He got all of the kids to all of their events (some of them 25 miles away), got the kids to do chores, had dinner waiting for us when we got home....etc.  He's so wonderful!

He also brought the kids to see us and cheer us.  They waited for several hours until we walked past.  Sue almost cried.  I was so happy.  For the moment, all of the pain went away...and actually the last 2.5 miles went much easier because they were there for us.  Then, they also went forward and were there to see us finish as well!

Factoid:  Did you know that your feet can swell up so much that your toe-nails turn black and fall off?  No, that didn't happen to me, or anyone on our team, but I heard at least a dozen people say it happened to them...and more who said that it had happened to them one of the other times they did the walk.  One lady said she only had three toenails left, and was pondering whether or not she could get a discount on her next pedicure.

At one point during the last half of the second day, Sue and I both had ankle injuries (we later found out that she had a sprain from twisting it on a bit of uneven ground.  I had a bone out of joint) were Marching along in grim silence, just putting one foot in front of the other, feeling the pain each time, and moving through it one step at a time.

Sue:  "What's that up there?"

Me:  "Nothing.  Just more people."

Sue:  "No...no.  I think I see Bataan."

Of course, while she was historically accurate in that the Bataan death march was sixty miles long...technically, Bataan would have been BEHIND us, and there would have been soldiers yelling in Japanese and shooting the stragglers, rather than "sweep vans".  Oh yeah, and no "Pit Stops" with food, water and port-a-potties.

Still, the analogy FELT accurate enough.

Another snippet of conversation with Suzie (not to be confused with Sue)

Me:  "Ouch".

Suzie:  "Uh-oh, what's wrong."

Me:  "Nothing.  Sorry.  One just escaped.

Suzie:  "An ouch escaped?"

Me:  "Yeah.  I try to keep them in a little corral so they don't get out and bother you.  I've got a little collie that runs around herding them into the corral."

Suzie:  "The inside of your brain makes me laugh."

There was a little boy visiting his mother at the lunch stop, and he ran over to a crew member with his mom's empty water bottle:

Boy:  "Can I have some water for my mom?"

Crew: "Sure.  Hey kid, do you know why I work crew?"

Boy:  "No."

Crew:  "So when you grow up, you won't have to." (because breast cancer will have a cure)

I’ll post about this again, and do a much better job of it, but I wanted to give you some idea about what went on.

When we have pictures, I will post again.  I especially need to show you the picture of, and tell you about “mullet pig”.  He was one of the volunteer crew members that helped us (and entertained and encouraged us) at street-crossings.

One last thought:  THIS is the strength of our nation.  These women are housewives and office workers and beauty consultants and three-time cancer survivors...and yes, some figherfighters and police officers, and personal trainers...but mostly ordinary everyday women.

And they can walk sixty miles on sprained ankles and feet that have lost toenails, and taped-up knees.

They can walk and sing funny filk songs about "I'm walking on blisters (to the tune of "Im walking on Sunshine")" and they can stay up an extra hour and dance like there's no tomorrow on day two.

And if they start to falter, all it takes to keep them going is a sign that reminds them that "blisters don't need chemo"  (that one worked for me), or a thought about their sponsors, or a funny man dressed up in a pig mask and magenta hair weaves (I'll tell you about him later).

If they think a cause is worth it.  You might say that it isn't important to finish, because we raised the money whether we finish or not...but that isn't true.

See...many people say that it is impossible to find a cure for breast cancer.  Many people also say that it is impossible for an average suburban housewife to walk sixty miles.

Well, here's news to them.  The "impossible" is NOT impossible.

So there.

Now, Im going to the gym.

My friend Jenny recently asked me to do more personal posts, as she has no idea what is going on with our family.

So here it is:

I hardly ever see Tim anymore (formerly known as Adventure Boy) since he is in marching band all of the time.  However, I am his "friend" on Facebook, and he has me in the top level of clearance so I get to see all of his interactions.

Also, he has a girlfriend.  They met at CONvergence.  Nice fan girl, cute as a button.  Nice family.  They've had us over for a BBQ.  First official date, a movie and several hours of "hanging out" at the Mall of America.

She made me a "friend" on Facebook too.

Grasshopper is working hard at school , and learning to get organized.  Also, dealing with the frustration he feels do to being an imperfect perfectionist.

I start my Susan G. Komen walk tomorrow with my team, "Beautiful Feat"...captained by my best friend, Sue.  I still have $200.00 in sponsorships left to raise, if anyone is interested.

Rock is going to drive us there and run the house until we get back.

My friend Falina is going to come down and give me a thereputic massage next week to help me recover (I love having a friend who is a generous massage therepist)

I just finished canning 36 more quarts of home-made wild Grape Juice.  Just call me the "Suburban Scavenger"  I had already managed to score enough wild grapes in random vacant lots and street-sidings to make 24 quarts of juice...but my family has already drank them.  I still have to bake a blueberry pie (the last one's been eaten already) and then I have to pack for my walk.  First job on returning home will be:  as much choke-cherry syrup and jelly as I can product and presrve before the birds eat all the berries (unless the grapes are still good, in which case I will make a run at getting some grape jelly in.)

Rocky is in the throws of finishing his latest book.  He has little to no life, although he has managed to get out and play tennis with the boys a couple of times in the last week.

[Gary and Isa visit: Day 1 Here]

The trip to the air show was low-key.

Gary was really “chuffed” to see a B-17 bomber, and get to take a tour inside.  Also, he was like a little kid when he got to see it take off.

The boys talked to several WWII veterans, and were at their most polite and attentive.   They asked good questions.   They talked to a guy who had been a ball-turret gunner, and had flown 28 missions.  He had copies of the bomber’s mission logs, and photos of the damage taken in every mission.  Also, he had dummies of the sorts of shells that were used in the aircraft-to-aircraft fighting.

They talked to two guys who flew with Doolittle, and a guy who was the co-pilot in a B-24.  They got an autographed copy of the book that told the story of the two Pacific Theater pilots.

Oh yeah, and an astronaut.  Gary and Isa purchased an autographed copy of the astronaut’s photo to donate to a charity auction for their local fan convention, and a mission patch.

The WWII veterans seemed surprised and pleased when my boys shook their hands and said “thank you”.

The nice thing about the Eden Prairie air-show is that it is very poorly attended compared to some of the bigger shows.

Then we went to see the Star Wars animated movie.  It is cute and fun.  It probably didn’t deserve to get the savaging that it got from the critics…but if it was anything other than issued by the Star-Wars franchise, it probably would have been released direct-to-video.

Then, the big news.

We went to a BBQ dinner.  The part that makes it the big news was that the BBQ dinner was being hosted by the parents of a girl that Adventure Boy met at Convergence.  She’s a really nice girl.  Cute as a button and a total fan-girl.

They, her brother, and Grasshopper disappeared into the basement to play Ecofluxx.  We visited with the parents and their friends.  Nice people.  Gary and Isa had a good time.

On deck for today, Tim will go and practice in the Marching Band all day, Rocky will work on his next book, and Gary, Isa, Grasshopper and I will go to the Minnesota Zoo.

Gary and Isa are here from Britain!  Grasshopper is home from orchestra camp!  Jay-the-dog is about to turn himself inside out.  Today, we are taking Gary and Isa to a good old-fashioned pancake breakfast and an airshow.

Last night we went to a party thrown by a friend/neighbor.  We left, but not until after I got into a “fight” with a republican.

No, not really.  It was fun for both of us.  It all started when I left our table in the pleasant back garden to find somewhere else to be.

We were having a great conversation when a guy standing right behind me launched into a diatribe about how the press was burying the “Johhny” Edwards story, and this was proof of a liberal bias in the press. 

What?  First of all, it was all over the place, and if they didn’t have Olympic coverage to run, they’d still be riding that horse until we ALL wanted to scream.  Secondly, if the press DID cover it to their satisfaction, they’d make it into a complaint about how he’s such a pretty-boy media whore he’ll even use an affair to get attention.  Seriously, John Edwards was so far out of the news until this erupted that they were practically on different planets.

So here’s a general drift of the conversation.  I don’t remember it exactly, but its my best recollection”

Rep. man #1 “What do you think of this Johnny Edwards situation?”

Rep. man #2 “What a slime-ball he fathered that baby AFTER she was sick again with cancer.”

Rep. woman:  “What is his WIFE still doing with him?  Doesn’t she have any self-respect?”

Rep. man” 1:  “She doesn’t have any choice, she’s not going to live much longer.  She’s stuck.”

(Just an aside here, does anyone actually believe that Elizabeth Edwards could be forced , by circumstances or anything else, to do something that she did not want to do?  I mean, wasn’t the Republican line on her that she was a brazen hussy who wore the pants in the family, feminized her husband, and didn’t know her place, or when to keep her mouth shut?  Like, wasn’t that just a few weeks ago?  And I would also like to point out that when Democrat women stand by their philandering men, they have no self-respect, but when Republican women stand behind their philandering men, they have family values.)

Rep. woman:  “They won’t let him speak at the convention now”

Rep.  Man#1:  “Oh, they MigHT.  How do you know they won’t?  You never know what they’ll do.”

Rep. woman:” Ugh.  He’s such a slime-ball.”

Rep. man #1:  “And they’re not covering it at all!  If it were a Republican, you know they’d find out everything and we’d hear about it, believe me.”

I DIDN’T get up and point out that the reason Republican affairs have gotten more coverage recently  is:

1)      Larry Craig was an out spoken homophobe (in other words, someone expressing unreasonable fear of homosexuality) who worked tirelessly to link homosexuality with pedophilia, libeled homosexuals as a group relentlessly, and pretty much made “traditional values” his calling card.  That made him a story.

2)      He broke a law in trying to solicit sex.  There was an arrest, and he pleaded guilty hoping to keep it quiet and avoid public consequences, then regretted and retracted his plea when there were public consequences.

3)      He was the latest in a long string of prominent homophobes caught in the act of engaging in the behaviors that they attribute to the homosexual community at large. (public sex, prostitution, drugs (Haggard), pedophilia  (that one senator in the page scandal), etc.

4)      Craig was arrested, and there was an arrest report, so the media could jump all over it.  The Edwards story was broken by the National Enquirer.  Running a false lead from the National Inquirer is probably a lot like getting duped into publishing false papers involving the President…a career killer.

5)      Craig was arrested on a slow news week, the Edwards thing blew up in the advance of the Olympics coverage.

I’ll cut out a few minutes of topic jumping and complaining about how rich Edwards is (I thought Republicans admired rich people),taxes and how the Dems just want to spend willy-nilly on all of these “entitlements” and things that don’t do us any good…the one that made me have to get up and leave was this:

Rep. Man #1: ”Just think about typhoid and diseases like that.  I just saw a show on it, and can you believe how many people they used to kill?  I mean, wow.”

Rep. woman: (awe in her voice) “Yeah.  Wow.”

And then they lapsed into profound silence.

*groan*  Yeah…”wow”.

But I guess the Fox News commentators that write all of their lines hadn’t put any words into their brains to describe things like robust public health infrastructure,  reality-based policy decisions, evolution-based genetics research that allows for analysis of mutations in diseases to create new vaccines to keep up with the rapid evolution of viruses.

I got up and left, ‘cause I was having trouble not saying anything, and these were not people you could talk to.  They were possessed by John Gibson.  Total Fox-bots.

And our host immediately introduced me to his “Republican friend” and left.

And one of the first things the “Republican friend” said was that the Dem’s didn’t provide funding for the 35W bridge, but were trying to blame the collapse of the bridge on Pawlenty.

Me: “Actually, there was funding specifically to brace those girders in the budget, and Pawlenty specifically vetoed the roads and bridges line item in the budget that would have provided the funds to fix the bridge, until it could be rebuilt”.

There ensued a lively and intelligent conversation where the guy didn’t dismiss my facts out of hand, while still challenging me to support them, and it was fun ‘cause he wasn’t a Fox-box idiot.

Thank God for the occasional Republican who is not a Fox-bot idiot.  Cause talking to people who only agree with you can get boring, but talking to idiots is self abuse…and not the fun kind.

One of his points was that it was possible that bracing the girders would not have prevented the tragedy.  Which is true enough…but IF everything that could reasonably have been done, HAD been done…and if Pawlenty hadn’t stood in the way of reasonable preventive action, I would merely disagree with some of his other policy decisions…but as it is, he DID stand in the way of reasonable action to prevent the tragedy, and a tragedy DID occur, and he is trying to somehow make it the fault of the congress.

The other night I heard from an old friend.  A blog-friend that has disappeared off of the internet, and  who I feared was gone forever.  He sent me an e-mail, and after a few turns of e-mail he told me he wanted to voice-talk.

So we got the Skype going, and just chatted.  It was a fun conversation that leapt from tree to tree…politics, science, literature, childhood stories,  exotic weaponry, etc.

I don’t remember when I informed him that I was using Google.  I think it was something to do with the latest research showing that people who are HIV-resistant have resistance to other diseases endemic to the human population. ..but he stopped dead.

“That is so cool!”

“um…it’s what I do.”

I was a little non-plussed, because actually, I was using Google as a brain-augmentation to keep up with him.  People who know me have been known to say that I remember everything I read.

That’s not true.  I remember bits and pieces and drips and drabs of everything I read with vivid clarity.  Enough to remember it when I am in a conversation and then want to use it, but not with enough completeness to have it actually be useful if challenged or queried.  Google is my friend.  I remember enough of something to craft a good search term, and Google and skimming ability provide the rest.

Anyway.

My friend thought it was enormously cool that here I was, sitting there, Googling our conversation topics, hunting down facts for clarity and accuracy and to add to the conversation.  Sort of a mind-meld cooperative grok session.

I had to stop and realized that it WAS enormously cool.  See,  I have other friends that I do this with.  Karen and I will sometimes (when we have time at the same time) have what I shall now dub “multi-media conversations” that include phone, e-mail, Google searches, etc.   Before I dropped IM, we used to have that as well.

Our friend Eric and I will sometimes spend an hour or so on the phone with household tasks running in the back ground and Google at the ready.

But the coolness of it had sort of slipped my mind due to the habitual nature.

Its true.  Its cool.  The feeling of talking to someone and being able to really tear into a subject…even if it is a frivolous one.  To chase down a fact and e-mail the URL to someone rather than just say “I read it somewhere”.  It adds a dimension and flavor and intensity to conversation that you can’t get any other way.

‘course, some people are annoyed by it:

“Why can’t we just talk”?

I suppose the intensity can begin to feel more like a data-download than a pass-time, but I guess that’s also what makes it so cool.

Most people don’t do it that way.  Most people don’t like that sort of thing, and I suppose that it might not even occur to many people to have a conversation that way.

You know, that really IS cool.

Happy Hour Benefit for the
3 Day Walk for Breast Cancer

Monday, August 11th

5:30 pm – 7:30 pm
Billy’s on Grand (in the Café)

857 Grand Avenue
Victoria and Grand in St. Paul
(651) 292-9140

Live music by The Fabulous Retreads

Complimentary appetizers

(generously donated by Billy’s on Grand)

Happy hour drink specials

Suggested donation $10 per person
All in-person donations will include a raffle ticket for a prize drawing.

Please come support team Beautiful Feat in our goal to raise $8,800 for the fight against breast
cancer. On September 19 – 21 we will be walking 60 miles through the Twin Cities with
thousands of other men and women in order to raise funds to support breast cancer research
and education. To find out more about the 3 Day Walk for Breast Cancer, go to
www.the3day.org.

Team Beautiful Feat is: Susan Grove (breast cancer survivor and team
captain), Susy Andert, Leslie Dwight and Teresa Lhotka.

If you can not make it to happy hour, but would be willing to make a contribution,
please go online to: www.the3day.org • Click on “Donate Now” • Click on
“Search for a team” and enter “Beautiful Feat” as the Team Name • Click on the
team name which will appear below • Team members are listed at the bottom of
the team homepage - click on a member (preferably the one currently furthest from
their fundraising goal) and follow the directions to make a donation. Or if you
prefer, e-mail susandert@gmail.com for the mailing address to send a check. Thank
you for supporting the fight against breast cancer and us on this incredible journey!

All donations are tax deductible!

I case you have any doubts about Susan G. Komen, here is their Charity Navigator rating:

http://www.charitynavigator.org/index.cfm?bay=search.summary&orgid=4509

Started off the day with a 15-mile walk with Sue.  We were going to walk the "chain of lakes" except we got lost going from Lake of the Isles to Cedar Lake and then we accidentally walked around Cedar lake twice...so that added a lot of milage...then we missed where the cars were parked on Calhoun and ended up walking even more.

We walked for six hours.  Assuming a 3-mile-an-hour pace (which I bet we walked at least 3.5), that's at least 18 miles.

I drove home and soaked in a hot bath and stretched out, and went to Kung Fu.  I was late for weapons class, so I just did open-hand class and sparring.  I got my butt kicked in sparring.

You might ponder why I took a bath before going to work out some more?  Well...I brought a half-gallon canteen of water with me on the walk.  I drank all of that and filled it up again.  Then, I drank all of that,and filled it up again.  Then, I drank some of that...yet when I got home, I weighed two pound less than I had when I left the hous that morning.  That's a whole lot of sweat.

Then Geekgoddess swung by and we car-pooled to dinner, and then she and I went a-fringe-ing.

We saw "Bonnie Prince Charlie".   The directing and acting was very good.  The singing ranged from more than adequate to very good.  The story was mostly full of senseless death and dimemberment.  It was well done, and it is the sort of play you find youself glad you saw...without actually enjoying it very much.   

Then we went to 'Fringe Central" and hung out with Sasha and Chis.  GG and I drank coffee.

On the way home, Geekgoddess and I saw a group of bikers.  Our conversation went like this:

Me:  They're all wearing birth-control glasses.

GG:  Yeah.

Me:  That one guy has sun glasses on.

GG: Hey, he wears his sunglasses at night.

Me:  He also has a weird bike seat.  It cradels his butt.  (miming butt-cradeling with hands)

GG:  He has a butt cup.

Me:  He has an ass-letic supporter.

Then I casually asked what was going on about with a mutual friend and I learned something about someone that I really like which drug up feelings related to someone I really hate.  Now they are all confused and mixed up and I don't like it very much.

Then Rocky came home and Im going to go cuddle him now.

Adventure Boy leaves tomorrow on his trip to China.   It's hard to believe that it's that time already.

Those of you who are interested can follow his class on their blog.

I'm sure it will be a great adventure.

He's going to learn so much, and it will be so wonderful for him to see the two boys who stayed with us again.

I just realized something.

When I write in this blog it is usually because I FEEL something and want to make a note of it.

The words that best describe the emotions I most often have when I write are:

Surprised

Wondering

Confused (one of my favorite emotions!  It means I've got something to learn right in front of me!)

Joy

Interested

Curious

Perplexed

Elated

Amused

A lot of people have read this blog.  A few people have commented on it.  Some of those people have commented on the blog itself, many have just sent e-mail.

Sometimes those comments are along the lines of "Why do you let this bother you?"

They read me as:

Annoyed

Bitter

Angry

Crabby...

Well...you know.

So, I just REALIZED this.  My emotions are not coming through.  Some of you get that I'm worked up...but you attribute the worked-up-ed-ness as negativity.

I'd just like to say for the record that I am a student of the universe.  Not, perhaps a particularly apt one, and maybe one prone to some flights of fancy once in a while (I do love me my Scifi)...but EVERYTHING and ANYTHING will seize my attention and focus...no matter how trivial it may seem to you, I can find it fascinating.

I might think about the obnoxious behaviour of someone days later, and people say "just let it go"  because they think I am still stinging from ill treatment.

In fact, I am still just trying to figure out what happened, trying to fit it into my world-order...

...understand it.

I can continue to worry an idea long after the life has left it for most people.

Like Eyore playing with the burst balloon and the empty honey-pot.

It might cut for some a gloomy figure...but trust me:  I'm perfectly happy.  Don't worry about me.

When the bread comes out of the oven...the first loaf disappears within a couple of hours (before it is completely cool), and my family only eats it with butter.

The second loaf lasts 2-4 days and is mostly used for toast and sandwitches.

This tells me that if I only made one loaf at a time, I would be baking every day and my family would weigh 300 lbs. apeice.

If I made three loaves at a time, the third loaf would very likely get mouldy before it was finished...

so it is probably for the best that I make exactly two loaves at a time.

My best bread-making hint:  raise the bread by setting the bowl and the pans in the kitchen sink, with about 1.5 inches of hot tap water, and cover the bowl and pans with a dishtowel.  The bread will raise perfectly every time.

Poor Jay has a sore on his left side...right behind the shoulder.

The vet thinks it might be a "hotspot": a scratch or scrape or bug-bite that he has worried and irritated through licking.

But he's not SURE that it's a hot spot.

He thinks it looks "a little funny".

He wants to treat it as a hot spot for the next two weeks, and then look at it and decide if we should just take it off and get it biopsied.

the main treatment for "hotspots" appears to be: oral antibiotics, topical antiseptic/anesthetics spray, and...as the vet assistant so ironically put it...a "party hat".

Those stupid-looking funnels that go around the dog's neck and stick out past his head to keep him from licking himself.  I've also heard them referred to as "lampshades" and "Victorian collars".

But there's no gettin' around it - Jay is a funnel-head dog now, and he knows it.  His shame and humiliation are painful to watch, especially at those times when he is trying to suffer them with a sort of false dignity that is unbecoming to him.  He has never been a dignified dog, naturally, so seeing him try to fake it is heartbreaking.

The only consolation are those times he gives in to the goofiness of it by doing things like tossing a stuffed animal up into the air, and then catching it in the funnel like one of those Mexican ball-in-a-cup games.

I spent last night running around doing unceasing battle with the brain-goblins...while storms raged outside.

Apparently I was not the only one, because the dog was having nightmares too.  I ended up letting him sleep at the foot of the bed and he seemed to do much better.

But on the upside, it is the first day of summer vacation.

Adventure Boy got his numerals in Band and Drama, and has a solid "B" average for his last term in his Freshman year.  I think was can safely speculate that he has finished "adjusting" to high school.  He's backing off a little on his schedule next year...not taking any accellerated classes this time.  I think he hopes to bump up his GPA and letter in Band and Drama.

He plans to go to the gym and work out, and continue Kung Fu in lieu of organized sports...which is just fine with me.  Marching Band is an excellent team experience, and actually quite athletic enough.

Grasshopper got an A, three Bs and two Ds.  We will be working the summer homeschool magic on the two "D" subjects.  I think it is a matter of learning proper study techniques, as he is usually quite good in these subjects, and seemed to be working hard at them...but he just wouldn't follow my suggestions for how to study them more efficiently...so I think he wasted a lot of effort.

He seems to be interested in running, so I hope to go running with him a lot this summer.

Rocky set up the weight bench at home, so even on days when he can't make it to the gym, he can get a few lifts in quick at home with me spotting him.  He seems to be leaning toward biking...so I'll probably get a lot of biking in with him.

And of course, I'm still training for the breast cancer 3-day walk.  Linkage in case you havn't contributed to my fund yet, but would like to:

http://08.the3day.org/site/TR?px=2078421&fr_id=1191&pg=personal&JServSessionIdr007=uq74uf3q11.app322a

And a big, hearty thank-you to those of you who have ponied up enough cash to bump me past the 1/5 mark!  I've got the best friends in the world!  And even a couple of people I don't know came in from Rocky's blog and contributed!  THANK YOU!

Now, I have to find something house-worky to do or I will fall asleep.

I just resumed my Hardanger fiddle lessons.  I'd taken a two-year break because of a combination of the car-crash shoulder injury, and the fact that the grinding stress of the last couple years has turned my brain to mush.

Anyway, hardanger fiddles are cool.

They have eight or nine strings (more traditional fiddles have eight, more modern varieties have nine)  Four top strings, which are bowed, and four or five understrings which resonate in sympathy with the bowed strings.  You often bow two or three strings at once, and use complex multiple fingerings to create elaborate embellishments on the melody.

Come to find out, that the fiddles supposedly came from the trolls, that really good fiddlers were often reputed to be taught by the devil, and that Hardanger fiddles were burned by Christians.

(Here's another source, and a quote:)

Because of the association with dark magic, thousands of fiddles were burned or destroyed by religious fanatics throughout the 19th century. This is one of the primary reasons that today's fiddlers have more contemporary instruments. It is also the reason that the few existing old ones are kept in sealed cases, like biological specimens.

Grump.  First Science Fiction and rock and roll, then Martial Arts, then Yoga...now the hardanger fiddle.

How come the devil gets all the cool stuff?

More about the legends from this site:

Legends

Some hardingfele tunes are rhythmically very complex. The springar, though basically in 3/4, appears virtually impenetrable, with beats which vary widely in length; it is nevertheless a dance tune and is accompanied by foot stamping. More accessible are the different types of walking tune, from the slow march to the gangar, a steady 2/4 or 6/8. The halling is another 2/4 tune, played for a solo dance where a man attempts to leap high enough to kick a hat off a stick held by a girl. The origin of some of these old tunes is cloaked in legend. Some come from the troll or Nacken who lives in lakes, waterfalls and streams; if you hang your fiddle overnight under a bridge where he lives, the troll will retune your fiddle and play a tune on it, finally leaving his own instrument next to it. If on returning you pick up your own fiddle, the troll's tune and supernatural touch will beyours . If by mistake you pick up the troll's fiddle, your soul is his forever!

Rammeslatter are tunes which, because of their hypnotic quality can put player and listener alike into a state of trance; the fiddler will play, unable to stop, until someone drags the fiddle from his hands. It is said that fanitullen, the devil's tune, was first played by the man himself who appeared, hooves and all, at a village dance. He grabbed the fiddle and began playing a tune so wonderful that the gathered people continued dancing until they died from exhaustion- and then their corpses continued dancing until their skulls rolled out of the door and down the hill!

Another group of tunes, the Gammeldans, were imported from Sweden in the 19th century; these tend to be more predictable and less mysterious and melancholy. The mazurka has a bouncy 3/4 rhythm (eg. Brage Gilles Mazurka ); a similar dotted rhythm, but in 4/4 is found in the schottische (eg. Schottis fran (from) Lima .) Polkas, (not to be confused with polskas) and Reinlenders have a jolly 2/4 rhythm. Sweden has its equivalent to the walking tunes of Norway, including the brudmarsch (wedding march) and the ganglat. Gardeby Laten is a ganglat so often played that people sing along with it words which mean "aren't you sick of this tune yet?". Also well known is Appelbo Ganglat .

Probably the most important group of Swedish tunes are the polskas. These have a 3/4 rhythm with stress on the first and third beats; the emphasis of these beats varies considerably from region to region. Polskas, and indeed many Scandinavian tunes, are often named after a revered fiddler from the past whose playing defined a particular tune, though he is unlikely to have actually written it; for example Polska efter (after) Karl Linblad, or Polska e. Per Osa . Very useful for the fiddler is the skanklåt- an "I want to get paid " tune which reminds the guests at a wedding that the poor musician has been playing for five hours, hasn't been offered any sandwiches, hasn't been paid, and wants to go home.

Most of the above Swedish and gammeldans tunes are played on the normal fiddle (called flatfele in Norway), often in ensembles with other instruments such as accordion, recorder, or fattigmannsfele (poor man's fiddle)- the jew's harp. Spellmannslag are large groups of fiddlers who meet regularly to learn, play for enjoyment, and maintain the tradition.

Yesterday I took out our old, broken-down kitchen faucet (I was the only one in the household who still had the “Fonzie touch”, and could work it), and replaced it with a shiny new one.

Well, I had SOME help.  I was going to do it all myself, and I had begun to… I turned off the water supply under the sink and disconnected the faucet from the shut-off valves.

Then, I got my head-and-shoulders under the sink and began to try to remove the nut that kept the old faucet stuck to the sink.

As you might know, it was awkward.  I had to twist my head just so to get it under the drain pipe where it ran out from the garbage disposal, performed a goose-neck, and then turned and ran into the wall.  There were two angles that I could use to attack the problem:  option one was crappy, and option two was a giant flying whirlpool of suck.

I went with option one, and began to remove the nut, one quarter turn at a time.  I didn’t have a real good angle, so I ended up jigging the sink, a lot.  Some old rusty crap rained down on me.

Since I am a former farm girl, I luckily had my mouth shut tightly, and I was just congratulating myself on not getting nasty old bits of rusty sink-crud in my teeth, when one of those bits of crud started scrambling down my neck.

I stifled a girly little shriek, twisted minutely, but vigorously, and gave a flip of my hand.  A spider flew off my neck, landed on the bottom of the cabinet, and scurried to the safety of a small, dark hole in the corner.  I went back to working, only to find that I needed two sets of hands for this next bit, because I needed someone to keep the assembly up-top from turning.

So I called Rocky in for moral support.  When he’s home, he’s always happy to take a short break to lend a hand like this, and though I probably could have found some way to do it myself, I wanted an extra pair of hands.

I know some feminists will ridicule me for this, but I never claimed to be a feminist…so there.

I’m just sayin’ – Spider!  ‘nuff said.

A little bit of team-work had the old faucet removed in no-time.  Luckily, I got under-the-sink-duty, because several small but potent drips of rusty sink-crud-laden water still needed to fall after all the jiggling and jolting to get the old faucet disconnected, and Rocky needed to go to a meeting.

Rocky was kind enough to say that he thought that girls with rusty sink-crud drips on their face looked sort of cute.  He was even convincing.

Then he had to leave for his meeting, and I figured all the old spiders were safely in hiding by then anyway.  I got the new faucet assembled and installed in no-time…except…it was leaking.  I tried to figure out where the leak was coming from, but it is difficult to turn the water off-and-on and look where the water is coming from at the same time, so I called our friend Eric.

He came right over and we found the problem.  One of the connectors had some debris in it from the factory.

Eric said “Do you have some tweezers?”

“I’m forty years old and a natural brunette…do I currently look like Groucho Marks?”

“Uh…no.”  Eric replied. 

“Then of COURSE I have a tweezers.”

The debris was promptly removed, the hose re-connected, and viola!  Perfectly working new faucet.

It was time for me to leave to get to go teach my Wednesday class, so I “thanked” Eric by giving him enough time to pick up his tools before hustling him out the front door, rounded up my boys (who are assisting me) and ran off to teach.

Today, we drill a hole to allow for the installation of my soap-dispenser.  Woo Hoo!  Soap dispenser!

Once again, my friend Sue has done it:  She’s gotten me into trouble, and over my head.

I’ve committed to participate in the Susan G Komen walk for the cure…3 days…sixty miles.

It’s mainly because, when your best friend comes to you and says “I have cancer” and you say “Let me know if there’s anything I can do”…you can’t really renege when she comes up with something…even if it is a grueling three-day walk in September.   Even if it involves sleeping with a stranger in a two-man tent that even the site trying to recruit you describes as “cozy”.

Here’s my personal webpage for the event.  It hasn’t been personalized yet, but the donation button works (nudge nudge).

Here’s the personal website for my team-mate Susy (not to be confused with Sue, who is also on my team, and has met her goal).

Our Team name is “Beautiful Feat”.  Originally, I proposed the name “Oh, my DEAR GOD!  My Feet!  My Feet!  My beautiful feet!”

Most people seemed to think it was really stupid, but nobody came up with anything better, so they shortened it, turned the word “feet” in to a word-play, and  viola!  Clever team name.

When we do a testicular cancer walk, though, I have the perfect team name picked out :  “Not my gum-drop buttons!”

Anyway.

I’d like you to meet my personal trainer, J-dogg.  He’s a real slave-driver.  With him as my coach, I’ll be able to walk to Tibet.  Not that I’d want to walk to Tibet:

But I’ve got a problem.

In order to do this, I have to raise $2,200 in donations.

That’s where you come in, gentle readers.

It is time to bring you and *the begging* together in the same place.  I don’t ask much of you.  I don’t put ads up here to make money, and I don’t make personal demands upon you except for the occasional participation event (which most of you ignore anyway).

I know you’re out there.  I see the hit counts, and I can count subscribers on the newsreader sites…so don’t pretend you can’t hear me.  Please, please Pleeeeeese contribute to  my fundraising account.

And those of you who keep coming here off of Google searches for “Wookie Scrotum”…

…I think you get enough amusement just from that alone to make it worth a ten-spot.

Yesterday I had to run up to the Home Despot to meet my Sifu and hand off some sashes that he needed to give to some students of mine who are transferring over to his class due to a scheduling conflict.

The Home Despot is near his work, and I had to pick up some mulch.

After handing off the sashes, I wandered into the Home Despot and found the piles of cedar mulch.  Naturally, the brand I wanted was behind a pile of other stuff, so it was awkward, but I was managing just fine.  I was loading the two cu.ft. bags onto a flat-bed push-cart when I heard:

 “Hey!  Can I give you a hand with that?”

I looked up, and there was a guy with a silver ear-hoop, a buzz cut, and one of the most spectacular tattoos I’ve seen in a while.  The tat was a reproduced photograph of a little Chinese kid surrounded by wood grain, and illuminated by gothic script, which I couldn’t read, ‘cause the guy’s arm kept moving while he ignored my assertion that I was doing fine on my own, and pushed past me to begin loading the bags.

“Nice tat”, I said, “Is that of anyone in particular?”

“Yes.  It’s a kid I met while I was on a mission trip to China helping out a missionary running an orphanage over there.”

“Oh.  He must be pretty special.”

“Yeah, he was.  You know, all those kids were damaged some way.  I wasn’t comfortable around them.  I’m not proud to say it, but I wondered, ‘where are all the normal kids, why can’t I work with them?  This kid just came up to me the first day and plopped himself down on my lap, and I was like ‘OK, little dude, you’re cool.  He was my little buddy the whole time I was there.  I just loved him so much.”

“That’s really great,” I said…figuring the story was over.

He continued, “Before we left, the missionary went through and told me about the kids, told me their stories, and why they were at the orphanage.  Then he got to my kid, and told me that he’d been born with both male and female parts.  Wow, that was tough, you know, dealing with that.  But God had already worked in my heart by that point, and it didn’t matter.”

“That’s a cool story, thanks for telling me.”

“Yeah, that’s why the Bible verse here.”  He pointed to the script, which I still couldn’t read.

I thought it was a great story.  You know, a lot of people don’t believe that they need God to work in their heart to avoid judgment and express compassion for others.  But a lot of people do.  And my feeling is, if you feel that's what you need to make yourself better personally, you go with your bad self.  Do what you have to do, just get there.  I don't care if you think you need to wear a watermelon on your head to help you be a better human being.  If it works for you, great.  I will bring you fresh watermelons every day to help you.  Just don't try to force one onto my head, and don't turn the term "watermelonless" into a slur.  We'll be cool.

And this man was great, he wasn’t telling me that without religion, I was going to hell.  He wasn’t telling me that without religion I’m incapable of love and compassion (or that while I might be able to have love and compassion, it is meaningless without a “foundation”.)

He was telling me about his personal and meaningful story about how he personally won a victory over judgment, narrow-mindedness, and bigotry…and how the reward was a richer, more loving life.

And it made my day, and quite possibly my life better.

(disclaimer:  please realize that this conversation is recounted from memory, so the words in quotes are not direct quotes, but my best recollection of the conversation)

We held a fundraiser at my house last night.  Just a little get-to-gether to celebrate my friend Sue completing her cancer treatment, and to raise money for our 3-day walk to raise money for research.

In the middle of the chaos, someone asked me, "Is {Grasshopper} your son?"

Me:  "Uh....yeah?" (you never sure what you are agreeing to take responsibility for with answering this question)

Lady:  "He's soooo sweet!  He came to my son and said 'There's nobody downstairs playing video games, would you like to come down and play with me?'"

Me:  "Oh.  That's nice..."  (Not particularly impressed, being a somewhat observant host is the minimum I expect from my kids in a situation like that)

Lady:  "And then he turned to me and asked 'What is his rating limit?'"

LOL!  Now THAT'S pretty cool!

Grasshopper has been getting into radio plays, BIG TIME.  He's been listening to The Adventures of Ruby over and over again, for instance.

So he wanted to make a radio play, and he and Rocky are putting together some little tests to garner the skills needed.  Here is the first test.

Some of you might recognize the voice of the "damsel in distress"...what can I say?  A voice actor I'm not. 

For those of you who do not know, there is a growing food crisis world wide.  The cost of food is going up because the costs of producing processing and delivering it are going up.

What you may not realize is that BEFORE the gas prices really got cooking, and BEFORE the mortgage crisis, the biggest growth of demand for food shelf assistance was in the elderly (medical perscription costs cutting into food budget).

The second largest growth was in was middle class suburban families.

The current statistics say that 50% of the people served by foodshelves are children.  The demographic experiencing the largest growth is working families.

One of our favorite places to donate money is the Emergency Food Shelf Network.

I urge you to donate, if you have money that you can donate.

If you need food, and can't afford it...please go to your local food shelf and get some food.  Hey, when you get through this rough patch and back on your feet, you can always make a couple of donations, right?

Grasshopper is ten years old.

He has had a series of writing assignments meant to illustrate various grammar concepts.  The following is his response to an assignment where he was supposed to use verbs in past, present, and future tense:

The Cave

By [name redacted]

     A boy got told by his mother never to go into the Howling Cave, but one day he needed to go.  It was just too mysterious.  So he went with a little food and water and a flashlight.  Later, he didn’t know the way back.

     “I don’t think I packed enough food for me to get lost, and I already feel hungry.” He thought.

     It was dark in the cave.

     “I better turn my flashlight on.”

     Then, he saw yellow eyes.  They were bats!  They started to fly.  A few seconds passed, and he realized he could follow the bats out.

     He ran after the bats, out of the Howling Cave.  When he got home, his mom asked,

     “Where have you been?”

     He said, “At the park.”

     He had mud and scratches all over him.

     “Well, clean off for dinner.  I will find out where you really were eventually.” His mom said. 

The end.

"Leftovers"

I'm still adjusting to it being spring, with the snow melted and all that.  Now I can ride my bike to the gym, or run if I wish.  Today I rode my bike, as I had already been out for a long walk with the dog.

So I arrived a the gym and my work-out went really smoothly.  I was able to put a lot of explosive power into each lift, and really get the muscles burning.  Sometimes I arrive with a sort of lackluster energy level, and can't really shake it.  Not today.  The muscles were really happy to work, and the burn felt GOOD!  In fact, I was completely wrecked by the time I finished my stretches.  I was a big pile of goo, ready to go out and get in my car and drive home for a soak and additional stretching in the neighbor's hot-tub (whish we have a standing invitation to use any time we want to, as it is out-of-doors and they're really nice people).

Yep, I'd managed to put everything I had into my work-out, and I felt really good about it.  I hadn't held anything back...

...and then I opened the locker and saw the bike helmet there.

Crap.

It was only a mile-and-a-half home, and surprisingly,even though I thought I had nothing left...I made it back.

"I juggle my family" (ten brownie points the the person who gets that referance.  Hint: it is said with a crap Russian accent)

Two of my favorite machines are the hip abductor and hip adductor machines.  I like to work on explosive power on these machines, keeping the weight down somewhat, and just working on maintaining a fast and powerful, but controlled contraction through the full range of motion.  I've found that this has really helped those muscles relax later, when I stretch them, and has helped my flexibility as well as the speed of my kicks.  These muscles take a lot of abuse in the martial arts, and isolating them for a little intense, focused work makes them feel really good.

I do 145 lbs on each machine  (these machines work both legs at the same time, so it isn't as much as it sounds).

Anyway, I got on the hip abductor the other day, and the weight was set to ninety lbs.  I didn't think anything of it, there are a lot of little old ladies at the gym that time of day, and tiny little trophy wives.  They use the weight machines, but can't lift very much weight (I routinely find the bench press at 50 lbs).

I rapped off my first set of twenty, and then paused before doing the second set, and realized that the lady on the hip adductor machine next to me was openly staring at me.

I wondered for a minute if there was a green, slobbering space monster behind me or something, but then I realized that the lady had the machine set to 90 LBS.  I smiled.  She smiled back uncertainly, and then began painfully struggling through another set.

I blew through my second set, and went on to the glute machine to wait for her to be done with the one she was on.

The moral of the story is, apparently, I am very scary to suburban housewives.

"Dirty old men...kind of".

There's this little old lady that I see at the gym sometimes.  I'll call her "Carmen".  She's in her late '60's and she's just the cutest thing.  she wears a pink Nike track suit, and she works out everyday at about the same time.  I always enjoy seeing her there, because she's friendly, but I must admit that I get some entertainment at her expense sometimes.

I'm not proud of it, but I think you'll forgive me when I tell you why.

Carmen has replaced much of the subcutaneous fat that we all have when we are younger with a nice layer of muscle.  She does a lot of shaping and toning exercises, so that her posture and shape is that of a much younger woman...

...and hence the humor

You will see her working out, and every once in a while you will see an older man here or there who has not encountered Carmen yet, and he will be checking out her butt.

Then, he suddenly realizes that he is checking out the butt of a woman he must imagine is decades younger than himself, and he looks chagrined.  Then, he gets a look a Carmen's face and realizes that under that dyed red hair is the face of someone more his age, and then he gets a different expression a "I was checking THAT out?!?" expression...and then he realizes that the old lady he finds so unattractive is his own age, and he gets another facial expression, which is best described as deflated.

Gen. O'Neill: [smugly] My, this is an occasion. You know that bitter taste in your throat? It's kind of wrapped around your uvula? That's what's left of your pride.

                                         --Stargate SG-1

I like to help.  So when Eric called and said that he and his friend Chris had removed a wall of his three season porch, and would I like to come over and help move his ginormous hot-tub out through the de-constructed wall, naturally I said "Sure!"

The event started out with the usual planning and plotting and disconnecting and unwiring and lifting and prying, and tweaking and situating...and culminated in a concentrated push across the floor, down a carefully constructed ramp, and onto some improvised skids in the yard.

In between, of course, was the part where we started to push, and got the thing going REALLY well...and my foot slipped in a puddle of water, causing my face to slam chin-first into the edge of the hot-tub.

There is no visible bruising, but the area is quite tender.  The tip of my chin and a small, puffy bump on my lip that you can't even see on the outside, but I can feel with my tongue on the inside.

Thank God it didn't get ugly and purple.  I teach class tomorrow, and I don't want to scare the parents of the children I teach by showing up with my arms all covered in bruises (most hidden by my shirtsleeves)  AND with my face all banged up.

I left them to put the wall back together, and get the space ready to recieve Eric's incredible new piano.

Had a great time at Kung Fu today.  One of the other second degree black belts and I mixed it up with some old-school grappling/strikeing/take-down/groundwork stuff.  It was fun.

I got to show off the superior core-lower-body strength of women fighters.  Men like to think that they have the upper-hand because of superior upper-body strength, but in the end, all that does is put you at risk for letting yourself get put off balance.  Don't get me wrong, upper-body strength is great for climbing trees and chucking spears and stuff, but when it comes to throwing your opponant over your hip, I'll take a nice, low, girlie center of gravity any day. 

I also got to show how rabbit punches (sorry, meant rapid punches.)to the body, comined with knees to the solar plexus and elbows to the jaw can short-circuit a lot of standard wrestling moves.

And yes, I pretty much got powned after my opponant drove his shoulder into my chest, and knocked me into the wall. I wasn't even thinking when he went to back off and I put him into an elbow lock, but I didn't hit him.

Normally, I hold back quite a bit because I am sparring lower-ranked people and it is my responsibility to make sure that neither of us gets injured, and to make sure that they improve and learn.

What's great about this, though is that even thought it LOOKED like we should have been completely wrecked after the fight (knees to the solar plexus, elbows to the jaw, trips, throws, etc. - neither one of us had even a minor injury.

I get more bruises from a tepid sparring match with an intermediate student. 

I got rocked pretty good when my break-fall didn't completly keep my head from hitting the ground after a leg-trap-take-down, but it cleared right away.  No worries. 

 I'm happy endorphine girl now.  It's been a while since baby's been able to play.

So I am at the Doctor today, waiting to get the anti-biotics that will help me kill the projectile lung crud that always takes over my body this time of year and makes me not able to run. (Point of interest, even with said projectile lung crud, my peak-flow at the athsma Dr. last week was 550, which I damned impressive, if I do say so myself)

Anyway, I got there early because the errends I planned to run on the way didn't take that long.

So I pulled my old Algerba book out of my back-pack and started working some problems.  I'm brushing up so I can help Adventure Boy put in some extra study time.

The nice lady in the headscarf across the room, gets up and says "What are you studying, can I see?"

She's all jazzed, "I love Algebra, it is my favorite subject!"

We start working problems together, and I try some Arabic on her.  Turns out, she doesn't speak Arabic, so I assume she must be from Iran.  I never learned any Farsi.

But we don't get too far when the nurse calls her in for her appointment.  :-(

Who knew you could make friends doing Algebra in the doctor's waiting room?

It occurs to me that I have not linked to Conrad Zero for a while.

It’s not that he hasn’t had anything worth linking to.  After all, I enjoyed his entry entitled “No, I never Slept with Diablo Cody” enough to comment on it.

It’s probably mostly because I am mortified that I am sometimes described as “the first fan of Jagged Spiral who is not married to them or related by blood”.  Yet I have not been to a single solitary one of their live performances.

Ever.

Mostly because they keep having them on nights when I have to work, and my husband is out of town, and I’m tired afterwards, and someone has to go home and make sure the kids are still alive and check their homework, and get to bed early enough to wake up at 5:30 AM make them a hot breakfast and get them to school on time.

You would think I’d be able to excuse myself with the above reasons, but I can’t.  What kind of “first fan of the band to DEFINE the genre of northern gothic epic rock” begs off because she has to check homework, she’s too tired, and she has to get up early?

But I finally have to admit it.  I’m a fraud.  Don’t get me wrong, I like their music a lot, and I find their personalities and personal details very fun and compelling, but those are just the beginnings of fandom.

Fan is short for “fanatic”, after all – and a “fanatic” would make it out to a bar on a weeknight and leave the kids a bottle of Jack Daniels and a book of matches to amuse themselves with for another couple of hours.

I DID vote for them numerous times on “Rock the Dash” (and you can too.  The Band is Jagged Spiral.  The songs are "Let it out" and "Not Enough Bullets" You can vote once per day).

But I’m afraid it’s too little too late.

Well, there.  Now THAT’s out of the way.  I feel a great sense of relief, and though it was difficult to come to terms with it, I think my energy that was previously directed toward denial will be more useful in overcoming my enduring sense of shame and loss.

And I think I can begin to link to Conrad again from time-to-time.  Now seems like a good time.

Conrad has re-defined his war on emo.  He now defines it as a war on emo music, not a war on emo kids.  Because having a war on emo kids would be lame…and he’s right, of course.

But as someone who has passed difficult passages of time sustained only by The Cure and (naturally)  Gary Newman, I really feel that I must speak up in defense of Emo (and yes, Screamo) music.

I’m reminded of a prim little English teacher who once pontificated that vulgarity was the last refuge of the illiterate.  In other words, if you couldn’t find words to express yourself appropriately, you resorted to vulgarity.  I didn’t raise my hand an point out that there were, in fact situations for which there WAS no appropriate vocabulary except vulgarity.  Mostly because I wanted to nip out for a smoke on a pilfered bathroom pass, and figured that calling attention to myself would be strategically counter-productive.

But I have long since stopped smoking, and Conrad can’t send me to the principal’s office, so I’d like to just raise my hand here and say that there are some days where you just can’t find a better way of expressing your feelings than to flop onto the couch and play a ten-minute spot of Bright Eyes…or slip on the gloves and work the heavy bag to a half album of Lincoln Park.

It might not be the best choice, or the socially acceptable choice, but sometimes it’s just plain the only music that does the job.

A couple weeks ago Adventure Boy came home all exceited and happy.  His band director had invited him to join the jazz band as a bass guitarist.

He's going to be the next Geddy Lee, you know.  Bought himself a guitar, taught himself how to play, practices every day.

I felt a sinking feeling in my stomach, as I realized that I was going to have to say "no".

Adventure Boy has a B- average.  Barely.

He's a Freshman, and he is working hard, but he's just not settled in to the High School academic pace yet.  He's taking accellerated classes, and he was in the Winter play, and now he's in the spring play, he's playing tuba in the band and Chamber Winds, he hangs out with his friends a lot playing D and D, doing martial arts, playing basketball, etc.

He's even hoofed it down to the Caribou for a little hanging-out-and-studying-with-the-gang.

He's busy is what I'm saying, and he's treading the soothing waters of average while throwing himself into the whole teenager gig with gusto and positivity.

And that's great and all - but I saw one more activity as the death-knell of his academics.  I don't have real high standards when it comes to grades, but this is a kid who COULD get straight "As".  And as far as I'm concerned, if he doesn't have a "B" average, he's not making the cut.

Add two hours of jazz band practice per week, and the performance schedule they have...and I can even kiss a "B-" average goodbye.

Not cool.

So I said "no".  I explained that extra-curricular activities were "EXTRA-curricular", and that his curricular activities had to come first.  If this opportunity arose again later, when he had a solid "B" average, I would say "Yes", but until that happened, he would need that time to focus on his studies.

He looked crushed, but he nodded and said he understood.

And I went upstairs to do dishes, because I figured that if I had to feel like a puppy-kicking monster at least I could also be productive.

Now, lo and behold, the drama club is doing "As you like it" and Adventure Boy has a small role (William, a country fellow), and the director asked if there was anyone who could play an instrument in the play...just be a sort of roving minstral wandering through the scene.

Adventure Boy is going to get to play his guitar after all. 

Today, I had a chance to take one little problem off of the top of a big pile of someone else's problems -

and make it disappear.

Poof!

Damn, that feels good!

Some of you might have noticed that our server has been up-and-down for the last couple of days.  Apparently, I have a zombie army of computers rapidly trying to post pingbacks to my blog, which was over-loading the server.

The attack continues, so  I just want you to know what's going on.

It seems very strange that anyone would consider my little blog to be worth the trouble.

Not really, but this woman appears to be an exact psychological clone of my mother.

http://themakersacres.blogspot.com

It's a little weird.

I found her through a comment she left on Karen's blog.

The other day I was “up nort” for a family event and I witnessed a conversation that went something like this:

Guy 1: “Do you ever see red fox up here?”

Guy 2: “I’ve seen one sometimes.”

Guy 1: “How about wolves?”

Guy 2: “They’re beautiful.  They have a beautiful pelt.”

Guy 1: “Can you trap them?”

Guy 2:“Not yet, but we’ll see…depends on the damn environmentalists.”

Guy 3: “If they let us hunt ‘em their populations will probably go up.”

Guy 1: “Yeah.”

Guy 3 :“It’s like the bald eagles.  I mean, how many eagles do we need?”

Guy 1: “Keep the roadkill cleaned up good though.”

Guy 3: “Yeah.”

The rewards of lurking near a conversation like this make it worth the effort to not interject your opinion.  Even though I grew up in the area, I’d only ever seen one timberwolf, maybe a handful of bald eagles, and never a fox, and never a trumpeter swan.

Now, after numerous environmental protection measures, they are ubiquitous.

Guy three was right, when a certain population level is reached, there’s some scientific indication that controlled hunting will increase the population, as has been the case with the deer population in the area.  but he's wrong in implying that hunting in and of itself is automatically a forcer for population growth.

The question is what is the threshold?  And no matter what, without the “damn environmentalists” there would be no beautiful wolf pelts to argue about taking or not taking right now.

And yes, I know that if I had pointed that out, the guys would have asserted that the population lows we saw during my childhood were “natural” lows in the populations that would have come back with or without conservation efforts.

However, I think we’ve seen enough evidence to the contrary all over the world where conservation efforts were either never attempted, or were circumvented by market pressure for poaching or habitat destruction.

Another interesting portion of the conversation wandered into the subject of "the damn buck-shooters" and how there weren't very many bucks in the area anymore.  It is important to note that the "damn buck shooters" were probably not being complained about because of concern for the effect that a limited number of males might have on the genetic diversity (and therefore health and stability) of the local deer population, but because of resentment for "six-one-tourists" (tourists from the cities...which used to be dominated by the 612 area code) coming up and sniping all the good trophies.

On a personal note, I don't know if I qualify as a "damn buck shooter" or not.  I grew up in the area, but now I live in the cities (not the 612 area code anymore, though) and I'll shoot anything tastey that comes across my path, doe, buck or itty-bitty fawn.  I hunt to eat, I'm not a trpophy hunter...

...but I have to admit, I was a little proud of the 8-point monster buck I pulled out of the woods a couple of years ago.  As a matter of priciple, I don't take trophy photos, but I was tempted that year.  Sorely tempted.

Aaaaarrrrrgh!

I've been developing detailed descriptions of how to do the Kung fu techniques that I teach my students.  I write them down into study guides to help their parents double-check and be sure that they are doing it right.

I created two study guides this weekend while I was up visiting my folks, working in the car to use my time wisely.

Then I got home and Rocky found that the server had crashed.  So he (being the efficient, hard-working guy that he is) restored from the last back-up.

And when I connected my computer to the network it auto-synced (Rocky is efficient and hard-working, did I mention that?  And thoughtfully set my computer up to auto-sync everytime I connect and disconnect to the network.  It has saved me numerous days worth of work over the years).

Naturally, when my computer synced THIS time...it found that the two study guides I created over the weekend had been "deleted" from the server...so...it "synced" that action on my computer.

grumble...

I would like to say, for the record, however, that I am NOT complaining about having a competent, hard-working, thoughtful computer genius who thinks ahead and takes great pains to set things up so that I can have all of my work backed up and updated continuously without having to lift an extra finger to do so.

That would be dumb.  All of these things have added up to saving me many times more work than the few pages I lost.

Mostly, I'm grumpy because my dishwasher is broken, my car has been in the shop three times in the last week (to the tun of a couple of grand), my dog is obsessed with eating my headscarves, and now my computer ate my homework!

Oh, and I got a nose-bleed at kung Fu tonight.

blah.

Went to my brother's wedding last weekend.  It was a nice service.  The bride is really sweet, and she's going to make a great sister-in-law.  The wedding dance was fun, and there was Kareoke.  I didn't do a song, but my brother sang a nice love song to his bride.  People seemed amazed that he had a nice voice, but of course we knew that, just because he's kind of quiet and sort of a rough-neck and a smart-alec when he ISN'T quiet doesn't mean he can't sing. 

The bride's family is very nice.  They threw a bon-fire party and kegger.  That was lots of fun, but we couldn't stay late.  The bride lamented that the bon-fire was kind of small because they "didn't have any outhouses to burn this time".

My kind of people.  Fire and alcohol DO Mix and those of you who think otherwise are just a bunch of wimps. 

On the other hand, with all the running back and forth I've been doing up between here and "up nort", I've also had quite a few reminders of why I ran away and became one of those much-hated "big city libruls". 

For every girl who understands that throwing an entire out-house on top of a bon-fire the size of a small car is just good clean fun...there are a half a dozen guys who think that the height of entertainment for you is having them cornering you and making you listen to them slur incoherantly while they bungle dirty jokes. 

And just so you know, if you are looking for a place where a Christian can excape the horrible persecution of having no choice but to go to a SECULAR paintball gameplace and store...you will be thrilled to know that Bemidji is a nice, safe haven where Christians can go to a Christian paintball gameplace and store.

Hey guys, do me a little favor - K?

Come up with some good turn-down lines that my fellow Kung Fuer - Maggie- can use.

10 brownie points for the best one.

Stuff like "I'd love to call you on the phone, but for some reason my electro-magnetic fields keep getting reversed, and people's phones get hot and explode when I call them".

Or "No, I can't sleep with you.  I shouldn't even be talking to you.  I have projectile herpes.  Oh!  There goes one now.  Sorry."

or "You want to buy me a drink?  No thanks, .  My last trip to the bar, they were all out of the blood of the innocent."

Adventure Boy is home from school today.  Classes were cancelled because of an alleged threat against the High School.

So far, that's all we know.  Probably, that's all we're going to know for a while.

He's downstairs working on some homework right now.

When I told him he was indignant, and a little outraged.

Rocky's not happy.  When he was a kid, his school was closed several times due to bomb threats.  Looks like we're headed into the '70s again whether we like it or not.

All my students passed with flying colors!

I took Adventure Boy to school today.  He had some last-minute stuff to do, and would not have gotten to school on time if he had tried to walk.  On the way, we saw his two best friends, and picked them up so that they could not freeze as well.

As we approached the final turn near the High school, we witnessed an accident.

This intersection is atop a small ridge that runs for several miles, winding through Eden Prairie.  So the road we were waiting to turn onto has a steep incline on either side.  There is a yellow double line for "no passing" down the middle of it on both sides.

Of course, someone JUST HAD to try to pass the person in front of them.  After all, who wants to be stuck behind someone doing the speed limit in a school zone?  THIS IS A FREE COUNTRY after all, and if you can't speed while passing in a "no passing zone" in the middle of an intersection...well then, the terrorists have already won.

Naturally, this being rush hour near the largest high school in the state, there was a car coming the other way.

The jackass thankfully avoided the impending head-on collision by swerving into the guy next to him...forcing him to collide with the car on my street that was waiting to turn left, and effectivly bunging up the whole intersection.  All three vehicles sustained a surprising amount of damage.  One of them lost a wheel.

I eased into the right-turning lane, and took an alternate route.  I got the boys safely to school just in the nick of time, and then drove back, intending to offer my witness information to the responding officer.  However, there was not yet and officer on the scene, and I saw at least two subsequent fender-benders as hurried and inattentive drivers failed to realize that traffice was impede at that intersection.

I decided that the only value I could add to the situation would be negative.  Normally, I'm all about offering witness information if I have it because when I was in my accident, it absolutely in no uncertain terms helped me refute the other person's account, and saved me a lot of trouble.

However, in this case, it just would have added to the snarl.  Besides, It's a slam-dunk as to who is at fault.

But one thing I will carry away from this today:  No matter what happens to me today, no matter what befalls me, nor how many mistakes I make nor how many things I say which I might regret later...

...at least I can go through my day knowing that I'm not a selfish prick with a high-end SUV who thinks nothing of risking other people's life-and-limb pulling multiple bone-headed traffic violations.

And that ain't nothin'.  It's only up from there!

...I think my molocules have stopped moving.

Grasshopper and I wait outside in the -30+ windchill for 20 minutes.  Then I made a rude gesture in the direction the bus SHOULD have come from and went to warm up the car.

It took three minutes to warm up the car, twenty minutes to drive to the school, five minutes to wait in the traffic circle, and another 20 to drive back.

The cabin of the car never got warm.

I can't feel my feet.

One thing you can say about the weather in @#)%*$#% Minnesota...it keeps the riff-raff out.

[Update:  My mom just called from "up nort".  There, it is -35 WITHOUT factoring in windchill.  They watch the neighbor girl in the mornings when her mom is at work.  They drove her to the bus stop this morning, obviously.]

[Update II:  The benefit of having a home office is more than just the nice commute past the coffee pot.  When you're stuck in an office and you are cold, you are out of luck.  It's just plain COLD.  Suck it up for 8-10 hours.  When you are at home and your cold, you can get some bread baking in the oven and the house is warm again.  Plus - bread.  mmmmmm...fresh baked bread.  The downside is, of course, good luck finding 8-10 hours of work everyday.]

LEARNING CHINESE IS HARD!

That is all.

grumble.

Check out Monk-in-Training's history of St. Valentine.

Paula tells a personal story, and story-telling is what Paulas do best.  Plus, there's sonnets involved, and who doesn't like that?

What is with these people with an Epicopalian History and their literary/scholarly ability?

If I could believe the things you have to believe in order to call yourself a Christian...I'd want to be an Episcopalian...but I'm not sure I'm smart enough or well-read enough.

And for those of you who don't want to think about romance and human love today, I bring you a story about the healing power of the love of DOG.

Oh and , Happy Valentine's Day!!

A while back, I wrote a story that was inspired by something a friend of mine told me about her childhood.

I never published the short story, because it was so completely personal to her, and I took a few liberties with details to fit it neatly into the short story form, and also to set the story in a time closer to the time-period I was most familiar with.    This woman was about ten years older than me, the youngest of several children in a Catholic immigrant family.

The family was from Poland.  My friend was the youngest because her mother had died while giving birth to her.

The father’s sister came from Poland to care for the children and help their father run his household.

This aunt was apparently a perfectly sufficient care-taker for all of the other children…but she believed that my friend was touched by evil, and possessed by demons, which had killed the mother.

So she tortured the little girl for the duration of her childhood.

I only learned of this story because of my blundering and often insensitive big mouth.

My friend had lost her first child in utero.  She had given birth to her second child with great difficulty, and he was three weeks pre-mature and struggled through infancy.  Her third child came along and this is where the story actually picks up.

My friend’s little toddler had fallen face-first into the wading pool while her back was turned.  Only the quick action of the older child (who was all of four years old) saved the little girl.  It was one of those momentary lapses that every parent has, every parent knows they have, and every parent know it is only by luck or provenance (whichever you prefer) that it turns out well.

There were a few other small bizarre mishaps, which I don’t even recall exactly what they were now, ten years later.

A few months later, my friend was stalled in a residential neighborhood.  Her old van had stopped running, and she had no idea why.  Her two children were sleeping in the back seat, and there was a house right there.  So my friend decided to ask to use the phone.  (this is before cell phones were as ubiquitous as they are now)  The woman who answered the door said “Is that your van that’s burning?”

My friend turned, and sure enough, there was smoke and flames shooting out from under the hood of her van.

She managed to pull her children out, they were treated and released from the hospital, the fire was put out, and except for some minor concerns associated with smoke inhalation, the kids were OK.

I couldn’t believe her run of bad luck.  We were sort of sitting around doing the “Now that everything’s OK, let’s try to make light of it to make ourselves feel better” thing, and I said “If I didn’t know better, I’d say there was some supernatural force after your kids.  It’s like the last few months it’s been one freak accident after another.”

She looked as though I had slapped her hard across the face.

Now, in my defense, this was completely in keeping with the tone of “I can’t believe it, how bad can my luck get” quipping that SHE had set for the conversation, and I had never had an inkling that she was tortured by a religious nut for her whole childhood…

…but the whole story came pouring out then and there.

Some of the most horrifying things I’d ever heard.  And the last thing was that apparently this evil aunt had told my friend that if my friend died first, the aunt would urinate on her grave…and if the aunt died first, she would haunt my friend and make her life miserable because of the pain and evil she had brought to the family.

So, you can see why it sort of bothers me to read this story.

The punch-line is, of course, that my friend’s husband is a Protestant Fundamentalist, and they send their kids to a Catholic school.

I don’t understand people sometimes, and I don’t know why someone who was tortured by religion, who’s misery was caused by superstition, who felt shame and terror over some bizarre belief that she was responsible for something she had no control over, would ever subject her children to the same philosophy and raise them with the same view…

…or why huge segments of the population would turn away from reason and make a mad-dash back to the Demon-haunted world.

Then again, some run the other way, and thank goodness for that.

Since I didn't have a class to teach tonight, I was not going to be driving up to Plymouth like I usually do, and taking a dozen or so laps around their indoor track to warm up for my classes...so I schlepped on down to my local community center and checked out the new facilities.

...niiiice.

Like...NICE nice.

There's a wonderful hip abductor machine that I guess is a normal, standard hip abductor machine...but I've never been a member at a gym that had one.  I am going to be able to stop charging rinos with my side-kicks.

You watch and see.

Bigger space, more machines, better lighting, clean, new carpeting...ROWING MACHINES and, maybe not the most important feature, but significant...bigger cup-holders in the tread-mills.  I can finally bring a quart bottle in and have enough water for more than an hour of running...without having to stop and re-fill.

I got a lot of "Hey!  Where have you been?"  People don't seem to realize that there are other ways/places to work out that sometimes fit into a schedule better for varying periods of time.

Especially not OCD lady, who was still there on schedule, her regular work-out apparently not affected over-much by the changes.

Anyway, it's good to be back, and even though our membership fee will be three times as much, I'd say we're getting much more than 3X the value.

The bad news is, that after months of fighting the good fight with liver cancer, my grandfather succumed to kidney failure today...just hours after I left his house near the Canadian border.  I knew that I would never see him alive again.  I did not know that he would pass away before I got to Bemidji.

I've been asked to write a eulogy.  It's a big job to eulogize a great man.

My parents were greatly comforted/relieved when he accepted the eucharist yesterday, for the first time in his life. 

To me, it is most important that he lived as a person should live.

While we were up there visiting, they were giving him morphine tablets to dissolve under his tongue.  He was told that the tablets should bring relief within fifteen minutes.  If it didn't he was supposed to take another one.

Grandpa always took things like this very seriously, but especially self-care things.  For years, he has put five miles a day on his stationary bicycle...including during his chemo treatments.

He assigned himelf daily chores, and made sure that he performed them every day.  Whenever he could, he looked for additional ways to help my mom around the house as time and energy permitted.  He kept track of his own medications, and managed his own affairs to the largest extent possible.

So needless to say, when the morphine tablet he took didn't help within fifteen minutes, he took another one.l  It knocked him competely loopy for 24 hours.  We showed up near the end of this timee, and he said "I'll never do THAT again" and went back to sleep.

A ittle later he woke upand said "I can't believe people pay money to feel like this.  That doesn't make sense."

A few hours later, he perked up again, and I asked him  if he would like to see Grasshopper, who had been able to come with me.  He nodded and said "yeah".

So I went upstairs and got Grasshopper and told him that Great-grandpa was ready to talk to him.

He went down there, and my grandpa craned his neck so that he could see Grasshopper and his little cousin, who had also come down.  He was somewhat hampered by his weakened state and the oxygen hose and other accoutrements.  He looked over at them and made eye contact, and said:

"Stay off the dope.  It's terrible.  You can't remember anything from one minute to the next."

They nodded somberly, and he fell back asleep.  My sister and I tried to stifle our giggles, because he said "Stay off the dope" in such a funny way.

A little later, all of us kids were in the room visiting as grandpa faded in-and-out of conciousness.  He'd open his eyes and smile at some fragment of conversation that he over-heard, and then fade out again.

At one point, we ran out of things to say, and lapsed into silence.  Grandpa's eye shot open and he said "Oh!"

We said "You OK grandpa?  You want something, some water or tomato soup or something?"

"No, I'm alright, you were all talking, and you stopped and it was quiet.  It was spooky." then he laughed, and fell back asleep.

He thought he'd died.  Given how difficult it was for him to talk, and how much effort he had to make himself understood at all...it should tell us how important it was to him to be useful to others.  He was helping us with his humor and his advice, taking care of us in his way.

He went down-hill fast over the two-and-a-half days I was there.  From getting with help to visit the bathroom, to having to not being able to drink from a straw.

I held his hand as much as I could, and even when he was unconcious, he would squeeze my hand from time-to-time, to let me know that he knew someone was there.

So Rocky and I have been married for twenty years.

He offered to take me on a big trip even though he travels so much it makes him sick.

But I couldn't think of anywhere I wanted to be more than here.

He offere to buy me something big...

...but I couldn't think of anything I wanted.

We were going to go out and spend the day together, but Grasshopper had to stay home with the flu today.

And all I can think about this is; if staying home and taking care of your child with the guy you love feels like the best way to spend your anniversary, you probably don't have anything to worry about.

HAPPY ANNIVERSARY HONEY!  You up for 20 more years?

...wow...do the math guys.  I've been married to this guy HALF my life.

Wow.

Hey family!  It's not that I don't appreciate it and all, but all of the wobbly tables have been stabalized, the hermit crabs cage has been lined, and the drafty crack in the wall behind the crapper in the upstairs bathroom has been insulated...

...so you can stop sending my kids Bill O'Reilly's works of fiction for children now.

(oh, all right, I admit it, I have this book thing, and I can't seem to bring myself to really treat them that way, I DID pass them on to the kids -call it "social Saulkism"- but really, they can only read ONE copy at a time, so it's alright, you can stop now)

I think I've mentioned that Adventure Boy is a Rush fan.

I might have also managed to convey his idolization of Geddy Lee.

Well...Adventure Boy has spent his own money, much of it earned by his roofing work for our neighbor and some sales work for a friend, to buy an acoustic/electric four-string bass guitar.

Here's pictures:

Sorry about all the finger prints.

Anyway, for those of you who watch Firefly, he's named the guitar "Vera".  It might give you an idea of how fiercly he feels toward the thing, and how hard-won he feels it is.

My sister showed him proper posture and hand position in a lesson up north during Christmas, gave him a book to teach himself with and turned him loose.  All he needed was a guitar, and now he has one.

There will be nothing to stop him now.

The chili cheese dip for New Years is all done.  It has been tested by Rocky and his brother and found to be good.

My title of "She who makes chili cheese dip" remains secure.

There was much rejoicing.

Christmas eve we were able to continue part of what had been a regular Holiday tradition.

Adventure Boy’s best friend, who had recently moved to Montreal, came over and spent Christmas Eve with us. 

For the past few years, we had an “exchange program” going with Adventure-Boy’s friend, who is Jewish.

AB would go and spend one night of Hanukah at his friend’s house, and his friend would come and spend Christmas Eve with us.  When the family moved away to Canada, we thought the days of the “exchange program” were gone forever (although I assured AB that Goyim are also allowed to buy Matzo.  There’s no law against it)

Obviously, AB was not able to travel to Montreal for Hanukah, but his friend was back in town over the holidays and was able to stay with us.  He got a Nerf gun, some chocolate-covered Oreos, and a Personal Care kit from Santa.  From us, he got Travelers of Catan and a hand-made quilt.

AB’s friend’s aunt came with to drop him off, and begged to come in a look at the tree.  She was thrilled with the tree, and asked many questions about the various hand-made ornaments, which we have made ourselves over the years, or brought back from our world travels.

She seemed particularly thrilled by the addition of Grasshopper’s “Bird nest collection”…a couple of the many nests that he has collected over the years, which we added to the tree.

We visited for a while, and when the mom and aunt left, I just sort of hovered around the periphery, listening to the sounds of my sons and their friend enjoying Christmas together once more…something I had thought I would never hear again.

And best wishes for a Happy New Year!

I've ALWAYS wanted to say that!  Well, now I can.

 Jagged Spiral will be playing at Stasiu's along with 32nd Day and Sirens of Titan.

Stasiu's is loated at University and Lowry in NE Minneapolis.

There will be a $5 cover charge.  Jagged Spiral will be playing sometime after 11:00PM.

A friend recently sent me this picture in an e-mail describing it as "The Eye of God."  The e-mail assured me that if I gazed upon the Eye of God, it would change my life (presumably for the better, in a way that I could understand and appreciate).

Laughingly, I responded:  "In ancient times, if you told someone that they could look upon the Eye of God, they would refuse to do it.  They would be certain that someone would be instantly struck dead for such an offense.  Today, we take pictures of the Eye of God, transmit it to our friends through the internet for entertainment purposes, and use it as a charm for granting free wishes...and they say ATHEISTS are arrogant." 

Adventure Boy came home a couple of weeks ago, and informed us that he was going to try out for a role in the school play.  I thought that auditioning would be a great experience, so we sat down and surfed the Internet for a good, dramatic monologue for him to use.  I printed it out, and he took it with him, along with a ton of study materials and homework, on his trip to Spain with Rocky.

(Yeah, haven't told you all about that yet, have I?  Adventure Boy and Rocky went to Barcelona for 9 days over Thanksgiving vacation).

Anyway, I told AB that it was great that he was going to audition, but since there are a few thousand kids in his High School, and since he is a Freshman, and since he hasn't had any experience with acting except for one drama workshop last summer, he shouldn't expect to get a role... but should try his best to get the most out of the experience of trying.

Needless to say, he returned that evening and informed me that he had a call back the next day.  They would be performing "Rebel without a Cause".  So I helped him research the plot and the characters on the Internet, and the next day he went off armed with a fair understanding of the sort of stuff he'd be asked to read.

He got a part.

Not only that, but it is a pretty good part.  A small but important role.

He's the female love-interest's abusive father.

Needless to say, he's a little creeped out by the role. 

Anyway, I guess it goes without saying that you all will be informed of the date and time of the performances so that you can attend if you wish.

Weird relation to a news story.

When I was a kid, I used to come home from school in the winter and strap on my cross country skis.  I would then hit what my family referred to as "the Pipline trail"...a long strip of clear-cutting that ran over a pipeline route that went past my house.  The stretch we lived on was between Cass Lake and Bemidji.

Apparently, the Enbridge Energy Pipline exploded near Clearbrook, causing oil prices to rise.

The explosion happened nowhere near my childhood home, and nowhere near the stretch where I pushed myself to cover our little loop through the woods, down the pipeline, and back through the woods to our house, in less and less time every day; pushing myself to physically burn up the frustrations and stress of a day in High School.

It's strange when you actually know the place where the news on CNN is happening.  I just wish that sometimes it could have something to do with something other than schools getting shot up, guys in my graduating class blowing away helpless kittens on school grounds, or stuff blowing up.

Hey CNN!  Can't you go to the area to do one of your feel-good puff pieces?  Our area has sent lots and lots of soldiers to Iraq, and many of them are wholesome, hometown kids.  ONE of them must have done something inspirational and heartwarming.   Just a thought.  We've got a lot of wonderful social service NGO's at work up there.  I'm sure you could find someone for your Heroes segment.

Do it for me...K?

For those of you who do not believe that our great Republic benefits from the constant infusion of culture, language, and perspective of our alien residents, I offer a challenge to your closed-minded ways.

On December 8th, 2007; At 7:30 PM; for the mere pittance of $20 USD (effective price dropping daily) you can witness the charming and immortal tale; "A Christmas Carol" by Charles Dickens.

But this isn't just ANY rendering in ordinary English.  No it is not!

Come to the University of MN Saint Paul campus

Student Center Theater

2017 Buford Avenue

St. Paul, MN 55108

There, you will witness the moralizing, liberal, whiney, orphan-hugger words of Charles Dickens transformed!

Commedia Beauregard will give that pallid old Englishman an infusion of Klingon-American honor, courage, and (I assume) bloodlust!

That's right "A Klingon Christmas Carol".

See it Dec. 8th at 7:30 PM  Tickets at:  www.ticketworks.com or (615)209-6689

Oh, did I mention that this is a fund-raiser?  Proceeds from this performance will assist in funding future productions, commissioning new translations of foreign-language plays, and helping to further the understanding of the world's cultures, and (I assume) other world's cultures.

Don't miss it! 

Oh, and...Q'aplah!

Someone just sent me a copy of a recommendation letter that they wrote on my behalf...

Wow.

It's good to hear nice and glowing things about yourself...even if you can't quite bring yourself to believe them.

So I wrote an e-mail to my friend, Mike, who I took over the Kung Fu classes for.  I was asking him for some information, and then told him that I thought the classes were going well, with the exception that I felt like the kids were still looking at me like I was from another planet, so I must do things very differently from him.

He just responded.  Among other things, he says: "They are probably looking at you like you are from anothere planet because you are really weird, and probably have booger or something hanging out of your nose."

mutter mumble grumble.

Should I be disturbed that there are girls calling at 8:30 PM at night asking to speak with my 10-year-old boy?

Is this just what the young whipper-snappers do now-a-days?

Is it my age that makes this seem wrong, my strict upbringing, or is it just that girl-children these days have turned into cheap floozies?

As always, my response is that he's busy, and can I take a message?

"Just tell him so-an-so called."  Giggle, hang up.

argh.

Does he need this kind of attention?  I don't think so.  Not at ten.

Sigh.

Wait just a gol-darned minnit here!

Geekgoddess is on a "watch list" ?!?!?!

NO FAIR!

I've never even had to walk through a metal detector more than once.

I mean, for goodness sakes, Geekgoddess has even served honorably in the U.S. millitary!

It's a disgrace.

For those of you who have been wondering if the world opened up under my feet and swallowed me whole, or if the ferocious Neo-Nazi home-decorator squad came and got me, none of the above.

I've been cutting up deer, organizing my house, cutting up piles and piles of undonatable junk clothing into quilting squares, and trying to rid the yard of fall leaves.

Also, I've been volunteering as an ESL tutor.  So far, I've been teaching a Somali woman and a Ukranian man.  I highly recommend doing ESL tutoring for anyone who thinks that immigrants are just lazy slugs coming here to drain our society.  You wouldn't believe how hard-working and appreciative they are.  They are America's greatest fans, happy to be here, and looking forward to forging a great future in the "land of opportunity".  Programs can always use more tutors.

Oh yeah, and they've added three Kung Fu classes to my teaching schedule.  I've got my two special needs classes, two classes for typical children, and an adult class.  One of my classes has 20 students!  I might have a co-teacher as soon as one of the other second degree black belts returns from hernia surgery...but I don't know.  I might be on my own from now on!

Needless to say, time has been a little tight, but this Kung Fu teaching is starting to look more and more like a job than a marginally profitable hobby.

Rocky shot a deer last weekend.  Adventure Boy saw some deer, but he chose not to shoot, because he did not think he had a very good shot, and didn't want to risk wounding the deer, so he just sat and watched them, waiting for the chance to take a shot.  It never came.  I think a lot of fourteen year olds would have found the temptation too great, and taken a pot-shot.  I am very proud of him for being responsible.

Besides, we still have venison in the freezer from his killing spree last year.  Lord knows, the kid has plenty of kills under his belt.  He's still averaging one deer for each season. 

Rocky got a spike doe.

Those of you who know something about deer anatomy and physiology will recongnize a problem there.  That's right a "spike" refers to the antlers of a deer being small, single spikes.  This indicates a young buck.

Does do not have antlers.

Usually.

That's right, Rocky shot an intersexed deer.  It's rare, but it happens, and don't let anybody tell you otherwise.  There's nothing "unnatural" about it.

I'm sure it will be delicious.  We are equal opportunity carnivores.  No discrimination here.

I have completely butchered the deer.  All that remains is to grind the hamburger meat (which is currently in the freezer), and donate the hide.

Ya know that stuff you remember doing, or being a part of, or even just standing by and failing to step in and put a stop to it that makes you feel badly when you think about it years later?

I’m not going to write about that.  Everybody writes about that.

I’m going to write about some of the stuff I KNOW I SHOULD feel badly about, but don’t.

I was, originally, going to try to do it without justifying myself…but let’s be honest, that’s not going to happen.  ‘Cause little old Jiminy EmmerEffin’ Cricket is sitting here staring at me, and even though I don’t feel badly about this stuff, it’s all I can do to keep from locking him in the closet with the Venus Fly trap I just recently bought.

That would be thing number one.

I generally don’t kill bugs.  I usually set them free outside or ignore them, depending on my mood.  Sure, I’ll flush a woodtick down the toilet…but I WON’T burn them with matches.  That just seems psycho to me.  That, and I grew out of torturing insects when I was 8.

OK, 10.

Anyway, I bought a Venus fly trap.  Because we have this perennial problem with Boxelder bugs and those darned Asian Beetles.  They’re everywhere, inside and outside of the house.  I’ve even taken to spraying bug killer on them the last couple of years to try to thin them out…with very little success.  Sure I kill hundreds of them…but you don’t even notice a dent in the population.

They’re still all over the place, crawling around on both the inside and outside walls, wiggling their way in through cracks and crevices.  They’re in the shower, on the couch, in your hair…IN THE BUTTER (upside:  people are getting better about replacing the cover on the butter dish).

So I bought a Venus Flytrap.

You might think this is a sort of nice zen solution to the invasion of hordes and hordes of bugs.  You know, letting nature solve the problems caused by nature.

But I have to confess…I don’t just let the hapless bugs wander to their doom as nature intended.  No, I have captured some of the bugs…

…and FED them to the Flytrap.

It’s not like they’re cockroaches, or termites.  They don’t hurt anything, they aren’t pernicious and they’re just a seasonal annoyance.  The worst they do is die and leave their bodies around for me to sweep/vacuum/dust up.  Killing them is completely pointless, and not at all necessary.  It’s completely against my ethics to kill something just because it is an annoyance.  But I did it anyway, and so I should feel badly about it, but I don’t.

So much for cleaning up the karma.  But I don’t care.  It’s really SATISFYING to see the trap snap down on one or two representatives of  those effing annoying, endless, invading armies of bugs.

When I was in highschool there was this Home Economics teacher.  She walked around clutching her books to her chest like a shield.  He beady little eyes would dart back and forth as she hunched down the hallway.  As if she expected a sasquatch to leap out of a broom closet and maul her lace ruff, or hand-crocheted shawl, or her freshly-polished brown, sensible shoes.

A friend once described her as being a walking, open wound.  I’d never given it a lot of thought, but my friend was right.  Something in the rabbit-like appearance and demeanor of this poor excuse for an authority figure cried out for harassment.

She could not manage a classroom.  She couldn’t keep order, and she couldn’t stick to a lesson plan.  She wouldn’t call on students nor answer questions, because of many years of having the students provoke her with inappropriate or galling questions or statements.  Her most frequent in-class activity was to assign reading from the text-book, and then wander around the room, eyes darting to the left and right, muttering “shut up.  Shut up.” Under her breath, in her tense little voice.

I’d always assumed that she was talking to the numerous kids who talked and goofed around in class, not caring about anything they were supposed to be doing or learning.   In retrospect, maybe there were ethereal voices involved.

Anyway, This poor woman was persecuted mercilessly.  Like most frequent targets of bullies, I sympathized.  Also like most frequent targets of bullies, I kept my head down and enjoyed the relief of the attention being diverted elsewhere.  I didn’t participate, but I also didn’t speak up on behalf of this teacher.  Like any other prisoner of an institution, I was just there to do my time, and keep myself to myself.

Until one day.

I had opened my back-pack to take out the homework work were supposed to do for the class, and hand it in.  I’d brought my lunch to school that day, so that I could enjoy the outside-air and a cigarette by the lake rather than endure the cafeteria.

There was a school rule against having food in the classrooms.  Nobody paid much attention, but on this particular day, the neurotic bird woman of Home Economics decided to enforce this rule against me.  ME!  Who sat quietly and didn’t cause trouble.

Not against the boys who had placed a condom on the doorknob (a lubricated condom) of the classroom door.  They knew she never turned her back on the class, so when she reached out to open the door, she didn’t see that she was about to touch a slimy condom.  The bastards got a LOT of amusement out of the feverish hand-washing that ensued.  She didn’t go after the people who had threatened to kidnap and kill her cat, or the people that spit-wadded her whenever she walked down the hallway.

No.  She picked the person she knew she could harass without anyone objecting.

She snatched my lunch-bag out of the back-pack and “seized” it.  I wasn’t supposed to have food in the classroom, you know.  She took my lunch, and she wouldn’t give it back. 

That was it.  I became her worst enemy.  Even going so far as to create a shriveled paper-machet hand puppet which I dressed in a dowdy old doll dress, and took it out when doing a slide-show and bobbled it back and forth in  front of the screen, saying “shut up!  Shut-up!” in a very good imitation of her quavering voice.

I got detention for my escapades, unlike the cowards who harassed her in their sneaky way.  I think she was glad to have a target for her bile. 

The next year, the poor woman had to go on an extended “vacation”, from which she never returned.

I should feel bad about my part in her inability to handle her class, because I wasn’t helpful, and I didn’t “rise above” to be the better person when she chose me, of all people, to assert her bit of control in a world that was too big for her…

I should feel bad, but I don’t.  Is it enough that I feel a little bad about not feeling bad?

I guess I’ll just have to settle for knowing, intellectually, that I was wrong and working from that.  I’m not sure that that particular little bit of corruption in the heart is terribly tractable. 

There’s a few other things, I know, but the inspiration to write about them hasn’t struck at this particular time.  So stay tuned.  There might be another episode of “I’m not sorry.”

Anyone else have some “I’m not sorry” stories?

Feel free to be anonymous.

Home Front 1 Allergies:  No reaction to the allergy injections, beyond the expected swelling and rash at the injection site.  I’m told that I must do a peak-flow test every time I come in to get the injections (every 3-10 days – 7 being optimal).  I’ll need to come in that frequently for about 6 months, until I reach my maintenance level.  Then, it will be roughly every 28 days.  As an aside, my peak flow measurement is still 600, despite the fact that I have not been running or training with nearly the vigor I usually do for quite some time now.  Not bad for an asthmatic, eh?

Home Front 2  Kung Fu:  I’ve been given three more classes to teach.  The classes previously belonged to my friend, and Kung Fu “brother”, Mike.  He’s found a new job that will require him to travel, and he has to give up his classes.  I now have three classes with typical students in addition to my two classes with special needs students.  Mike is a very good teacher, and his students have a very high level of achievement over-all.  As far as I can tell, there are no super-stars, but all of his students perform at a high level.  The highest rank in his class is 3rd yellow.  The classes are fairly homogeneous as far as rank goes, so I don’t have to worry about teaching to all different levels at once.  A real load off my mind!  Still, I am going to have to work very hard to keep the level of instruction as high as Mike has set the bar!  A little daunting.

Home Front 3:  I think Rocky’s coming down with the flu.

Home front 4:  Rocky’s brother and his family is staying with us this weekend.  A happy,  bustling household.  The kids are thrilled to see their cousins.

Home Front 5:  Grasshopper has a cello recital today at 3:30 in Minneapolis, and I have to judge a Kung Fu contest in Hopkins.  Rocky is speaking at a Code Camp in Bloomington, and Adventure Boy is going to be the only one who stays put in the house today.  Yet, there will always be several people home.  Weird.

Today was my first visit to the allergy/athsma clinic for my immunotherapy shots.  So far, no reaction at all.  So I am very happy.  I tolerated it very well.

I also got my flu shot, which I havn't bothered to get the last couple of years.  It was very good to get it.  Now I know I will be at least somewhat protected.

I am going to have to stay on my anti-allergy medications for quite some time, I think.  However, it is nice to be finally starting down the road to a reation-free exsistance.

I'm going to go get my first allergy shot today.  I'll let you know how it goes.

I'm using one of my favorite cleaning techniques right now, and as I was implementing said technique, I was reflecting on how strange it is to me that so many nerds I know have not thought of it on their own.  So I am going to share it with you all in the hopes that it will bring great improvement to your lives.

Now, being nerds, we all have massive libraries of books, games, DVD's, CD's, fan art and museums of tiny little collectables.  Clutter is one of those inevitabilities of fandom.  A badge and a burdon that we bear, like all the others, with a mixture of pride and shame.

And dust is the constant companion of clutter.  We all know the heartbreak of trying to wipe the dust and occasional cobweb off of that great Jack O'Neil action figure (thanks again, Bob!  I LOVE it), only to have the stuff catch in the joints of his arms and legs, or in the creases of his uniform.   How do we keep our vast collections from choking us with dust?  Well...I have to admit I DO clear all surfaces to dust them.  But before I do, I make the rounds with another ubiquitous staple of nerd exsistance.

Canned air.

Books, action figures, row after row of jewel cases, and the frames of fan-art that deck the walls all get a quick blast of canned air (You can get it on sale at a variety of places...don't pay full price...stock up and save). 

It doesn't take much.  Then, you can move eveything and dust the easy flat surfaces.  Big time saver.

Some people are apparently a little confused about how I can reconcile my love for Daniel Jackson, and my loathing for Eric von Daniken.

Well, it's easy.

Eric von Daniken lives in THIS world, where the pyrmids were build by extraordinary human effort using advanced, but still ancient and very human, ingenuity, math, technology and skills.  All of which we can abundantly demonstrate that the humans of that time had.  Nevertheless, he believes that alien astronauts came to our planet and assembled the wonders of the ancient world with the magic laser beams.  Despite the inability to support these claims with equally extraordinary proof, he continues to promote his ideas as though they are established fact.

Daniel Jackson lives in a fictional world where the pyramids were ACTUALLY BUILT by extraordinary human effort using advanced ingenuity, math, technology and skills which were given them by ancient astronauts posing as gods in order to obtain hosts for their parasitic selves, as well as intelligent, adaptable and fast-breeding slave armies.  Unlike Daniken, when Dr. Jackson went looking for the alien astronauts, HE FOUND THEM.  Then, they pissed him off, and he tweaked their noses, kicked the asses, rolled them in tar and feathers, and kicked them out of his galaxy...with his brain.  He hardly had to flex those nicely proportional arm muscles at all.

Also, Eric von Daniken is a paunchy, dusty old crank who is technically old enough to be either my father or my grandfather, and he spouts enough unsupportable superstitious B.S. to be my pastor.  Anyone creeped out yet?

Daniel, though fictional, is only two years older than me (born THE DAY BEFORE ROCKY), is adorable, and works out on a regular basis.

So, there you have it.  Happy now?

Happy Birthday to me?  Happy Birthday to me!  Happy Birthday to me-eee!  Happy Birthday to me!

Wait.  I'm forty now.  I'm too damn old to be up this late.

Where's my nurse's aid with the warm milk and electric blanket?

Nevermind.  I'll just grab this here walker and hobble off to bed on my own power.

Stupid birthdays.

[Update:  What's the matter with the time-stamp on this blog.  MY clock says after midnight!  Has it always been one hour behind?]

[Another update:  Bob said some nice stuff]

So, say you're a sanctimonious, self-important little jerk who is a member of a homeowner's association of a high-priced suburb of a Midwestern city.  Say your homeowner's association decides to rent space for their annual meeting in a Community Center.  Say the staff of said Community Center warns you that the night you want, the room is also rented by a Martial Arts Class for Special Needs kids.  This class will be operating behind a flimsey temporary partition for the first fifteen minutes of your meeting, at which point it will ajourn.

So you say "OK" and you show up for your meeting, and said Special Needs Martial Arts class is in full swing next door.

Do you:

a)  Begin your meeting and announce that it to be over in fifteen minutes, you were warned.

b)  Delay the beginning of your meeting for fifteen minutes.

c) Go and tell the happy active Special Needs students (whose group ALSO PAID FOR THE FREAKING SPACE) to "keep it down", even though all they were doing was holding their regular martial arts class that they attend every week?

d) go and tell the happy active special needs students (whose group ALSO PAID FOR THE FREAKING SPACE) to "keep it down" while exuding an air of aggrieved victimisation.

Of course, you do "d", because you are a sanctimonious, self-important little jerk, whose first fifteen minutes of meeting is much more important than the happiness of a bunch of disabled children.

By Saveau.

It's worth the read.

So I'm on the phone with Barb, and we're both drinking.  It's a little thing we do when there's nothing else going on.  She's in Missouri, I'm in Minnesota, so we call each other up at a time when both of our cell-phone plans give us free minutes, and we drink and talk on the phone. 

And Barb starts talking about how one time she went and visited this guy that I had dated, and he was reading her some of his writing and one of the pieces he had written was about me.

And her rememberance of it was that he described me as some sort of epic super-heroin, a cat-like force of nature.  A goddess of potential mayhem and violence.  He just says that because I kicked his ass in sparring.  Repeatedly. Thoroughly. and with more enjoyment than a strictly sane woman would have.

And her response was that this was strange and new to her.  To her, I was just Teresa, who could be sullen and moody; goofy and geeky; a tortured and lost soul with a bit too much drama mixed in to be taken seriously.  I was her kindergarden friend who like playing cars with the boys and moved away and came back years later as a third-grade tom-boy cowgirl with a chip on her shoulder.  The nerdy girl who smoked with the toughies behind the Jet-Mart across the street, and had lots of scary friends, yet never seemed to be scary herself.  Who drank enough to be mouthy when it wasn't wise, but somehow managed to pull off an escape when trouble struck.  Who got arrested on occasion, but was too embarassed to admit it outright and did detention for truancy rather than admit to larceny if she was dragged down to the cop-shop during school hours.  Who showed up at school with spectacular bruises and more spectacular stories that no one really believed or listened to.  Who appeared to make up as much stuff as she told straight, who covered under callousness and carelessness a sense of wonder and responsibilty.

I responded that if she didn't think I was a cat-like super-hero force-of-nature chick, it was probably because she had never been sexually attracted to me, and plus, if she'd never seen me as an epic heroin, she had probably never seen me clean a toilet.

Because me doing battle with the forces of disorder and chaos in a houseful of males is nothing short of the epic battle between Gilgamesh and the Bull of Heaven.  And that goes double after a LAN party where you have at least a half-dozen men who don't live here, have been living on Little Debbies, Doritos and Mountain Dew for 17 hours, and want to get back into play before they get greased by a teenager who has more of a natural tolerance for Little Debbies, Doritos, and Mountain Dew than they do.

Barb called bullshit, as child-hood friends will.  the subject changed, and we moved on.

And I kept my real secrets again.  Hidden in plain sight from those who know me best.

Because you know, don't you dear readers...you're only REALLY dead...when they put you in a box.

>:->

This morning, I got Grasshopper up a little early so that he can put in more time on homework.  Yesterday was kind of a C-F so I figure it would be good to spend a little extra time on homework.  He had everything that was due today done, but still some projects due Friday that needed to advance.

Today he has an audition for Orchestra, as well.  I just realized that he forgot the music he was supposed to bring.  Grump.

I get the kids through some more homework, get them to put their stuff in their backpacks and get them off to school.

I sit down to work on editing Rocky's latest e-book.  Jay is laying down under my desk, contentedly nibbling away on one of his dog toys.  I've got a stack of papers that need to be filled out sitting next the the laptop waiting for me to need a break from scanning pages of technical gobbeldy gook on the screen looking for mispelled words, misplaced commas, akwardly phrased sentences, formatting inconsistancies, etc. (now maybe you know why I don't proof-read my blog.  I've already done more than enough proof-reading.)

Suddenly, Jay leaps up and starts jumping around under my "desk"...which is actually just a light plastic craft table.  Because that's the way I like it...small, portable, durable, and repurposable.

It's like he's been hit with a cattle prod.  My computer, coffee cup, papers and PDA go flying every which way.  The coffee cup ricochets into the laundry room and shatters on the concrete floor.  I've got coffee on my carpet, the wall, my papers, PDA, and in my keyboard.

A half-an-hour of clean-up later, and I still haven't figured out what the heck set the dog off, but he hasn't come back into my office since.  He keeps licking one of his back feet, but I can't see anything wrong with it.  Other than that, he seems fine, though subdued.

Adventure Boy must have enjoyed the Rush concert very much.  Here is his sketch of Geddy Lee that he did today...from memory.

In a conversation I overheard him having with Grasshopper, he said "I didn't watch the monitors, because you're at a live concert...why would you watch a screen?"

Pretty awesome, huh?

[update:  My Sunday Devotionals sometimes involve Rush - check out these lyrics by Neal Peart]

"The Way The Wind Blows"

Now it's come to this
It's like we're back in the Dark Ages
From the Middle East to the Middle West
It's a world of superstition

Now it's come to this
Wide-eyed armies of the faithful
From the Middle East to the Middle West
Pray, and pass the ammunition

So many people think that way
You gotta watch what you say
To them and them, and others too
Who don't seem to see things the way you do

We can only grow the way the wind blows
on a bare and weathered shore
We can only bow to the here and now
In our elemental war

We can only go the way the wind blows
We can only bow to the here and now
Or be broken down blow by blow

Now it's come to this
Hollow speeches of mass deception
From the Middle East to the Middle West
Like crusaders in a holy alliance

Now it's come to this
Like we're back in the dark ages
From the Middle East to the Middle West
It's a plague that resists our science

It seems to leave them partly blind
And they leave no child behind
While evil spirits haunt their sleep
While shepherds bless and count their sheep

Like the solitary pine
On a bare wind blasted shore
We can only grow the way the wind blows

Got up at oh-five-dark-and-sleepy, Rocky got me to the airport in plenty of time.  I got on the plane, plane took off on time, no bumps, no hitches, no muss no fuss.

Well, maybe a little muss and fuss.  I sat next to a grumpy, incommunicative little man who passed noxious gas the whole flight.  But that’s sort of something I’ve come to expect.  Travel has a deleterious effect on some people’s digestion.

Got to the airport in Boston, found out Barb was in a completely different terminal, but she got there in enough time to orient herself and find where I would be.

Good thing too, because my eyes were watery and difficult to focus for a while after I got off the plane.

I got my suitcase, and Barb and I hiked to the shuttle bus area where we looked for our shuttle to Enterprise Rental.  We saw every other possible type of rental car shuttle, but no Enterprise.  Barb went back to the rental car phone bank to make a call, and three Enterprise shuttles came all in one glob while she was gone. 

At Enterprise, we were greeted by a fully-staffed counter of freshly-scrubbed and smiling faces in shirts and ties.  And I mean greeted, handed bottles of cold spring water, had our hands shaken, were asked about our flights, checked in promptly, and given excellent directions to our destination (including an offer to print out a Google Map, which Rocky had already done for me.)

We got on the road, and began our aimless wander up the coast of Main, taking wrong turns there, and right turns that turned out to be wrong there, and wrong turns that were actually right at the other place…

Oh, that reminds me of something I wanted to say:

“HEY NEW ENGLAND!!!!  YOUR SIGNAGE SU-DIDDELY-UCKS!”

There, just had to get that off my chest.

We stopped at Red’s Eats in Wiscasset on Sue’s recommendation (she had been through there days earlier) and the lobster roll, crab cakes and fried zucchini were delicious.  The ice cream was rather…eh.

A  nice couple we met in line gave us their card, and a sales pitch for  a patent medicine that was made from a rare asian herb  that would cure all migraines and cluster headaches and a whole list of other seemingly unrelated conditions.  It had changed their lives.  Uh huh.

More driving, beautiful country, lots of fun chatting and catching up and such, and we finally arrived at N.E. Harbor, where our “cabin” was.  We drove all over the place trying to figure out where 76 Harbor Street was, only to eventually find out that somebody (who shall remain nameless) had given us the wrong address and it was actually 76 Summit.

Our friend Alicia, her two daughters and Sue’s daughter walked down to rescue us.  There was much rejoicing.

We were exhausted, so I pulled the air-mattresses Sue had loaned us out of my suit case, and we began blowing them up.  I got light-headed pretty quickly, so while Barb took a turn at trying to inflate one of them, I went in search of something to help.  I thought we might hook a vacuum hose up to the exhaust and use a vacuum to blow up the mattress.  I’ve done this before, so I asked about a vacuum.

“In the closet” said Sue.

“What closet?” I asked.

“There’s a door in the entryway.”

I looked around the entry-way, and sure enough, there was a door.  I opened it, and there was a defunct dust-buster sitting on a shelf an arm’s length in front of me in a very shallow closet, cloaked in shadow as it was late at night, and that corner of the entry-way was not well lit.  I pulled it out and examined it.  The thing had probably not worked for ten years.  There was rust on it.  I went to put it back, and it tipped off the narrow shelf.  As I leaned in to right it, I took a step forward…into NOTHING.

My hands shot out and braced against the wall in front of me and the wall to the left.  My back slammed up against a shelf that ran along the wall to my right, and friction held me there as I yelled, groped with my foot for the floor that wasn’t there, and yelled again.

More foot-groping, one more yell.  Three seemed like a good number of yells.

“What?” Sue demanded, sounding irritated.

“No floor!  No floor!”  I yelled, or something like that.  It’s a little fuzzy.  I was still holding myself up, one foot on the threshold, braced at three points by hands and back against walls, and most of my weight dangling over blackness that should have been a floor.

Sue’s daughter brought a flashlight, and shined it down the hole, revealing a steep stair-ladder Chimera going almost straight down into a stone-walled basement filled with junk.

I pushed HARD with my right hand against the back wall, and got myself back out of the “closet”, shut the door, replaced the hook-and-eye latch, and tried to catch my breath.

“That door was sealed off, we couldn’t get it open.” Said Sue, still sounding irritated.  She also pointed me to the identical door on the opposite side of the entry-way...where the closet was.  It was not immediatly apparent from the side I was on at the time.

“It opened right up,” I replied.

Then I realized that I was probably walking into an already tense situation, and with Sue and Amanda’s help, Barb and I got the air-mattresses inflated, and I laid down and listened to everyone debate endlessly how the logistics were going to work to get everyone somewhere that they wanted to be tomorrow.

Eventually, I said something like, “I don’t care what we do tomorrow, if I’m not asleep in 20 minutes, someone is going to die.”

Plans for the next day were hastily concluded, and I fell asleep to dream of falling and being stuck in a dark dungeon with rats all night.

Ben is quitting blogging.

And just a little while ago a small penguin was visiting me, and said "I'm in love with Ben."

Now where will I go for an internet kindred spirit?

Sad Teresa has mopey face now.

Good-bye Ben, and please stop back by here once in a while to say "hi".

And, should the blogging itch hit you some night when you are up late and have a thought ping-ponging around inside your head, please write it down and send it to me as a guest blogger.

You always have a venue here.

In a couple of weeks, my friend and Kung Fu "brother", Chris, will be heading for Iraq.

For those of you who weren't here for my Black-belt saga, Chris is the really big guy who gave me the merciless "beat down" for my sparring match at the end of my test.  Exhausted, sore, mentally and physically drained, I had to go three minutes non-stop fighting this guy who probably outweighs me by close to 100 LBS and is a good eight inches taller than me...and who does 150 mile bike races for "fun" and charity.

I could hardly lift my hands above my waist, but Chris came at me like a freightrain, and got the adrenaline going so I could not only lift my hands, but hit him hard enough to spin his head-gear around sideways once, and cave his belly in enough to make him give out a "whoofing" noise.

I don't really remember much of that fight (I was somewhere else in my head, cross-country skiing), but suffice it to say that it had the "buddy-cop" effect.

Chris is kind, good-natured, competative and generous.  He's a good man, and a good friend.  We'll all miss him, as will his wife and his German Shephard, Axel.

Good luck, Chris, keep yer head down, and thanks for serving.

So I went to the store today to buy some paint for the upstairs bathroom, which has had the wallpaper removed and the walls washed down with vinegar water, scraped with a putty knife to get the residual past off, and then wiped down again with the vinegar water again.  The only way to be sure, short of nuking the site form orbit.

I cut myself three times with the putty knife.  The vinegar water stings pretty bad when it gets in the cuts.

"But putty knives don't have sharp edges" you say.

"I know," I answer.  Yet here I am.  Three putty-knife cuts on my hands.  I am able to apply quite a lot of pressure to a putty-knife, apparently, and when it slips, there is badness.

So I go to the store and I pick out my colors, a pretty bright blue and a nice browny-green that, while coming from two comletely different sets of Granamal-style color-grouped chips, complement each other well.

I bring it up to the paint-mixer lady, and she exclaims over my selections "These colors are PERFECT together.  Oh my God!  They're absolutely perfect, they just make me want to go paint something."

"OK", she says, scanning the chips and setting the machine, "Prussian Blue, and..."

"Excuse me?" I ask, blood turning cold in my veins.

"Prussian Blue.

"Are you sure?"

"Yes.  What?  Is there something wrong?"

"uh...no...go ahead."

So I go home and I'm painting and my friend Barb calls me on the phone and I tell her that the name of my color is "prussian blue",and it's all wrong.

"Why?  not a good color?"

"No...It's a fine color, perfect It's just...first of all, it's kind of Robin's egg blue...a little lighter, but close, and Prussian Blue is..."

"More like Cobalt"

"Exactly."

Then, I tell her about how it is also the name of the teeny-bopper Neo-Nazi pop band comprised of Lynx and Lamb Gaede.

"So.  you have a neo-nazi bathroom?"

"Yeah."

Then, I held the phone out from my ear as she lets out peals of unrelenting laughter.

"You know I'm going to be calling this your Neo-nazi bathroom for the rest of your life right?"

"Sigh.  Yep.  I know."

Hey!  Parracks!  I got your message while we were on vacation, but since we didn't have any signal except digital roaming, I thought you would be OK with us waiting to call you back.  I'm going to try tonight after 7:00PM.

OK, with that out of the way...

On to other things.  I have almost finished with the laundry, which I spent all day on yesterday.  Ironing, and such.  The bathrooms are clean (and I mean CLEAN, there was an old toothbrush involved.  Not one micrometer of either bathroom escaped scrubbing), but I'm having to do some maintenance.  I just got done platering some fairly nasty damaged places on the bathroom walls.  Some of our guests (not Karen, who is an excellent guest on her frequent trips through the cities) have a problem remembering to start the fan BEFORE starting the shower.  This leads to cumulative steam damage to the walls and paint in the bathrooms...not to mention mold.

The hotel Lhotka has taken kind of a pounding in the last couple of years, is what I'm saying.  So plastering and painting and repairs are a constant thing.  You would think the rules would be simple to remember and follow:

1) Turn on the exhaust fan before you start the shower.

2) SHUT the shower door during your shower.

3) Leave the shower door OPEN after you shower so that air can circulate in the shower and dry it out, preventing the growth of mold.

4) Use the squeegee provided to remove water from the glass to prevent water spots and soap-scum build-up.

The wallpaper in the upstairs bathroom has almost completely peeled of fthe walls, so it is time well past time to finish the job of removing it, and then prime and paint the walls.  I think I'm going to try some of that special bathroom paint up there and see how that works (that doesn't get you off the hook for using the fan, though.  Just DO it.)  Also, I'm going to try to update the vanity up there by roughing up the dark-walnut stained vanity and priming and painting over it with a more modern color.

And yes, those UGLY old late-1970's light fixtures days are numbered.  I've got a plan for lighting that bathroom, and it's going to be GEORGOUS!!!  Those of you who know and like my husband might want to give him some commiseration in the next few weeks, 'cause I'll tell you now, it ain't going to be cheap.  You might need to buy him a drink.

And we need a new exhaust fan in that bathroom too.  Not that it'll do a damned bit of good if people don't USE it.  OK, 'nuff said.  No more words.  In the future, ACTION will be taken.

I mentioned taking the discolored textured plaster off the cealing as well, but Rocky turned a funny color.  Funnier than the strange orange tint of the cealing plaster.  I'm looking for a cheap and easy work-around.  Maybe I'll try a weak bleach solution.  Maybe I'll paint it.  Both have their draw-backs but I think he'll cope with that better than the mess and expense of scraping and re-texturing the cealing.

Highlights of our week-long trip to International Falls:

1)      Grasshopper and I were rehearsing with the Rainy River Orchestra along with my mom and dad.  We rehearsed for an hour every day and spent at least another half hour every day practicing.  We got the music on Sunday, and the concert was on Friday night, so we had to learn fast.

Each stand of the junior orchestra consisted of a more experienced player, and a less experienced player.  My dad helped Grasshopper, and I helped a woman named Celeste, who is 29 and has Downs Syndrome.  She is very bright and a hard worker.  He technique is very good.  Her only real problem is that she has a difficult time tracking the music because she is blind in one eye.  I suggested to her mother that maybe she would benefit from enlarged music.  I mostly just helped her find her place whenever she got lost.  I also helped her follow the speed signature changes as she had a hard time tracking the music and the conductor at the same time.

The concert went very well.  The senior orchestra did a fantastic job, especially the two cello soloists.  Their performance was amazing, and followed by a stunned silence from the audience and then a thundering standing ovation.  The evening was completed by a group of teenagers doing a fiddle ensemble.  It was awesome. 

Typical of small town community center performances, however, was the fact that part of the concert was marred by a chorus of barking from the neighborhood dogs, and a couple of hot-dogging pick-up trucks tearing up and down the street with after-market exhaust systems roaring their Godly White Male Virility.  You couldn’t help but imagine the sloped foreheads and dragging knuckles of advanced testosterone poisoning.  As all the doors and windows had to be opened to let in the night air (the building would have been stuffy without it, as there is no AC), the disruptions were significant, but the orchestra just played on, and all disturbances were temporary.

The local paper covered the concert.  Grasshopper ended up with his picture on the front page.

2)       I went canoeing with a fellow cello player, a girl named Sammy.  We were going to canoe to town and back, but the wind came up.  At one point, we spent twenty minutes paddling at full speed just to keep from being swept out into the lake.  We made it most of the way there, but decided that it was taking too long, and we were almost out of time, so we turned around and went back to the resort where Sammy was staying.  She got in trouble from her grandmother for being gone for too long.  Here I am, nearly forty, and still a corrupter of youth.

3)      We were camping at another campground not far from Rainer.  We were right on Rainy Lake.  A couple of guys lost the lid of a minnow bucket from their boat.  Adventure Boy kindly swam under the dock after it and retrieved it for them.  The next day, one of the guys lost his glasses over the edge of his boat.  Grasshopper dove under the boat several times, and eventually retrieved them from the bottom of the lake.  The man who lost the glasses offered him a dollar for retrieving them.  His buddy ridiculed him for being stingy and only offering a dollar.  Grasshopper said he didn’t want any money.  The man eventually persuaded him to accept two dollars, one of which went for ice cream, and one of which will be saved for a rainy day.

4)      Rocky went out and bought Grasshopper his very first grown-up rod and reel.  He’s had a number of kiddy sets in the past, but this is a wonderful Cherrywood rod.  Rocky presented it to him the night before their first big excursion into Black Bay.  The awe in Grasshopper’s voice when he breathed the words “thanks Dad” left a glow in our hearts for a couple of days.

5)      Rocky and the boys spent a lot of time fishing.  One of the places they went was out on Black Bay in the canoe.  Black Bay is in Voyagers National Park, and it is really cool.  They also put into an island there, and explored it.  Then they had a shore lunch and came home.

6)      There were bald eagles and Blue Heron everywhere.  There was a small island of rock a short distance from the end of the dock, where a couple of eagles came almost every day and spent some time fishing.  They were impressive to watch with or without binoculars. 

7)      We had a pot-luck picnic.  I brought some picante sauce I had made from our garden, as well as some Teriyaki pork spare ribs.  There was much rejoicing.

8)      We checked out a little Chinese restaurant in International Falls one day.  It was bland and flavorless…flawlessly conformed to the palates of Northern Minnesotans.  The nice Chinese family that runs it were recent immigrants from China Town in New York city.  I used my few words in Chinese.  The girl politely informed me that I should talk more through my nose when I spoke Chinese, because if I didn’t I would continue to sound like a man.  Easy for her to say, she’s smart enough to learn passable English in three months.  I have enough trouble with the words and tones and grammar…much less undoing a lifetime habit of cultivating an impressive contralto speaking voice.

9)      On our way home, we had to stop at the Big Fork River.  Where it crosses Hwy 71, there is a small rapids.  We pulled over into the city camp ground and let the kids climb around on the rocks and swim in the rapids for a little while.  If Rocky gets the footage up on our website at some point, I’ll be sure to put up a link to their exploits.

10) Adventure Boy was his usual helpful problem-solving self.  He helped with setting up camp, maintaining equipment, watching his brother, managing the dog, carrying heavy things for various people in the orchestra and generally making himself useful and helpful.  Things would go a lot less smoothly without an Adventure Boy around.

Denialism.com takes on Mike Adam’s hysterical screed against microwaves.  I’m really, really, really sorry that they had to do that.  After all, I remember when I was in grade school and our family got a shiny new microwave and one of the parents of one of my mom’s piano students told me about how eating food from that unnatural machine was going to give me cancer.

I don’t remember her exact words, in part because it was a long time ago, and in part because I wasn’t paying attention to her words.  My attention was focused on waiting to see how she would react to the fact that she wasn’t getting any smoke when she dragged on her cigarettes because we had taken them all out and poked pin-holes in them and then put them carefully back in the pack as a prank while she was in the studio with my mom visiting and writing out the check for her daughter’s lessons for the next month.

Also, I could tell that what she was saying was total bullshit.

Anyway, the anti-microwave screed got the Hoofnagle treatment, so I don’t think I need put in my housewifey two-cents except to point out that there is absolutely no possible way I could keep up with my daily coffee habit if not for my microwave.  Keeping a constant freshly-brewed-in-small-batches supply going all day would be too time-consuming, and going without is unacceptable.  No, two pots brewed daily, (one in the early morning, and one in the afternoon) and then kept at the perfect temperature cup-by-cup throughout the day by constant “zapping” is the way to go.

I’d like to turn my attention to the article where Mr. Adams puts the howler on the “corrupt” FDA for wanting to regulate dietary supplements.  He absolutely freaks out:

I've documented much of the criminal history of the FDA in my recent book, Natural Health Solutions and the Conspiracy to Keep You From Knowing About Them, which suddenly seems even more relevant today than when I wrote it. In that book, I documented the FDA ordered book burnings, the raids on vitamin shops, the kidnapping of natural health practitioners, the threats, intimidation and oppression tactics that have been used to suppress natural medicine for nearly a hundred years now. And now, with this CAM Products Regulation effort, the FDA is about to deal a final, fatal blow to the alternative medicine industry, outlawing nutritional supplements, functional foods, homeopathy and natural therapies all at once.

Wow, and here I thought it was just about the prevalence of unsubstantiated health claims made by the producers of these materials or the constant and shrill demands that they be treated legally as legitimate medical treatments (sorry, regulation and FDA compliance is part of being a “legitimate” medical treatment in the U.S. You can’t have it both ways, sunshine).

It couldn’t possibly be because of the prevalence of wild variance in product quality and dosage regulation, contamination of the product by mercury, lead, and other potentially harmful chemicals that have been a common problem for the industry?

Seriously, the more I hear alternative practitioners kvetch about not being taken seriously, about the government programs not allowing their treatments to be paid for through Medicare, how their treatments are not validated by science because of  a "conspiracy" in the main-stream medical community to ignore them, how they can’t get insurance companies to cover their services and treatments as “legitimate” medical treatments…you would think that they would welcome the opportunity to prove the safety and efficacy of their products, and to have them validated by standard science.

But then again…maybe they actually know how full of bullshit their claims really are.

Just a note to let you all know I'm going to be blogging rather sporadically for a while.  I just got a passel of work to do, and you know hte saying "Make hay while the sun shines".

Just call me one of America's "laborious and saving". 

Our family is OK, and as far as we know, all of our friends in the area are OK.  We're still getting information, but so far so good.

Thankfully, Rick changed his normal route a few days ago...otherwise there is a very good chance he would have been driving over that bridge when it went.

How are you guys?

For those of you outside the Minneapolis/St. Paul area - one of the big bridges on one of our major freeways collapsed today...into the Mississippi River. as many as fifty cars are reported in the river and six people have died, according to CNN.

The pictures on the news look pretty aweful.  It's going to take a while for our community to recover from this, and it is terrible to think of all the people and families that are in pain and fear tonight.

If those you love are in your house with you, give them a big hug for me, would you?  Just out of gratitude for your peace and safety tonight.

Yesterday I got up at 3:30 AM and took the Chinese boys to the highschool, I had volunteered to help wrangle the lines at the airport, so I got on the bus too.  Grasshopper went with as well, to wring out just a little more time with his new friends.  He was a big hit with all the Chinese kids, as well as the teacher and the principal of the Loudi school.  I think it was because of his spunky attitude, friendly nature, high energy levels, and his very expressive ability with non-verbal communication.

Anyway, on the bus to the airport, the kids sang songs.  The kids passed time this way a lot, any time they were forced to be inactive, and were together waiting for a long time.  One kid would start a song, and everyone who knew it would join in.  They had a preference for ballads and plaintive love songs in either Chinese or English.

One of the kids asked me to sing a song, and when I asked Grasshopper to sing with me, he yelled that we were going to sing, and everyone got quiet.  Then we had to argue about what to sing, and eventually I agreed to sing Grasshopper's favorite children's song...the "Johnny Appleseed Song".  It is short and lively and fun.  I think the kids liked it.

One of the boys, who went by his "American" name, "Antonio", had been given one of his host father's uniform jackets from when he was at the Citidel.  He was kind of the star of the departure, as every kid wanted to see the jacket, and learn what each patch and symbol meant.  Antonio wore it proudly, proud of his host father's accomplishments, and proud of the wonderful gift.

As we got off the bus, Grasshopper and I were innundated with gifts.  Bags of fine green tea, good-luck charms, hand-embroidered handkercheives, even a tiny china doll on a key chain.  One girl gave me a perfumed sachet box filled with dozens of tiny paper cranes that she had folded herself.  Everyone who had been a guest in our home, even for just an hour or so presented us with gifts.

The Americans on the bus were able to get special concourse passes that are available to people helping passengers who need assistance, so we were able to go with them all the way to the gate, which was lucky, because the entire group was selected for extra security checks, and it was rather starteling and uncomfortable for the teenage girls to experience the pat-down (rather more personal touching than they are culturally accustomed to).  We were fortunate to have arrived even earlier than two-hours before the flight, since it took a long time to get 23 people through the full security check.  Especially with half-a dozen TSA agents angrily barking one-word commands that were complete non-sequiters, and yet somehow managed to contradict one another.

For instance, I was telling the kids that they had to take off their shoes, and a TSA agent came up and yelled "Red!  Red!" at me.  As I was trying to figure out what that meant (I was thinking maybe the condition had changed from orange to red, but couldn't figure out how that affected the procedure for removing shoes), another TSA agent was shouting "Grey! Grey!" at the bewildered English teacher from China.  Eventually, one TSA guy chased the others away to their other posts, and calmly, quietly, explained things in real words, and the mess straightened out immediatly.  We were supposed to use the red bins, not the grey bins to put our stuff in as they went through the x-ray machine.  The helpful and articulate TSA agent also procured the red bins for us.

Unfortunaly, the barely conversant TSA agents have merely resumed their original posts, which meant that one of them was manning the metal detector and alternated between yelling "hurry up!  hurry up! and One at a time!  One at a time!"

We saw a bunch of National Guardsmen getting ready to leave.  I made sure to shake their hands and thank them for serving our country.  I told them my cousin was home finally, and safe with his family, and that I wished the same for them.  The Chinese students seemed to look at the soldiers with admiration and respect.

We got to the gate with no trouble, and when the boarding call was given, we watched them get on the plane, calling "good-bye" in English and Chinese.  The airport people seemed to have gotten accustomed to not having tears of farewell at the gates, and were visably and audibly annoyed, telling us to be quiet and settle down.  I remember when such scenes were common.  I suppose they are gone forever now.

And then they were on their plane and gone.

Later that day, I went to the high school to pick Adventure Boy up from his drama day camp, and I accidently, out of habit, pulled into the south parking lot, where I had been picking up our guests after their school days.  Of course, I started crying again.  So I'm going to go now and send some of the kids an e-mail so it will be waiting for them when they get home.

I'm involved in a discussion group about a book called "Jim and Casper Go to Church" - written by Jim Henderson, a pastor/housepainter and Matt Casper, an atheist hired by Jim to accompany him to various Christian churches.

Disclaimer: Our discussion group is not unbiased- it is held in a United Methodist church, and most attendees are members. However- it has proven so far (on week 4) to at least be a healthy discussion, and not a debate. I'm honestly not a real fan of debate- or the whole "I'm right, you're wrong, and I could prove it if only you weren't so narrow-minded."

The opinions expressed in our class range from socially moderate to socially liberal, but don't cover extremes. As a rule, legalistic Christians view our church as anything from slightly misguided (not enough focus on sin) to blasphemous (preaching the untruth) and therefore steer clear. OTOH- I would say our church doesn't really appeal to the unchurched, atheists, or extremist liberals because it is difficult for some to believe the motto posted on our door "Open Hearts, Open Doors, and Open Minds", could apply to any Christian, no matter how well-meaning they may be.

Jim the Christian, recruited Casper the Atheist from an Off the Map blog contest to find an atheist willing to attend churches and speak openly about his experiences (The site is: http://www.off-the-map.org/atheist/. Don't look for the same commitment to open-mindedness here-the threads too often are  dominated by people with an agenda-though they are generally polite about it.)

ANYHOO- these two guys, who become good friends, travel all over the country to visit many different types and sizes of churches, and this book documents the experience. In our group of about 20, questions based on the book are posed to us and we are invited to share our perspectives.

Some of Casper's observations demand a response. In one example, at Willow Creek- a mega-church outside Chicago, Casper is astounded to hear the preacher thank people for their prayers to help him land an interview with Bono. Casper says, "People are being killed needlessly in every corner of the world, kids are starving, and people are praying for their pastor to meet a rock star? That's ludicrous."

This does not resemble our church prayer experience- in fact Pastor Bill once got a complaint that his prayers for peace, and to help us to do as Jesus taught- to feed the poor, visit the sick and imprisoned, have compassion for the mentally ill, and to love our neighbors, etc. were too depressing. Yet I think it helps us to understand the perspective of non-Christians who think that at best we are largely failing in our call to help those in need, and at worst, whipping up a frenzy against "sinners" (which means everyone NOT like them), praying for personal wealth while we ignore the cries of the poor (clearly they are poor because they are "sinners") and praying for our pastors to win famous friends and influence people.  When you look at sheer numbers, Willow Creek has 20,0000 attendees each week, so its influence can't be ignored. It is obvious that these megachurches are as good at marketing as the more legalistic churches are at lobbying for political influence (If that point isn't obvious, just search "those wacky fundies" on Teresa's blog, and grab a coffee- cuz' you'll be reading a while.)

A large chunk of the questions from Casper in this book ask "If Jesus did X, why aren't you focused on X?", based on his experience visiting these churches. It is fair to say that this was his take-away more often than not.

There were also a couple of times Casper felt genuinely moved (not moved in the God-sense, but in a way he describes as "the humans' need for expression taking over"), and a couple instances where he was blown away by the positive impact a church had individuals or their community- hard-core criminals who authentically turned their lives around, and one church in an impoverished area that began their mission by providing a washer and dryer for the homeless to use so they could wash their clothes before appearing for a job interview, and now provides a free health clinic, free daycare, and builds no-profit homes for low-income people in abandoned neighborhoods.

Out of curiosity, I looked up some numbers. According to the Association of Religous Data Archives: http://www.thearda.com/mapsReports/reports/US_2000.asp  US mainline protestants +26,150,866, Catholics 62,035,042, Orthodox 989,106, Evangelical Protestant 39,935,307, Other religions 12,254,099 and Unclaimed 140,057,419 (which includes atheists as well as all others who were not adherents of any of the 188 groups included). Interesting. There are 3x as many Unclaimed as there are Evangelicals.

Our church is lumped in with the Mainline Protestants. Seeing the number 26,150,866 leads me to believe that if we strived to improve on practicing what we preach- that is a LOT of potential to help the poor, sick, and oppressed. Considering many of my friends fall in the Unclaimed group, and I know they too desire to help the poor, sick, and the oppressed- it helps me see how important it is to find common ground and pool our resources, and for Christians to, as Jim puts it "NOT be jerks to non-Christians."  In order to do this, we have to be willing to really get to know people beyond their soundbite "I'm an atheist" or "I'm a Christian" or "I'm a Wiccan", or whatever.

I guess that's the point of attempting to have an open dialogue versus a Convince-Fest.

Pastor Bill is gone this week, and I volunteered to lead the discussion on Wednesday night- and no one objected loudly enough to stop me, so if any of you have your own thoughts or perceptions you'd like to share, I'm interested to read them, and to share them with our group. Thank you to all who are willing to share, let others be heard, and not attempt to dominate the discussion or convince anyone of your stance.

Trees' friend Sue.

I really must apologize for all the stuff I am missing about the exchange student Host family experience.  I am mostly just trying to take it all in, as it is kind of a non-stop-full-attention-type thing.

You know "Help these kids experience America.  You have two weeks.  Go."

You might as well say "Give a marxist-feminist analysis of Mobey Dick.  Give careful attention to the issue of the futility of man's struggle against nature.  Be focused, complete, and original.  Fifty words or less."  (I have to just interject here and remark that the greatest irony I ever encountered in my study of literature was an admonition to stay focused in a deconstruction of Mellville.  That's like asking someone to keep clean during their mud bath.)

Today I spent most of the morning with the young man who hurt his finger on the waterslide.  The school nurse brought up to the clinic, and we sat around for hours.  He was worried that he would miss the pizza party and ice skating.

Needless to say, his injury is painful, but not serious.  He does not have any breaks (they took an x-ray) he has full mobility in the finger, and keeping it clean is the main concern.  He's has a tetnus shot, as we didn't know if he has had one in China or not.  He lost a fair amount of skin on the inside of the finger, and has a cut on the outside.  Also, he will probably lose the nail, but it will grow back.

He has started refusing pain meds now.

This morning the kids had a special treat.  The school's technical people rigged up a Skype connection between Loudi and Eden Prairie Highschool, and the kids got to see and speak to their parents.  There was much exceitment.  One girl cried a couple of times.  It was very emotional.

And then the US host parents discovered what was probably our most significant contribution to the student's command of English:

The connection between Eden Prairie and Loudi was temporarily interrupted, and as soon as the screen went blank, all went silent, and one student said:

"oops."

Immediately, there was a chourus of "oops" with every possible inflection that could express every possible shade and nuance of meaning.

One of the most widely and highly educated states in the nation, and what do we teach the exchange students?  "oops". 

Genius.

By the way, the young man with the hurt finger got to the pizza party at the City Center OK.  Where there is another cute story.  The students were being treated to pizza by the school board.  When the school board was introduced, they heard the words "School Board" , and got completely silent, and got to their feet, standing in respect.  For the School Board.

I'm starting to feel a little trepidatious about the manners and habits of the students we will be sending over there.  How are we going to find 18 kids that will stop talking, stand up and show respect for the school board?

Finally, Dracut's admonition to avoid sports involving water was terribly apt.  One boy fell during ice skating and needed two stiches in his chin.  It's not just liquid water.

I tell you, these kids are intense.  They don't do anything half-way and they don't ease into stuff.  They just throw themselves into it.

Oh yeah, one more thing.  I think I got the best possible compliment on my Chinese the other day.  The boys got a phone call, and they were jabbering away happily, passing the phone back and forth and talking and laughing...and then they stopped, looked at me, and took the phone down into one of their rooms and continued the conversation.

One of the Chinese boys cut his finger at the water park.  It looks extremely painful, but not like anything that will result in permenant damage.  The school nurse is on her way to check it out.  Thank goodness for the school staff.  If it were one of mine, I'd ice it and disinfect it and take them to the pediatritian tomorrow.

Since it's someone else's kid, I'd rather a trained medical professional put the last word in.

I felt a little weird asking her to come all the way over here...but I the kid is miserable and a little freaked out, and it's my job to advocate for him and make him feel comfortable.  So that is what I'm doing.

So we’ve had a couple of Chinese exchange students living in our house for a few days now.  Shen Zhexin and Gong Xiaosui from the city of Loudi in Hunan Provence in China.

They are really nice kids.  Like, really really nice.  We had two of their classmates over today to play basketball and football and such.  Wanna know how nice they are?  Their idea of trash talking is one of the boys, gestured to a chair and said “Ladies first” to another boy.  Gales of laughter, and what I can only assume is the Chinese teenager version of “oooo!  SNAP!” ensued.

The target of the jibe laughed loudest of all.

All of the students speak English beautifully.  We have no problem understanding them.

They are very kind and assure me that my Chinese is very good.  Their teacher is also kind, but is also helpful in correcting me, so I know that the boys are just being nice.

Also, when Grasshopper had to take a bathroom break for basketball, they asked me to stand in for him, so I did.  Adventure Boy passed me the ball and I made a break for the basket.  Both Shen and Gong rushed me, and made a great show of trying vigorously to take the ball away from me…yet never came close.  I shot and scored a basket.  They congratulated me.  I pretended that I was completely unaware of their subterfuge.

Grasshopper is already talking about how sad it will be to see them return home to China.  He said “They don’t let me do anything for myself, they just treat me like a little brother.”

It’s been a lot of fun.  We’ve learned a lot.  Primarily, our children have learned how easy they have it.  Shen and Gong begin school at 7:00 in the morning, and continue until 10:00 at night.  They are not allowed to play video games at all.  Their summer vacation is only one month long (half of it, they are spending here, studying American culture).

Shen and Gong are very lively and engaged in everything.  However, when there is nothing going on, Shen falls asleep.  But as long as there is anything to learn or something new to do, he is awake, alert and absorbing it like a sponge.

Adventure Boy and Grasshopper have probably played more basketball in the last few days than they have their whole lives.

Anything we show them , or do with them is always greeted with exclamations of “lovely” “wonderful”,  “I like it” and such.  It has been quite an intense few days, but everything is going very well, I think.

I just bought a Bissle steam cleaner at Costco.

Is it weird that I fill out the warrenty card, and read the manuel before I assemble/use the machine?

Little bit of catch-up.

The fourth was fun, for the most part.  We got together with the extended family and did some camping and BBQing and water-skiing and stuff.  There was a parade and fireworks and all that jazz.  Rocky, the kids and the dog all had a fabulous time.

I behaved myself for the most part.  At one point we were in the livingroom watching  the travel channel and there was a show on Niagara Falls.  One of the bits was about the history of the falls as related to the underground railroad.  The show described run-away slaves crossing an ice bridge that formed over the falls, as well as a suspension bridge that went over the river into Canada.  One tour you can take traces the route of escaped slaves over the (now modern) bridge into Canada.

The relative we were visiting was not pleased by the description of people escaping the US to find freedom in Canada.

So he proceeded to tell the children that the slaves brought to America from Africa were better off as slaves in America than they were as free people in Africa.  He asserted that slavery was not as bad as some people claimed, and also, that modern black people should be GRATEFUL that their ancestors were slaves because if they weren’t they’d be over in Africa with all the disease and genocide.

Now, this relative is a Conservative older man, living in a rural area, and is unlikely to change his opinion or outlook in anyway, and is unlikely to actually be able to harm anyone with his opinion either.  So I left and took a little walk and later talked with the kids about the conversation, making sure I let them know where this relative was in error.

Later, back home, we had some other relatives as houseguests, and discussion of the health care system ensued.

Let’s just say that I was called ignorant, and stupid, mocked derided, talked over, interrupted, and my ideas completely re-interpreted and misrepresented and scoffed at.  When I tried to explain how the relative was going off in a completely different direction, he raised his voice and said “Let me finish.”

I got very upset.  I was tired from the first day and night of CONvergence, so I teared up and had trouble speaking.  It is something that sometimes happens when I get really angry and I am exhausted.  I was practically speechless to be treated this way in my own house…and by someone I actually like a lot and respect, but whose personal manner changed dramatically on this particular topic.  It was a bit shocking to me.

What was it that made me stupid and ignorant?  I don’t really know, but the relative in question argued that a basic national health care system that only covered standard treatment for routine medical problems would stifle innovation, because people would not buy catastrophic or “Cadillac” healthcare plans if they had the basic national plan available for free.  I wanted to point out that I never proposed it be automatically free for everyone…but that was one of the times I was waved off as “interrupting” before I could get the clarification out.  I suppose it would be overly snarky of me to point out that the clarification would have been unnecessary if I hadn’t been interrupted.  So the person continued to completely demolish the point he thought I had made rather than the one I was actually trying to make.

 I wanted to point out that the plan I was trying to discuss would actually add consumers to the health care system because people currently going without care would be getting it, whereas people who currently have great coverage would choose to use their great coverage and this would drive innovation just as much as it ever has.  No go.

The person insisted that nobody would spend money for insurance to provide state-of-the-art treatments if they could get the insurance for cheaper less innovative treatments for free.

I said “So you don’t think people can be trusted to understand that they need to pay for better coverage to get better treatment?”

Apparently, this is a terrible thing to say to a Republican with Libertarian leanings.

But it seems to me that the average American understands this.  If you have better coverage…you get better treatment.  If you have crappy coverage, you get crappy treatment.  A minimally adequate coverage will get you treatment that is effective for most of the things that most people encounter in life…and no coverage at all is a recipe for disaster.

I assume that, like now, people will try to get the best coverage they have access to.

All I was trying to say is, wouldn’t it be possible for us to have a program to move the people who have no coverage and crappy, inadequate coverage into the category of having minimally adequate coverage?  While it might not be that great if you get cancer…you’ll love it if you get a broken leg or a sinus infection.

The person responded that it would just cost too much to overhaul a system as big as our health care system for what is essentially an incidental segment of the population.  He asserted that it is really very exceptional cases where people cannot afford insurance and are unable to pay for treatment.

I asserted that the overhaul of the system is coming one way or another.  We can either let it break down its present form and change on its own…hoping the magic of the market fairies will pull a better system from the chaos…or we can plan it and manage it so that hopefully it doesn’t lead to radical disruption of our society.

My discussion partner expressed incredulity at that assertion, and told me that people should just bring down costs by buying generics and such.

I said good luck with that since you have an entire industry built around “motivating” doctors to prescribe new formulations of existing drugs, presenting the new formulations as “innovations”, and fostering the perception that generics are inferior to brand-name drugs (I personally know a drug rep who flat out told me – on several occasions – that I should, under no circumstances buy generic drugs as there was just too much variance in their manufacture and performance…for instance.  I didn't listen to him.  I buy my meds at Costco and go genaric whenever there is one available.  Ther are usually cheap enough to cost me a fraction of my co-pay.)

He countered snidely that I didn’t trust people to be able to make rational decisions on their own.  My attempts to explain the difference between a general understanding of levels of coverage and people making a choice when there is a multi-billion-dollar industry focused on shaping their perception with the complicity of the people who are supposed to be their health advocates fell on deaf ears as he condescendingly explained to me that I had employed a double-edged sword when I invoked personal choice and responsibility.

I guess I had to be punished for defiling said deities by using them in a "liberal" argument.  The Conservative Libertarians have claimed them as their own and nobody else can use them.

Apparently, the magic of the Wonder-Twin Magic Market Fairies of Personal Choice and Personal Responsibility work the same whether you have access to high-quality information from reliable sources or not.  I guess I know better now.

Needless to say, the rest of the conversation is kind of a blur.  I wish I’d walked away from that conversation as well.

Fortunately, CONvergence was in full swing and things can never go that wrong when CONvergence is going on.   I’ll talk about that more in my next entry.

Oh good lord.

I totally suck as a parent.

No really.  I probably ruined my children for life.

Forget about how reading them Lord of the Rings will teach them Satanism, or letting them play D&D will turn them into blood-drinking disciples of Marilyn Manson. (and don’t think J.R.R. Tolkien can’t turn your children to Satanism.  He’s very persuasive.  He persuaded C.S. Lewis to convert to Christianity.  And don’t think for a minute that the whole initial thing was C.S’s idea.  No.  I’m surprised he didn’t invent a second middle name just to be more like his mentor.  THAT’S how effective J.R.R. Tolkien’s influence is) Insidious, isn’t he?

No, I did something, much, much, worse.

I read them the “children’s book”    If You Give a Mouse a Cookie.

Turns out, it is an eerily prescient account of how human/mouse Chimeras will eventually take over the world, making humans into slaves to their will just because they look adorable in blue cover-alls.

Forget about how Harry Potter is a cultural retro-virus designed to insert the cancerous code of witchcraft into your child’s social programming.  THIS IS MUCH WORSE!!!

If you give a mouse a human brain and a cookie, the chain reaction will be unstoppable!

And I read a story that makes my kids think it’s “cute”.

Oh!  The humanity!

Worse, they have also been exposed to Mrs. Frisbee and the Rats of NIMH.   NOW I realize why Jerry Fallwel didn't want us to read science fiction!

This reminds me of another personal story.

It begins at the Minnesota Zoo.

I was there with a friend I have known for a long time.  We have kind of a strained history, and the reasons for it will become apparent as the story rolls onward.

We were at the Minnesota Zoo with another mutual friend.  We were in the barn area and there were some new-born calves in a pen.  They were adorable.  Just sweet.  I grew up helping on my grandparent’s farm, and one of the things I got to do every morning I was there was help feed the calves.  It was good messy fun, and they were always happy to see me.  I love calves, and I understand them.

Anyway, my friends and their daughters rushed the calf pen, and stood around “ooohing”  and “awwwwwing”.  The little critters were ADORABLE.

They couldn’t gush enough about them.

Of course, I’m the observant one.  I noticed the sign above the calf pen identifying the calves as clones.

The nice part of me wanted to just wanted to let the happy mommies continue with their adoration of the little miracles of nature.  I knew how both these women felt about anything “unnatural”.

But the Imp of the Perverse had claimed me long ago, and I could not resist.

“They’re clones”  I said.  With perfect timeing.  Just as the rapturous adulation of the miracle of nature’s bounty  reached its crescendo.

“WHAT???!!!”

“They’re clones.”  I repeated, pointing at the sign.

The mommies’ eyes tracked from the calves to the sign, and back again, making the round trip several times in a few seconds.

“That’s just creepy”, said one mom, and they both marshaled their children and hurried them away from the offending freaks of nature.

My boys and I lingered a few more moments.  “Isn’t that just cool?”  I asked.

“Yeah.”  My boys said.

And that, my friends, is why the meek shall inherit the Earth.  The rest of us will don our best blue cover-alls, gather up our adorable, demanding, cookie-scarfing  mouse-human chimera friends, and go to the stars.

(Hat Tip: Pharyngula)

The original article PZ was commenting on is here.  To be fair, it says nothing at all about the story If You Give a Mouse A Cookie that was Prof. Myer's very apt addition.

Grasshopper passed his first degree red sash test with flying colors!

He was very focused, and got very high scores, even from Shifu, who is quite picky and spareing with grades above passing.

Adventure Boy has to make up four items from his red sash test...but the things he passed, he did very well on.  As he was testing at the adult level, the test is very grueling.  He accidently left out a coupld of moves in his form, he couldn't complete the 15 fingertip push-ups, and the judgest felt that two of his kick combinations needed improvement.

He will be able to finish those up on the next test.  These are all things he can do, when he's not already exhausted.

He did very well defending himself against three attackers in a two-minute round. 

Spoof of a conversation I’ve had too many times.  Maybe some of you will recognize it.

Believer:        “I read your blog.  You’re really angry at God.”

Me:                  “I’m not angry at God.”

Believer:          “Then why do you hate the church so much?”

Me:                    “I don’t hate the church, but I also don’t think the church represents God.”

Believer:            “You must have been really hurt by some false teachers.”

Me:                     “Yes, but you see, in a way, I’m glad I encountered them because they caused me to ask

                             questions, and those questions lead to me unraveling the shackles of religion and find

                             an approach that is better and healthier for me.”

Believer:            “See?  You’re so hateful and angry.”

Me:                    “Only when the religion is hurting people, or being used as a political tool to re-write

                            science, education, history, and law to the likings of people who yearn for the middle

                            ages.”

Believer:            “Wow, you must have been very badly hurt.”

Me:                    “Um…yeah, but I’ve moved on now, and I just don’t like to see religion misused as tool

                             for subverting the political process.  That’s bad for both religion and government.”

Believer:             “I just can’t talk to you anymore.  You’re just so angry and hateful.  I’ll pray for you to

                              find some peace, though.”

Me:                      “But I don’t want to be at peace with bad religion being used for bad purposes to do bad

                               things to people.  I am at peace with religion in general.  I’ll go to church with friends

                               and family, you know.  It’s kind of pleasant.”

Believer:              “Please stop shouting, you’re  just so shrill and angry.  I hope God heals your heart.”

Me:                       (shouting now)  “Oh my GOD!  I’ve told you and told you I’M NOT ANGRY!!!  WHY CAN’T YOU PEOPLE GET A F#$%^%ING CLUE.

                             I’M. NOT. ANGRY.”

Believer:               “That’s right, let it out.  Jesus can heal you.”

My friend Barb just reminded me of a story from when Adventure Boy was little.

We'd been out to the zoo, and AB had been a total little twerp.  He'd whined and complained, threw temper tantrums, been mouthy and generally a pain in the pattotie.

We were tired, hungry, and crabby.  I was at the end of my rope.

I reportedly declared:  "I need ice cream.  We're getting ice cream."

So I bought us ice cream, and Adventure boy looked at his before eating it and said: "How come you bought me ice cream?  I've been so bad today.  I don't deserve it."

And I said: "Sometimes you get ice cream, and sometimes you don't.  Whether you deserve it or not, that's just how it is."

Adventure Boy said "Oh." and ate his ice cream.

Apparently, Barb saw in this an important life lesson of great profundity and amusement.

I don't know why.

But just in case, I thought I'd let you all know too so you can profit from it if you have a brain like Barbs.

I just got a letter from my aunt, "Squeak's" mom.  It reads in part:

"We recieved [his] footlocker today - still expecting a priority mail package.  He is on his way to getting home! When? I guess when he calls us or appears in our bedroom at 5:00AM some morning and say 'Hi Mom, Hi Dad' like he did last time (Sept.)"

Yep, That's "Squeak", alright.  Glad he gets to stay home a little longer this time! Glad he's coming home in one piece.

More story on Squeak, showing why it is a good thing he is coming home in one piece.

Squeak with his “gameface” on.  Terrorists beware!

Squeak’s bad-ass rat tat.  You’d never know he was a nice Catholic school boy just a few short years ago, would you? (Speaking as a person who held him as a days-old baby…that thing is just God-awful)

(Hat Tip:  All links "sixty-six")

My folks came down to visit over the last few days.  We had a nice visit.  They brought a ½ lb. bag of fresh morel mushrooms from the woods behind their house.

So today for lunch Rocky and I had Bourbon Salmon, fresh steamed asparagus and $20 worth of sautéed Morel mushrooms for lunch.  You gotta love a state where you can go out into your back yard and pull a couple hundred dollars worth of delicacy out of your backyard three weeks out of the year.

My mom and dad got to see Adventure Boy’s band concert (with the obligatory post-concert visit to Cold Stone), and Dad went with to Grasshopper’s cello lesson.  My mom and I took a lot of walks with the dogs, and went to the dog park.  They watched the video of the Middle School’s production of The Music Man, which Adventure Boy played in the pit orchestra for.

And now I get to relax a little and decompress until August.  I love my folks and all, but there ARE a few issues  J

Sue got a promotion.

Because Sue is AWESOME!!!

So I was taking off with Grasshopper to go meet his new cello teacher (really nice guy), and we get to the corner and there is an accident.

One of the local spoiled teenagers took the corner too fast (as they do) ran off the road, sheared off a fire hydrant, and into a telephone pole.  His little red convertible sports car was a mess.  No one appeared to be hurt, but there was a crowd of hysterical teen-aged girls standing around doing the teenaged drama girl vogue.  So I assumed that he must be little Mr. Sports Hero.

The lady in front of me was stopped and rubber-necking for what seemed an eternity.  Finally, she eased out into the intersection, and I followed her.

Then, she slowed down and weaved toward the shoulder.  The break lights came on and she slowed even more.  In the middle of the intersection.

I thought, “Oh no, you are NOT going to sit there and do more rubber-necking with me hanging here in the oncoming traffic lane.”

So I steered around her, only to find her wandering back towards me, and accelerating.  I had a choice.  I could slam on the breaks and pull back behind her, or I could accelerate, weave temporarily into the oncoming lane (which was empty) and get past her.  I chose the latter.

I was past her by the time she noticed me.

Whereupon she laid on her horn, and laid on the gas and spent the next mile within a foot-and-a-half of my bumper, leaning out the driver’s side window, waving her hands, and yelling.

Psycho much?

No mystery where these little rich bastards learn their driving habits, is there?

I might add that less than a month ago, we had a three-car accident on this same stretch of road that involved two cars leaveing the road due to all three most likely speeding by way too much, one car passing the other, and a near-miss of a head-on collision.  The whole road was closed down for about 45 minutes while they cleared the cars.

This is the same stretch of road where I narrowly missed a head-on collision with a woman who was passing another car in a no-passing zone (fortunatly, I was able to break in time, and did not lose control of my car.)

About a mile from there is the intersection where I was rear-ended while stopped at a stop-light.  The woman who ran into me claimed that I "came out of nowhere".  Apparently, so did the three cars in front of me.

Sheesh.  I think the whole town needs a refresher course.  I like Eden Prairie a lot more when I don't have to drive (why does a 90-lb bleach-blond-fake-tan-Tammy-Fae-make-up trophy-wife need a Hummer?  And how come they're so angry all the time? And do they think the Jesus fish and "W" stickers will ward off car accidents?)

We attended The Music Man last night at Central Middle School.  Adventure Boy is playing tuba in the pit orchestra.  They did a very good job, and it was a lot of fun to see the results of all of their hard work.  The costuming was very impressive, the Barbershop quartet was cool.  Overall the acting was good, the primary characters were very good, nobody did a bad job.

In particular, there was the scene where the local piano teacher, her Irish mother, and a young piano student are in the same room together.  I actually forgot, for most of that whole scene, that every actor in that scene were actually the same age.  The Irish mother seemed middle aged.  The young 20-something piano teacher seemed like a young 20-something, and the little girl seemed like a little girl.  Yet they were all seventh-or-eight-grade girls.

Also, the people sitting next to me (a couple of youth pastors) were very proud of their son, who played the creepy bald salesman who was after the Music Man.  The mother told me that he hadn’t wanted that role, because he had to play a mean, creepy character, and he was worried people wouldn’t like him.  He did a REALLY good job.  I had the creepy-crawlies after the scene he had with the piano teacher.  He is a very talented young man.  Too bad his mother tells me that he won’t be doing drama in High School, because he is afraid people will think he’s gay.  More proof that homophobia is everybody's problem.

Despite the enjoyability of the musical, it's educational value, and it's positive influence on Adventure' Boy's sense of fun with his music, it’s time for the Central Middle School’s run of The Music Man to end.  I don’t mind running Adventure Boy to five rehearsals per week.  I don’t mind shelling out check after check for a “crew” shirt or matching Converse All Star basketball shoes so he can be identified as a member of the pit orchestra, or pizza money for the all-day weekend rehearsals, and another for the cast party afterwards, or watching the list of unfinished schoolwork pile up on his school website (while the estimates of his grades drop no matter how temporarily).  I don’t mind him wandering the house humming the songs from the musical over and over and over again with his fingers working imaginary valves, or having to run to the store and by forty snack bars and forty drink boxes because it’s his turn to bring the after-rehearsal snack. .

But it’s starting to affect his thinking.

I was reading this introductory paragraph aloud to Rocky from the Blog “Think outside the cage”

The Colorado Department of Corrections director told local officials Wednesday that inmate numbers are growing at a rate of “one prison a year” and more needs to be done to reduce recidivism before budgetary problems get further out of hand.

Adventure boy immediately sang out, with great dramatic flair, “What we need is a BOY’S BAND!”

Enough is enough.

Although, come to think of it, a band might not be such a bad idea after all...you MIGHT stand a chance of getting the funding for it if you could somehow make it a "faith-based initiative".  A prison Gospel band?  Hmmm...

Adventure Boy's best friend is moving to Canada.  Montreal, to be specific.

Poor Adventure Boy.  His last friend who moved away moved to Argentina.

Rocky and I had made an agreement long ago that we would provide the kids with a stable home-life, none of this moving around having to rip up roots all the time like we did when we were kids.

Too bad we didn't get the same agreement from the rest of the world.

Plus, the boy's parents are super-nice people, but the dad is a pro-Bush, Pro-Iraq anti-tax, anti-public program libertarian conservative...

...and he's moving to CANADA?

When the mom called and told me the bad news, I said "You know, I always thought I'd be the one calling YOU and telling you that WE were fleeing to Canada."  She laughed.

She DID say that Adventure Boy could hide with them if he had to dodge the draft, though.

Cleaned two bathrooms spotless

Did seven loads of laundry

Prepared three nutritious meals

Unpacked and assembled the new lawnmower (yes, honey, if you are reading this, I RTFM-ed)

Mowed the lawn (and picked up the dog dookie, and the sticks knocked off the trees by last nights insane wind)

Walked the dog

Proof-read one of Adventure Boy's friend's English papers.

Cleaned and organized the entry-way and the entry-way closet.

Arranged for both Adventure Boy and Grasshopper to entertain friends.

Emptied all the trash baskets in the house.

Got a good start on updating my resume'.

I've got three hours of conciousness left.  I'm trying to decide if I want to tear into organizing my office or get out the painting supplies and touch-up the paint in the public areas of the house.  It's looking a little scuffed.

Not bad for a Sunday.  I think the new allergy and asthma meds are working already.

Grasshopper and one of his best friends (S-dogg)got into a knock-down fight at Kung Fu yesterday.

Apparently, S-dogg punched Grasshopper in the throat (not a legitamate target), AND hit him a little harder than the "light touch" that they were instructed to use.

So Grasshopper punched back really hard.  They then attacked each other full force, and fell to the ground, whereupon ShiFu broke them up.

I arrived shortly after, and they were not speaking.  As we walked out to the car, I told them a little story about a similar thing happening with me and a friend of mine in the Karate school.  I tried to make it funny and instill in them the idea that one day they would laugh together about this.

By the time I dropped S-dogg off at his house, they were laughing and sharing snacks.

Isn't that just like boys?  All-in with the fight, and then totally over it when it's over.

So, I went to the allergist today.  Three bouts with bronchitis in a row, plus endless breathing problems before that, and I'm done.  I don't care what it takes, just break out those needles and FIX ME!!!

For those who don't know, they draw a huge grid on your back, and poke you with some sharp peices of plastic containing concentrations of allergens.

You also get two controls:  one is a non-reactive substance (I assume Saline or something equivilent) and the other is Histamine, the chemical that is produced by the body's attack on the allergins, and which causes the allergy symptoms.

My reaction to the non-reactant control was the expected - and my reaction to the Histamine was the expected ++++

This gives you the range from no reaction (-) to the Histamine reaction (++++) (a scale of 0-4, basically).

Here are my test results:                                                                                         Mold Spores:

Paper Birch                    ++++               Short Ragweed         ++++                        Alternaria                 -

Boxelder/Maple Mix          ++++               Giant Ragweed         ++++                        Cladosporium             +

Mulberry                        ++++               Marshelder              ++++                        Epicoccum                 +

Red Oak                        ++++               Sagebrush Mix          ++++                        Helminthosporium        +

White Ash                      ++++               Russian Thistle         ++++                        Aspergillus fumigatus   +

Shagbark Hickory            ++++                Careless - Pigweed   ++++                         Pullularia                    +

American Elm                  ++++                                                                           Fusarium                    +

Kentucky Blue Grass         ++++                                                                           Penicillium                  +

Timothy Grass                 ++++                                                                           Phoma                       +

Dustmite (D. Farinae)        -                                                                                 Rhizopus                    ++

Dustmite (D. Pteronyssinus)   +++

Cat                                    ++++

Dog                                    +++

Cockroach                           -

My allergist, who seems to have a gift for understatment, said "You are a candidate for shots."   

No wonder I have been having a hard time running.  I'm allergic to the whole darned out-of-doors!  (And the in-of-doors too!)

One up-note...my peak-flow reading in the middle of an asthma attack was 490...a good score for a normal, healthy adult woman.

Another up-note is that I CAN get shots, and don't have to sell the dog and buy pet cockroaches.  LOL!  Although those Madagascar Hissing Cockroaches are pretty cool.

Rush's new album, Snakes and Arrows is AWESOME!

The concert is coming up!  I can't wait!  Saveau and TempleViper are joining us.  Woo!  and might I add...Hoo!

I'd also like to thank Jenny for her effort in making sure we didn't miss the concert.  We already knew about it, but suppose we hadn't?  Catastrophe!

It's nice to know Jenny is looking out for us.

Oh yeah, another CD Change-out now in changer position one:  Rush's "Snakes and Arrows" in - Godsmack's "Godsmack" out! 

The other day, Rocky reminded Adventure Boy to be sure to get all of his stuff together for school the next day before going to bed.  He's been forgetting stuff and aweful lot lately, and we are tired of running stuff in to him.

Rocky:  AB, make sure you get all your ducks in a row before you go to bed to night.

AB:      (In his TERRIBLE Londo Mollari impression) Don't you mean cats? 

When Rocky looked at him quizzically, he came out with this quote:

Ambassador Londo Mollari: But this - this, this, this is like being nibbled to death by... what are those Earth creatures called? Feathers, long bill, webbed feet... go 'quack'...
Ambassador Vir Cotto: Cats.
Ambassador Londo Mollari: Cats. Being nibbled to death by cats.

LOL!  We ARE raising him right.

Another fun quote:

ME:  You should have your friends over and play basketball or something.  You need to get in some time playing sports, because in college, the best way to have a social life is to go out and goof around at the basketball court, or the vollyball court.  You will want to hang out with the guys and play sports.

AB:  (flippiantly) Um, no.  I'm going to want to stay in and cook with the girls.

Then, he seemed to remember that he was talking to his mother, turned red, and walked away.

And one from Grasshopper:

"Who needs video games when you have THE WHOLE WORLD to frolic in?"

My jaw dropped when I heard this one, because Grasshopper is the KING of wasteing time with video games.

Today Jay and I walked Grasshopper to school.  We went out to the bus stop, and just kept on walking because it was a nice day, and we were talking, and it seemed a shame to just stand around.

When we got to the school, I left Grasshopper at the front door, and proceeded back the way we had come, along the edge of the parking lot where the busses come to park before they drop the kids off.

I heard someone yelling, and I looked around, and realized that one of the 4^th grade crossing guards was calling to me :

“Please stay out of the danger zone!”

What?  I didn’t know what he was talking about.  Then, I realized that he must be talking about the broad yellow stripe painted down the side of the sidewalk.  It must have been painted in order to keep people from wandering too close to the bus traffic.

“Oh, sorry!”  I stepped out of the “danger zone” and proceeded to walk toward the boy.  He looked familiar.

“Thank you.”  He said, as I got closer.

“Barry?”  I said (Barry isn’t his real name).

“Yes", he replied.

Barry had been in Grasshopper’s first grade class.  I had been one of the parents that came in a couple times per week to help out with the reading groups.  I often ended up with Barry in my group.  He constantly challenged me, was constantly disruptive, asked deliberately inconvenient questions, picked his nose dramatically to make the other kids laugh, pretended that he didn’t know how to read even the simplest words, managed to “lose” every item he needed for the activity at least once, was defiantly, obnoxiously, relentlessly, variously, and creatively difficult.

I really liked him, but I was always exhausted trying to get through the material in the allotted time.  He was obviously bright, but such a source of constant disorder that I was shocked to see this miniature engine of chaos before me, his official crossing-guard vest gleaming in the morning sunlight, thanking me for obeying his request that I comply with school rules.

“How are you doing?”  I asked him.

“Good.  You?”

“I’m good.”

“What’s your dog’s name?”  He asked.

“Jay.”

“He’s not very old, is he?”

“Seven months.”

“He’s very well trained. “ Barry complimented.

“Thanks.  I’d better let you get back to work.”

“Yeah.  It was nice talking to you.”

“You too.”

Talk about weird.  In three short years my primary discipline nemesis had transformed into a polite, mature, social mini-adult responsible for helping maintain order and safety in his school.

I STILL feel a little dizzy

Whoa.  Just out of curiosity, I tried to follow a link to a townhall page, and I got in!  WOW!

Repeated attempts to go to any Townhall.com page ended in a message that my IP address was on a list of blocked addresses.  Numerous e-mails asking why ignored.  Then, no word of explination or reply...and I am unblocked.  I wonder what happened.  Townhall.com taketh away, and Townhall.com giveth again.  'course, now that I'm able to do it without having to resort to subterfuge, I find I'm not all that interested in their paranoid, hate-filled drivel.

Rocky is home.

He's been fed, showered, medicated, hot stone massaged, and installed in a comfy bed with 600 thread count Pima cotton sheets, and strategically placed pillows to enhance his comfort (I spent the better part of a year as a home-health aid for an elderly polio vicitm.  She was also a diabetic, so bed sores were just not something we could allow to happen.  I got really good at pillow placement for comfort.  Give me four-to-six pillows, and I can make anyone comfortable.)

And I made him Chai.

I finally find myself with a little bit of time tonight, so I’m going to fill you all in on what is going on around here.

It all started Monday of last week when Rocky was in San Francisco for VSLive!.  He started feeling sick (no details, it’s better this way).    Sometime between midnight and Tuesday morning, his umbilical hernia (which I’ve been nagging him to get fixed) popped out, and he was sick AND in agonizing pain.

The hotel staff drove him to the nearest hospital ER, where he was treated for flu (given medicine to alleviate the symptoms we’re not talking about) and sent back to his hotel room.  He spent the rest of his time in SF in his hotel room sick as a dog, and came home early on Thursday night.

I picked him up at the airport and brought him home, gave him some chicken broth (free range organic) and sent him to bed.

Friday morning he informed me that he needed a doctor’s appointment, because he couldn’t stand being this sick any longer.  I thought:

“You’ve got the flu, what are they going to do?” but made the appointment anyway.  I took him to the doctor later that day, and lo and behold, under the harsh, unforgiving fluorescent lights of the clinic, he looked yellow.

The doctor said; “I think you have hepatitis.  Drive to the ER.  I will call ahead and have them waiting for you.”

I called Sue, and she came right down to sit with the boys for the night.

We got to the ER, and they immediately got him a bed and ran a bajillion blood tests and did a sonogram, which revealed a very large gall stone in his gall bladder.

“It’ll have to come out” said the radiologist.  The Internal Medicine specialist agreed, and told them to find Rocky a bed. 

Then we waited for six hours while they worked on that.  During that time, we heard a poor woman having a psychotic episode, a senile old man screaming for some woman that nobody knew who she was…she’d probably been dead for years, and a number of really uncomfortable sounding babies.

After they put the psycho woman in restraints, a nurse came in to apologize for the noise the woman was making.

“She can’t help it.” We responded.

She stopped in her tracks just for the briefest second to look at us and said “No, she can’t but most people don’t realize that.”

I think that’s really sad.  How can you listen to someone losing their mind in the next room and summon only annoyance at them?  I don’t think that could possibly be true.  Some people might express their feelings as annoyance…but they CAN’T be that callous, can they?

Rocky was only allowed to eat a couple of ice chips to ease the dryness in his mouth, and those he was ordered to keep to a minimum.

Finally, at one o’clock, we got Rocky ensconced in a real live hospital room, and I went home.  I got home at 2:00AM. Sat. morning, slept for four hours, and then went back to the hospital to be with Rocky when he met with his surgeon.  She seemed to be bright as a penny, and we were filled with confidence.  It turned out to be well placed.  She explained everything to us, each decision had a reasonable explanation.  She answered questions smoothly, confidently, and extemporaneously.  Also, she was going to fix the hernia as part of the gall bladder surgery.

There was a delay getting Rocky into the operating room.  His surgery started an hour and a half late.  When they finally wheeled him away, I called Rick, and he came down and relieved Sue of her Watcher duties.  I took the opportunity to call a few family and friends, and then fell asleep.

Fortunately, the hospital had given me a pager something like what they give you when you are waiting for a table in some restaurants.  It went off in a frantically cheery burst of “music” when Rocky’s surgery was completed, so I was able to take a minute or two to get all of the different areas of my brain rounded up and stampeding in the same direction by the time Dr. Nowak was in front of me telling me that the surgery was a complete success…

…with two problems.  The stone was REALLY big, and the gall bladder was REALLY infected.  She didn’t think he’d be getting out of the hospital before Monday, but she had very high hopes for his complete recovery.

I waited until Rocky was comfortably set up in his room, went back home and told Rick he could take off, and then went back to the hospital to make sure Rocky was doing alright.  I don’t remember arriving back home.

The next couple of days are a blur; running back and forth between the hospital and home trying to take care of everyone...

I remember a nurse names Leo, whose accent sounded West African, who was very nice, thoughtful, thorough and knowledgeable.  There was a guy named Dan in the ER who lifted our spirits while delivering Rocky to the sonogram room…lots and lots of wonderful, caring professional staff in the hospital.

Rocky has a bit of an infection from the gallbladder problem.  He’s being held at the hospital until they get him over that.  He was supposed to come home today.  They say he will come home tomorrow…

…we shall see.

But Rocky got tons of calls, and well-wishes.  EVERY person I called to tell about this offered their help and pretty much wrote me a blank check, figuratively speaking.  My ShiFu and his wife stopped by to visit Rocky in the hospital.  He has flowers and cards, and lots and lots of e-mails to answer wishing him well.

I went shopping today.  The next couple of days after he comes home will consist of massive spoilage of the Rocky person.

I just hope that he really comes home tomorrow.

“Let me know if you need anything.”

“Just let me know if there is ANYTHING I can do.  Anything at all.”

”Just tell me where to go, and when to be there.  Oh!  And what I need to bring.”

If I get to the end of my life and find out that there IS no super-uber-God-being;  I will be disappointed for one reason, and one reason only…that I can’t look him in the eyes (or whatever), list off the people I’ve heard these words from in the last few days, and say “Thanks” for the fact that I know so many people who will just drop what they are doing to offer kindness and help to someone who needs it.

But even that disappointment will be small and fleeting, since I can say it now, when I know it counts.

Thanks everyone.