Swistle

I Hate Insurance Companies

2012-01-28T09:12:00.005-05:00

I re-watched part of The Incredibles yesterday, which was a mistake since I needed to look over a dental plan option today. In The Incredibles, the dad of the family works for an insurance company, and legitimate claims are being denied left and right, and the boss keeps saying he doesn't care if it's a legitimate claim, DENY IT!! Make it IMPOSSIBLE for the clients to figure out how to get what they paid for!! Or else you're FIRED!! (The Incredibles dad eventually loses it and throws the boss through several walls, which is satisfying.)

Anyway, the forms. I can't tell if it's worth it. FIRST, the dental plan collects $1,700 per year from us. (There's no employer contribution, though it's "through" the employer.) THEN, if I understand the simple, easy-to-read charts correctly, they cover what they feel like covering, at the percentage they feel like covering it, up to a maximum of $1,000/year per family member. And next year, we'll get a letter from HR saying that the rates have doubled. Is that a good deal, or not?

We might have economies of scale going for us, here, since the amount per year is "per family." So, for a family of four, maybe they don't use more than $1,700 in coverage (plus the co-pays and deductibles) most years; but for a family of seven, we can use that in annual check-ups alone. BUT: although the cost is per family, the limit is still per person.

AND: it doesn't cover our dentist. Or any dentist I've ever heard of. So we'd have to switch from the dentist we like to an unknown dentist, and then we add to our lives the SHEER RAGE of finding out after every check-up that we weren't covered for what we thought we were covered for. Not to mention that I don't see how I can get two check-ups/cleanings/x-rays and maybe a filling per year and still have much left of my personal $1,000 maximum to pay for, say, a crown.

Also, if we have insurance, the dentist will switch their view of us from Poor Unfortunate Uninsured mode to Milk-Cow mode. Currently, our dentist looks at our file and says "...Oh. No insurance. Well, if you like, we can wait on those x-rays until next time." Or if I don't want a certain procedure considered essential for EVERYONE living in a country that has already greatly shifted the definition of "basic care," I can say regretfully, "No dental insurance," and they back right off: I mean, you either have that kind of money or you don't. But as soon as I have insurance, it doesn't matter if it costs $1,700/year before I get any benefit at all, and it doesn't matter that a procedure isn't covered or is only covered once every four years at 50%, suddenly we "have dental insurance!" Which sounds like "Everything's free!" to us, and like "Switch to Luxury Level dental care because everything's paid for!" to the dentist.

And it's hard to collect information from other people about whether coverage is worth it or not, because hardly anyone (including me) sits down and figures out the math. So if I asked you right now if it was worth it, you might say "OH, yes, TOTALLY!"--and yet you could be WRONG WRONG WRONG. Say for example you've for years been spending $1,700/year on coverage for $1,000/year of benefits (in other words, losing $700 a year on the deal), but then one year you needed a $4,000 procedure and 80% of it was covered so you only had to pay $800, WHEW. You no longer even notice the monthly payment taken out of your check, but you DID notice the huge relief of not having to pay the $4,000---so you might feel as if the insurance was totally worth it. And yet you wouldn't even have broken even: your costs would still have exceeded your benefits. (And now you're not eligible for that $4,000 procedure for another 6 years.)

(And also, even THIS happy story wouldn't apply to the plan I'm looking at this morning, since benefits cut off at $1,000/year/person, so that $4,000 procedure would be covered at $1,000 minus the dental care covered that year---or, about $700, say, at absolute most, with the other $3,300 due to my dentally-insured self.) (This really isn't sounding like it's worth it, as I type it out.)

It's also complicated because with health and life insurance, you may have heard the expression "a gamble you WANT to lose": that is, we don't mind if we put in more money than we get out, because the only way for the insurance to be a good deal is if we have a serious problem---and we'd rather lose money on the deal than get cancer and/or die in order to come out ahead. This is NOT the case with dental insurance: especially with a $1,000/year maximum per person (i.e., when we can't think of it as "But in a big dental crisis, we'd get a huge benefit out of it"), we DO need to come out ahead for it to be worth it.

I am going to see if I can do this math.

$1,700/year for $7,000/year maximum coverage
but the $7,000 is misleading because it's $1,000/person
and most of us won't get anywhere near $1,000 in a regular year
and remember we sometimes have to pay a percentage of a procedure
but we get our xrays/cleanings 100% covered
(as long as we don't get them done too often)
and if we needed fillings, we'd get more benefit
but sealants are already done for $20 through the school system
and we'd have to switch dentists, which I don't want to do
but soon Paul and I will be needing more serious work
but it's still only $1,000/year coverage for each of us

No wonder nobody does the math. It's not math, it's a LEAP OF FAITH. A leap of faith into the arms of companies we know make a huge profit. And that profit is COMING FROM SOMEWHERE, which is an equation I CAN do.

Stomach Virus (NOT FLU)

2012-01-27T06:14:00.008-05:00

Describing a run-of-the-mill illness is like describing a dream. "I was too sick to take a shower." "It was so weird, it was LIKE our house, but it was ALSO our old apartment." "I sat in my recliner, but that turned out to be too active for me, so I had to lie on the couch." "You were you? but it was weird, you were also NOT you, you know?" "The barfing was bad, but it was the whole-body soreness that really got to me." "We were walking through, like, a park? I guess? And, like, you were telling me about your cat, but then suddenly Allison was there, and..." "I was TOO SICK TO CHECK TWITTER."

Illnesses and dreams feel so consuming, but they don't transfer well to the storytelling realm. Suffice it to say, I had a stomach virus (or perhaps food poisoning; it's hard to tell the difference) that completely felled me. And please note: the use of the term "stomach virus" is deliberate, to avoid spreading the highly misleading term "stomach flu." If we are vigilant over our entire lifetimes, if we spread the "stomach flu IS NOT FLU" message every chance we get, one day we may reach a utopia where no one will ever say again, "We were barfing all weekend! Stupid useless flu shot!!"

Who STARTED calling it stomach flu, anyway? Did they realize what they were doing? YES, some people barf when they have influenza; that doesn't mean that barfing = influenza. Influenza can also involve coughing and sneezing, but that doesn't mean that if your cold involves coughing and sneezing you have the cold flu; influenza can involve a sore throat, but that doesn't mean if you have a sore throat from strep you have the strep flu. A stomach virus might be CALLED stomach flu in a casual way, and that is FINE and I DO IT MYSELF, but it is only REALLY fine as long as all the speakers and all the listeners understand that it is NOT FLU. The flu shot does nothing to prevent it, BECAUSE IT IS NOT FLU. Why is it called flu if it's not flu? I don't know, why is a cold called a cold even though it's not about feeling cold? Why don't we have a singular pronoun instead of having to say "his or her" and "he or she" all the time? LANGUAGE IS WEIRD LIKE DREAMS.

Are we all clear? Because I could go on. Except I'm kind of too tired and sore still to go on, so just re-read the post kthanx.

Moms' Storage Pack

2012-01-22T16:23:00.004-05:00

Let's discuss: What makes this a "Moms'" storage pack?

MAMMALS

2012-01-20T07:22:00.006-05:00

I dreamed last night that we were snowed in and stranded, so I nursed a friend's baby. Which reminded me of something I hadn't thought of in a long time, which is the time I DID nurse a friend's baby.

We were out shopping with our babies, far from home; she'd forgotten her diaper bag; we were considering whether she wanted to buy a pack of bottles and a can of formula and then try to wash the new items and mix a bottle in the bathroom; and while we were talking over the options we went to the baby section and found the store was out of the kind of formula she needed. My friend remarked how convenient breastfeeding must be for me at times like this: there's no way to forget the bottles, no way to be out of the formula, no need to ask a restaurant employee for some warm water. We discussed if we needed to just abandon the outing and go home, or if we should load the babies back into the car and drive to another store to get the formula.

I think I was the one who raised the idea. I said something like "Too bad I can't just nurse her!" And there was a little pause as I waited for my friend to be grossed out and she waited for me to be grossed out, and neither of us was grossed out so we thought we would just go ahead and try it: maybe the baby wouldn't be willing, and then we'd abandon our plans for the day and drive to another store that had her formula, or stay here and get a different kind of formula, or WHATEVER, but in any case we'd call those Plans B and C and D, and now we had a Plan A.

I'd often mulled the idea of nursing someone else's baby, and of course until very recent times such things used to be commonplace. Whenever I was nursing a baby of my own I'd wish it were possible to offer "Breastfeeding Daycare," where I'd take care of someone else's baby and also nurse the baby during the day. That would work great, if weekends wouldn't then be kind of a problem---and if it were legal, which considering the extremely strict regulations for childcare services I'm guessing it isn't. (And can you imagine calling around to find out?)

With my fifth baby, I'd become pretty immune to The Alleged Magic and Wonder of Breastfeeding. Hum de hum, shirt up, latch the baby on, sit there and read a book while ordinary biology does its ordinary thing, done and done. But nursing someone else's child brought the stun factor back into it: I am FEEDING THIS BABY. We are MAMMALS. MAMMALS!

Sunday Sermon, A Day Late

2012-01-16T09:53:00.012-05:00

I have had an insight. Please await it.

It started when Rob and I were having that unpleasant conversation in which he wanted to know why Everyone Couldn't Just Get Along, and I wasn't really sure.

It continued to simmer during the whole War on Christmas thing that comes up every year, when I think it was Caitlin who remarked so insightfully that it seemed like it was actually a War on Happy Holidays.

And then, in the shower this morning, between applying the conditioner and rinsing it out, is when I figured out Where Religion Went Wrong. This is RICH STUFF, people. (It was Tresemmé Advanced Technology Salon Performance.) And as with all insights, I can confidently assume that many, many people have already ALSO had this insight---but "having it first" and "being the only one to have had it" are not required for something to be categorized as an insight, so THAT'S okay.

Braced for salon-quality brilliance? Okay! Here it is: it went wrong when it turned outward instead of inward. Religion works beautifully, I assume, if each participant uses it as a guideline for working earnestly on their own behavior, and for improving their own relationship with the god or gods of that particular religion. This holy book says our deity doesn't want us to get tattoos, so I will not. This holy book says our deity doesn't want us to eat pork, so I will not. This holy book says our deity doesn't want us to have sex during a woman's period, so I will not. This holy book says our deity wants us to take care of the poor, so I will. This holy book says our deity wants to give over 10% of all my money to our church, so I will. Lovely for everyone.

The trouble started when people INSTEAD said: This holy book says not to get tattoos, so I will picket outside tattoo parlors, even though the holy book doesn't say anything about wanting me to picket. This holy book says not to eat pork, so I will tell other people they must not do it either, even if they don't belong to my religion and the holy book isn't trying to give rules for people who don't belong to my religion. This holy book says not to have sex during a woman's period, so I will make sure that our national laws list it as a prosecutable perversion for everyone, whether they belong to the same religion or not. And worst of all: I don't choose to follow the rule about giving 10% of my income, and that rule about not getting tattoos isn't relevant to our times, and I don't think the rule about taking care of the poor applies to THESE poor people or to anything _I_ should be doing---but I will put tremendous time and energy into making sure other people follow that rule about not having sex during a woman's period.

The only holy book I'm familiar with is the Christian Bible, but it's weird that it even COVERS this with "Take the 2x4 out of your own eye before you try to get the speck of sawdust out of someone else's" and "You can throw stones as soon as you're perfect in every way"---the obvious message in both cases being that no one will EVER be available to work on someone else's issues. And yet that's not the way it goes down a lot of the time.

I don't see why people CAN'T get along, as long as religion (and, as long as we're at it, various self-improvement programs) stay inward-focused. If one person is working on herself, and another person is working on HERself, they can be friends even at a restaurant where one orders a ham sandwich and the other drinks wine. It's when one person decides to start working on SOMEONE ELSE'S flaws that we run into problems. Nobody LIKES that, is the issue I think.

Er, which is why I'm DEFINITELY NOT working on other people's flaws with this post. Certainly not. I am merely recommending my conditioner, in case you decide for yourself that it's right for you.

Anemia Frustration

2012-01-14T07:22:00.001-05:00

First a discouraged post, and now a frustrated one. And kind of boring, too: I can barely get through the proof-reading of it.

Edward. To review: at his six-year check-up this summer, he hadn't grown since his five-year check-up, and he had also lost a couple of pounds. The pediatrician sent him for blood work, which showed anemia: his iron is supposed to be mid-11ish at minimum, and he's low-9ish. That doesn't sound very severe to me, but apparently anemia can indicate Scarier Things, especially when combined with not-growing.

First the pediatrician had us add an 18mg iron supplement to his diet, and we started giving him citrus fruit/juice whenever he had the supplement (or one of the iron-fortified cereals he eats daily) (vitamin C helps the body absorb iron), and we were careful to separate all the iron stuff from calcium (calcium anti-helps the body absorb iron).

We re-did the blood test after two months, and it was the same. So the pediatrician added an additional 14mg iron supplement to his diet. The 14mg and 18mg supplements are each listed as about 100% of the RDA for his age, plus he's eating the iron-fortified cereal that's listed as another 100% of the RDA. Plus of course he gets iron from other foods such as meat and legumes.

We re-did the blood test again this week after another two months, and he's budged up two-tenths of a thing of iron---so, if it was 9.1 before, it's 9.3 now. The pediatrician says great, it's working, let's add another 14mg of iron, for a total of 46 mg of iron supplements per day.

I'm thinking that a 200% RDA iron supplementation with a diet that already contains a good deal of iron-fortified cereal should have resulted in more of an improvement than .2, after over FOUR MONTHS of it. I realize it can take awhile for iron levels to rise, but it's BEEN awhile now.

When I said to the pediatrician that this worried me that so much iron was giving us so little result, he said no, it's looking good, and may just take time. Which, I knew it would take some time, but this seems like ample time. I feel frustrated because this has been six months and three blood-draws and three co-pays to hear the results, and I'm getting uncomfortable with this level of iron supplementation. Plus, Edward still hasn't gained any weight since age five. And I'm worried because what I've read online is that anemia that isn't affected by diet is the kind to worry about, so if there's something else going on I don't want to just let it KEEP GOING ON.

Here's my plan. I'm going to make his 7-year check-up with the other pediatrician in the practice. (We see both doctors, just whoever's available, so this won't be weird.) We've been seeing the same pediatrician for this whole iron thing, which makes sense so that one doctor can be tracking the story. But if I see the other pediatrician for the check-up, I can run it by him and see what he thinks.

I'm also hoping that some of you have experience with this and can say things like "Oh, it's because that level of anemia is like a 99.5 fever: it's not really anything to worry about" or "It seems like .2 wouldn't be significant, but actually it is" or "WHAT? This is nuts! The absolute cut-off for iron supplements at his age is 30mg!! Something is wrong here!"

Preschool = OPPORTUNITIES

2012-01-13T11:11:00.003-05:00

I am so discouraged with how this whole Preschool = Abundant Time thing is working out. When we signed Henry up about a year ago, I started counting weeks until it would begin in the fall. Three and a half hours! Three times a week! UNIMAGINABLE FREEDOM!!! I will have so much more time to blog, and without being interrupted several times a minute!

Here is how things went today, and this is typical:

8:30 Take Henry to preschool
8:35 Exercise, and undo negative effects of exercise
9:40 Grocery store, and putting away groceries
11:00 At my computer, with an entire hour remaining

I am not complaining about that hour. No indeed. An hour all by myself in the quiet house is SUPER KEEN, and there is no denying THAT! But as usual it is about COMPARISONS. One hour compared to nothing is WONDERFUL. One hour compared to the anticipated three-point-five hours is...depressing.

Each time, I have to walk myself through it. I didn't "lose" an hour and five minutes exercising; I GAINED the opportunity to exercise! *finger to dimple*! I didn't "lose" an hour and twenty minutes buying groceries and putting them away; I GAINED a grocery store trip in total peace and concentration! *smile that does not reach eyes*!

Things I Like About Exercise

2012-01-10T06:08:00.009-05:00

Over the years I have gone in and out of exercise, and I assume that pattern will continue. There is no reason for me to think that one spurt of exercise motivation will be different from the others and will suddenly last forever and be easy and wonderful. No, it is always unpleasant and I always hate it, and there is never one single session that I look forward to. But I try not to discuss every single start-up and fade-off, because that gets boring, and also because most such accounts seem to lack introspection: everyone's new health kick is FINALLY THE ONE THAT WORKS. Step aerobics and low-fat 4eva!!! Tae Bo and Zone 4eva!!! Pilates and whole grains 4eva!!! Zumba and low-carb 4eva!!!

But I am on an ON cycle right now, and it has been long enough to be an Actual phase rather than one of my many, many Attempted phases, so that's nice also. The temptation is to only complain about everything I HATE about exercising, and so I am RISING ABOVE that and forcing myself to do the opposite. Here is what I LIKE about exercising, typed while CLENCHING MY TEETH.

1. My knees can get kind of achy if I don't exercise, which brings to mind ads for chairs that will help me to stand. If I exercise too much, they hurt even worse. But if I exercise the right amount, they feel better.

2. Working on my balance problem. My brother still occasionally mentions the time I was in high school and tripped WHILE STANDING STILL. (Hello, there was a PATTERN on that linoleum.) When I've been exercising, I notice I'm quicker to regain my balance if I lose some of it.

3. Feeling like I'm all Ms. Muscles McBallet. Instead of just bending over (lift with your back!) for the pan lid, I fling one leg out behind me and lever down like one of those drinking bird toys. If I'm waiting for something to boil, I crouch a little because it'll help improve my thigh muscles which in turn will help me the next time I exercise. This is why I think Jillian is so idiotic: for some of us, taking the stairs isn't some pathetic cop-out we should feel ashamed of trying to fool ourselves with; instead, it's what makes us feel like one million small movements are worth doing, so we do those one million small movements instead of NOT doing them.

4. Feeling all awesome. When I'm walking along, or when I'm folding laundry, I feel the muscles! engaging! and the cardiovascular system! kicking in! Again, see point about Jillian and how crappy her advice truly is. Her message is "Be perfectly 100% ultimately fit in every way, or else DON'T BOTHER, YOU PATHETIC FOOL." I reject it. I feel all awesome and motivated to do more when I do a bunch of small things. I don't feel awesome and motivated to do more when someone yells that doing small things is pathetic and useless.

5. When I have to do something active, like walking up a hill or taking some stairs, I notice my muscles feel all happy about it, rather than feeling resentful and tired.

6. Having more overall pep/perk. When I'm going from the kitchen to the computer room, or from the computer room to the kitchen, I often break into a run. This was startling to the children at first, but they have become accustomed to it.

7. Sleeping better. I fall asleep more easily. If I wake up at 3:00, I'm less likely to stay awake watching a mental slideshow of Every Time I Screwed Up.

8. Feeling like I am Improving. I am getting better at what I'm doing. This happens in other areas of life as well, so it's not that it HAS to happen in this arena---but it's nice, for a change of pace, to have it happening in a physical realm. At first I could barely do 10 minutes; now I can do 30! At first I couldn't figure out WHAT this exercise was supposed to do because I couldn't feel ANYTHING; now I think OH, I get it!

9. Being able to say at a doctor appointment that YES, I DO exercise.

10. Feeling like I'm doing things to delay death. My guess is that I'm not actually doing much to delay death: most of our ancestors had jobs that kept them physically active until they died at 52, but of course they were also eating a ton of local organic unprocessed whole foods, so maybe THAT'S what shortened their life expectancies. But our current culture believes that I AM going to live longer because I exercise a fraction of the amount my farmer ancestors did, and so I believe that I might be, and that is a pleasant belief. I am exercising, so I will live longer wheeeeeeee! Or shorter---we'll have to see how this all pans out, considering right now we know almost nothing about anything! But if I'm wrong I'm in good company wheeeeeeee!

11. Whether it prolongs life or not, "use it or lose it" is a saying that seems to hold true over the ages, and whatever years I DO have are more likely to involve better balance and an easier time getting a pan lid out of the oven drawer. Unless I get REALLY into exercising and destroy my joints.

12. Watching movies while I exercise is the only way I can make myself do it at all. So this means I am suddenly seeing movies! LOTS of movies! I saw Inception! I saw The Kids Are All Right! I'm watching Friday Night Lights! I kind of know what other people are talking about, sometimes!

I Upside-Down-Heart Exercising

2012-01-09T09:42:00.005-05:00

The things I hate about exercise are too numerous to...enumerate. Which isn't going to stop me.

I hate being hot. I hate sweating. I hate hearing it wouldn't be boring and hateful if I'd just find the kind of exercise I LOVE, DUH! I hate how the first month I start exercising I put on ten pounds, and I don't lose it until I (inevitably) quit exercising. I hate how no amount of exercise is ever considered "enough": you always need to be doing MORE.

I don't know if I could choose my absolute least-favorite thing about exercise, but today the honor goes to how much TIME it takes. When Henry started three-morning-a-week preschool last fall, I had a little talk with myself. I was pretty stern. I informed myself that with three mornings all by myself in the house, I certainly could spare 30 minutes three times a week to exercise.

And is it 30 minutes? Is it hell. From the moment I pull out the Wii Fit board until the moment I'm dressed in non-gross clothes again, it's 60 minutes. And that's to get an amount of exercise many people would consider completely negligible, and may I just as an aside kick their legs out from under them as they head out for their lazy little 5-mile run because they're taking it easy today.

So, to exercise just enough that my doctor assumes I'm lying to her, it costs me three hours per week (plus ten pounds). That is a lot of time. And in case you are feeling tempted to argue with me, let me say it again with more of a "now is not the right moment for a receptive response to that argument" spin to my eye contact: THAT IS A LOT OF TIME. Three hours a week is a lot of time. Do you want me to add "to me" to the end of that sentence? I will at the end of the paragraph, but right now I'm to riled up to add that qualifier. I suppose if I were sitting around bored, flipping channels and then going to bed early because I couldn't think of anything else to do, it might not be that big of a deal to me. But I spend every day almost PANTING with things I need/want to do. I hate bedtime because I'm always in the middle of something. Three hours is a lot of time to me.

It means giving up three hours of things I would rather do, every single week, for a benefit I have to take on faith. I am forced to assume it's worth it. I am forced to assume the exercise benefit is better for my health than the extra ten pounds is bad for it. I am forced to assume that if I am someday fortunate enough to be an old lady, I will be more grateful for the three hours a week I spent exercising than I would be if I'd spent the three hours a week blogging or reading or cleaning or doing ANYTHING AT ALL I'D RATHER DO. Which I AM assuming, which is why I'm more than four months into this latest effort. But I am not HAPPY about it, and I'm not going to call it "me time" or "time for MYSELF" or whatever: this is a sacrifice, and I hate it. It's CHORE time. If I were someone who used the expression "Me time," I'd reserve it for things I LIKE DOING. Such as writing about how much I hate exercising.

Penicillin Allergy

2012-01-05T10:27:00.005-05:00

Upside of Googling images of rashes: really puts child's scary rash into perspective. Downside of Googling images of rashes: OMG OMG OMG AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA.

This morning Edward has what looks like a bunch of mosquito bites on his leg, joined up the way they get when there are a lot of bites close together. And he's on amoxicillin, and the stuff I read about allergic reactions said it's very hard for a layperson to tell the difference between a scary-looking but non-allergic rash and a scary-looking but allergic rash, so I'm not giving him this morning's amoxicillin until I get it checked out, and I'll call the doctor's office as soon as it opens. And I gave him benadryl.

I also got everyone else ready early, in case we suddenly need to zoom to the emergency room. It makes me feel better to feel READY, even if I think the likelihood of needing that readiness is LOW. I'm trying to imagine how I'd feel if I had to go to the ER but Elizabeth's hair was still like cotton candy, and she wasn't dressed, and no one could find shoes, and Henry had breakfast on his face. No, better to get ready just in case. It's not like we'll WASTE the getting-ready: they still need to do it.

********

Rash has spread to his cheeks and ears. This part isn't mosquito-bite-like, just very red and rashy. Mosquito-bite stuff spreading up his legs and down his ankles. He's itchy, but cool washcloths and the benadryl seem to have helped quite a bit. Still no breathing issues, and no rash on his torso.

********

We're back from the pediatrician's. It was a little dramatic: I called the nurse at opening time and told her what was going on and she said "...How soon can you get here? Can you come in right now?" So it WAS good I had everyone totally ready. Apparently saying "amoxicillin" and "rash" together is like saying "middle-aged man" and "chest pains" together.

And it looks like it is indeed a penicillin allergy, luckily without any breathing issues involved this time. But now he has a red sticker on his chart. I asked if he could go back to school today and the doctor said yes---but he hesitated before saying it. And then when I got home and started to write the note to the teacher I reconsidered and decided to just keep him home. I'd like to watch him, and also he looks DREADFUL: anyone seeing him would assume he had an apocalyptic disease and was spreading it to all the other children. The school would have the doctor's note, but the other parents wouldn't know.

Interesting thing the doctor said: that some people are only allergic to the LIQUID form of penicillin, but can take the capsules later on with no trouble. Hm. But probably most people wouldn't want to EXPERIMENT with that.

Here is something I'd like to know: is penicillin allergy hereditary? Paul's mother claimed that Paul was allergic to penicillin, so of course Paul has had to say so to all his doctors over the years, and it's been a bit of a hassle. (When he went in with strep last week, the doctor said "Any allergies to medications?" and he said "Penicillin" and she said "WRONG ANSWER.")

But Paul's mother also diagnosed Paul's sister with many food allergies, and never got doctor confirmation for any of them (and either his sister outgrew them all or else she never had them to begin with), so it's a little hard to say---especially since when I was looking things up online I found there can be a very scary-looking non-itchy rash from amoxicillin that DOESN'T mean allergy. And yet if I'd seen that rash on one of my children, I definitely would have assumed allergy. So I'm wondering if that's what she did. When she was alive I tried to ask her more about it, but she just kept stating that he WAS allergic, be-LEEEVE her he was allergic, and I got nowhere.

...I've been kind of rambling all around, and it's losing the questions which are the POINT of this post, so I'm going to put them here, on their own:

1. Are penicillin allergies hereditary?

2. Wait, I guess that was my only question.

Waiting to Be on the Phone for the THIRD TIME Today

2012-01-03T08:50:00.013-05:00

I lay awake last night going over and over in my mind all the unpleasant hurdles I was going to have to navigate in order to get the new UTI treated. First: do I make an appointment, or do I try to get the doctor to call in a prescription? I'd prefer the latter, but it means dealing with attitude from the receptionist; and should I give her attitude back? what KIND of attitude would be most effective? (Effective = makes her burn with shame at the way she was treating a patient, followed by making her eager to appease me by helping me---as opposed to riling her up and making her accidentally drop my message into the wrong pile and/or into the trash.) Let's rehearse all the attitude-giving options here, in my mind, in the dark, at 1:00 in the morning.

Then, if the doctor is willing to call in the prescription with no appointment, there is often a many-hour wait before he or she DOES SO (once it was 2:00 in the afternoon, when I'd called at 8:30), so that in the past I've decided I might as well just make the appointment because it's FASTER.

But if I get an appointment, they will rebuke me for taking the Azo painkiller, which dyes the pee so they have to diagnose me through traditional methods (i.e., letting me describe my Absolutely Classic UTI Symptoms) instead of by dipping a strip of paper my insurance will charge me $20 for.

Then I will have to be firm about them NOT sending the pee away for $450 worth of lab work, which my insurance charges me $140 for---and even when I have been firm in the past, I have lost. So I will have to be firm far beyond the natural limits of my temperament type, which will make me cry.

The whole thing will end unpleasantly no matter what, and I'll be exhausted from having to struggle so hard for a treatment plan I consider reasonable, over a treatment plan I consider an excellent example of why heath care costs are so crazy. It COULD be a bladder/kidney issue instead of a UTI, I realize, and it COULD be a UTI that's resistant to the antibiotic they prescribe---but I am youngish and healthyish, and I have had these many times before, and they can FULLY COUNT ON ME to call back if I don't feel better or if I get scary lower back pain or ANYTHING.

(Perhaps you are even now scrolling down to the comment form to suggest I switch practices or doctors. If so, I think you are overestimating the size of my town and underestimating my ability to think of easy solutions.)

By this morning I had decided on the following things:

1. I would make an appointment.

2. I would not take Azo, despite the suffering, so that they could do their strip-dip.

3. I would not, however, pay for lab work. I would continue to say, "No, I'm sorry, but I can't pay for that" as many times as necessary. I would patiently endure their disapproval, and store it up to feel angry about later.

I called, and at first it felt as if things were going the most perfect way they possibly could: they didn't have any appointments today. They had me speak to the nurse, and they used the word "instead." I spoke to the nurse, who said she would speak to the doctor and see what they could do, and then call me back. I was going to get my prescription called in, without even having to fight with the receptionist first!

I was of course Theoretically Annoyed. Oh, I see, when _I_ ask for it to be called in, it's impossible and unreasonable and I'm trying to get away with something, but when THEY'RE busy and it would be more convenient for THEM, suddenly it's a good plan. But not VERY Theoretically Annoyed, because of being Actually Hugely Relieved. Plus, I could take Azo, so I did!

Then the nurse called back. The doctor there today is the one who previously insisted on sending away the pee sample for lab work despite my repeated protests, and assured me that insurance WOULD cover it. I was so thrown by this claim, and by the failure of my repeated protests to accomplish anything, that she won that round. And now, today, she declines to call in a prescription. She will need to see me, and she has no appointments until 2:00. Does anyone have anything earlier? No, that is the only appointment available in the entire day with any doctor.

I told the nurse that I had taken Azo, and she said that was fine because they could still send the pee for lab work and get a result that way. I said I would not have the lab work, because it was $140. We both said "Hmm" a few times. She said she'd run this new information by the doctor and call me back.

So not only am I waiting for a phone call (my THIRD in one morning), but I'm CHEESED OFF. I get these several times a year, and have for years and years. I have never been wrong about it, NEVER. A $450 set of tests is ridiculous for a routine UTI with no worrying symptoms. I wasn't trying to get out of needing an appointment, but I DON'T need their ONLY appointment of the day, if they won't be able to do the strip-dip OR the lab work, and if it's 5 hours from now.

If they think I'm getting too many of these (which they DON'T, despite me suggesting it seems like QUITE A FEW), or if they think there is something alarming that needs looking into, in THAT case I would be happy to cooperate with lab tests for further exploration of the problem. But $450 (plus the $20 strip-dip, plus the $130 appointment) to determine (1) that I have a UTI and (2) that it is not resistant to the prescribed antibiotic (test results back in 48 hours, by which time TRUST ME I WILL KNOW if it is not responding to the antibiotic) is WHAT IS WRONG WITH THE ENTIRE WORLD. Global warming? Due to unnecessary lab tests. Pollution? It's all the unnecessary lab tests. Crime and violence? PEOPLE ENRAGED BY UNNECESSARY LAB TESTS.

[Edited to add: I called my GYN, just to SEE. What I did was, I first made an appointment for an annual exam, because I'd rather go there anyway than to my primary. THEN I sprung my question. They only treat UTIs for women who are pregnant. So. Good to know, anyway.]

[Edited to add more: The doctor insisted on seeing me. I left with a prescription, and I refused to have the lab work done. She prescribed me an antibiotic my usual doctor says is not as effective; it would not surprise me to find that she is hoping I will be taught a lesson, since she kept mentioning that without the lab work she really couldn't make decisions for my care. So as usual, the whole thing ended up unpleasant no matter what: I'm glad to have successfully declined the lab work, but I'm upset and discouraged about everything else, and already greatly discouraged/upset in advance about the NEXT time this will happen, and about how very little control/choice patients have.]

New Year's Eve Report

2012-01-01T09:37:00.003-05:00

New Year's Eve was fun! I used to think it was fun back in high school, and in college when I was home over Christmas break: my dad would move the TV and VCR into my room, and I would RENT several VIDEOCASSETTES from a VIDEO STORE, and I would buy a bunch of snacks. I'd stay up late watching the movies and eating, and mooning into my diary.

This tradition continued on and off until my first baby was born. Oh, wait, actually we stayed up late that year, too, because it was turning to 2000! We were living with my parents, and we all stayed up in case we were going to suddenly need to learn to farm the backyard and fetch water from the river.

After that, there were many years of not staying up: I was either pregnant or nursing or caring for very small children, or in fact always two of the three, and didn't want to stay up.

I can't remember which year it was that Rob asked to stay up and I said yes, but I do remember being really, really tired and not at all enthusiastic about it. I think it was the year the twins were toddlers and I was pregnant with Henry. The memory is understandably fuzzy, but I do remember how proud Rob was to stay up.

We've stayed up every year since. First it was Rob and me, and the last two or three years it's been Rob and William and me. Next year I'm going to let the twins try it. My prediction is that Elizabeth will stay up easily, and Edward will fall asleep on the couch by 9:00, after an hour of asking NOW is it almost time? Paul goes to bed early: he's not interested in staying up (though he's glad I do it, because it's fun for the kids), and that way he can let me sleep in the next day.

Now that my youngest baby is four years old, and I'm neither pregnant nor nursing, it's finally fun to stay up again. Rob and William and I went to the grocery store the day before and bought a bunch of snack food: Doritos, Lay's, powdered doughnuts, pizza rolls, Kit Kats, boneless wings, mozzarella sticks, soda, champagne. (The cashier: "Wow, having a party! How many people?" Me: "...Three." Cashier: *awkward moment*)

On New Year's Eve we got out the snack food at about 8:00, and William learned his annual lesson about the benefits of eating slowly over the hours rather than cramming as much into the tum as possible right away. They played Wii and I messed around on my computer with resolutions. At 11:30 we turned on the TV and watched Lady Gaga and Ryan Seacrest and Dick Clark. (It is time to let Seacrest do the countdown. He's starting to remind me of Prince Charles.)

At midnight I turned all the new calendars to January, and the boys got ready for bed while I put away all the snack food, and then I stayed up just a little bit longer to finish the champagne while mooning into my journal. I'm not saying it's HUGE! CRAZY! EXCITEMENT!, but it's become a holiday I look forward to for its pleasant little rituals.

2010 Resolution Evaluation; New 2011 Resolutions

2011-12-31T22:24:00.003-05:00

New Year's Eve parties came about, I'm pretty sure, because if you eat an entire box of boneless chicken wings on your own, you won't have room for Doritos and powdered doughnuts. With friends over, you can have some of everything! Without feeling silly about how many boxes/bags you opened! And without, just for example, drinking the entire bottle of champagne yourself!

Remember these resolutions?

Ha ha, me neither! I had them hanging up by my computer so I'd remember to look at them and do them, but then when we changed the house all around they got lost I think, because I don't know AT ALL where they are. ...Oh. Here they are. They were in one of the deeper piles on my desk.

1. I will be less of a self-conscious sissy about hair dye. FAIL. I bought burgundy hair color, but I didn't use it; I researched REALLY bold colors (pink, blue) but didn't buy any. Instead I continued to fuss about roots and timing, and about the hassle of getting dye on towels and pillowcases, and about what strangers at the grocery store would think about it. I did use a boxed blond color for summer, and I liked it okay, but another reason I didn't use the burgundy was that I really liked the boxed blond when it grew out beyond looking just rooty: I liked the mix of my own hair color and the lighter blond, and I didn't want to lose that phase by using a new color.

2. I will try to keep up with my digital photos. FAIL. I kept up for a few months, but then the Snapfish uploading tool broke and I got discouraged. I looked into switching to another service, but didn't. I did finally catch up by doing about four months of photos all at once, but then I've let it slip again.

3. I will persist long enough with the fish tank to know if it's something I want to pursue. SUCCESS. Knowing I was going to persist experimentally took off some of the pressure to LOVE IT OR GET RID OF IT AND MAKE THE DECISION RIGHT THIS SECOND, and I do find I like the tank and want to keep it. I don't have an urge to get a larger tank, though.

4. I'm going to act with less inhibition on generous impulses. SUCCESS, but with a note. I did quite a few things this year where previously I would have gotten into a knot about it, and it was fun. BUT, the note is that I thought more about it, and I think it's NOT such a good idea to keep acting on such impulses: it seems to set up situations where the recipient feels uncomfortable and/or burdened, and wonders if they should reciprocate, and feels awkward if they don't want to. It can actually make people feel BAD, and that's not what I'm going for, obviously.

So while I'm still going to act on such impulses when it's fun and also seems like it can't set up bad feelings (one-time things, or buying a cute shirt for my niece, or buying something for Paul, or sending in something for the assistant teacher instead of just for the teacher), I'm trying to channel some of the generous impulses towards good-works-type impulse-buying. For example, I saw a great deal on Lands' End backpacks and lunchboxes ($10 down from $40 and $4 down from $12, respectively, plus 40% off so it was $8.40 per backpack/lunchbox set), and I bought several sets to donate to a local food/clothing pantry that tries to provide backpacks and school supplies in the fall to kids who need them.

I also found out that our lower elementary school has trouble keeping a supply of clothing on hand for accident-clothing-change replacements, so now I have my eye out for some 75%-off clothes to donate, and I've already sent in two packages of 75%-off underpants and three pairs of pants and three shirts---all of which were low-priced but CUTE, unlike the enormous "Dopey" shirt (INAPPROPRIATE IMPLIED-MESSAGE ALERT) and rolled-up sweatpants they sent Elizabeth home in when she needed a change of clothes NOT THAT I'M STILL STEWING ABOUT IT.

This has been FUN for me. And this type of buying takes away my worry that I'm overdoing it and maybe making someone else feel uncomfortable and obligated, while still using a character trait I enjoy and think is worth cultivating.

5. Buy or make Bath & Body Works lavender-vanilla conditioner. SUCCESS. I bought a bunch of bottles on eBay and now I have enough to feel like I can use it any morning I want to.

This year's resolutions:

1. I'm putting "Don't be such a sissy about hair dye" back on the list.

2. The thing I said above, about channeling the generosity impulse into good-works-type generosity. I'm thinking it could be really fun to use my clearance-hunting impulses for this: if I find a winter coat or backpack for one of the kids on 75% off, couldn't I buy two and donate one? If I find a bunch of great basic long-sleeved cotton-knit shirts at the irresistible price of $1.74, but my kids already have too many shirts, couldn't I have the fun of buying a rainbow of them anyway, but then donate them? YES! Yes, I COULD!

3. Send at least one Any Soldier package. I even bought a bunch of stuff that would be good for packages, I just haven't done anything about it because of "Who to CHOOSE" decision-paralysis.

4. Buy food for the food pantry bit by bit, when I'm grocery shopping anyway. Our grocery store has huge bins right at the front of the store for donations, so all I have to do is (1) remember to buy extras of a couple of the non-perishables I'm buying anyway each week (extra box of pasta and extra jar of sauce, or extra jar of peanut butter and extra box of crackers) and (2) have the bagger bag them separately so I can drop them into the bin on the way out. ...Actually, that sounds like a hassle. Okay, so my resolution is to figure out a way to do it but without it being so much of a hassle, and then do THAT. I think this has the potential to make grocery shopping a little more fun, if I can figure out how to do it easily.

5. Do 30 minutes of housework in a particular room on a rotating basis each weekday. I started this in December but it's not off the ground yet. And I'm concerned that this might be more discouraging than useful, because of the way earlier rooms might already be back to their usual states before I'm several rooms further down the list. But when I tried it, I found it was useful for doing not just regular housework chores (dusting, vacuuming) but also for doing things I'd been putting off (cleaning out all the stuff that rolled under the TV table, put away a clutter pile in the dining room, cleaning the bugs out of light fixtures). It was like instead of thinking "Ug, I don't want to do that, I'd rather check Twitter," I was thinking "Well, I have to be in here cleaning anyway, I might as well do THAT." I made a list of all the rooms in the house, and I just looked at the list each day after lunch to see what that day's room was.

6. Buy a couple of cute tops. They can be t-shirts, even, but then they need to be embellished in a cute way.

7. Find a conditioner that works well for Elizabeth's hair without smelling like grown-up-lady perfume OR Kool-aid.

8. Try to move one number on the scale (like from a 2 to a 3 on a scale of 10, for example) on giving hugs and pats and hair-ruffles and so forth. I don't think in terms of physical touch, so I think I don't give enough of it to the kids.

9. Order a bottle of expensive French perfume. (Good idea, AndreaUnplugged!)

What are you resolving this year? And if you're not making resolutions and think they're stupid, be SURE to tell us all about it. (I'm sorry. It's the champagne talking.) (No, I'm not sorry AT ALL! Ha ha ha ha ha!! -The Champagne.)

A Dilemma Involving Messing With Schedules; Calendars

2011-12-28T08:00:00.004-05:00

Today's dilemma involves a local jumping-around-on-inflatable-stuff place, which has school-vacation hours of 3:30-5:30 for "free jump" ("free" as in "no need to have a structured birthday party, you can just jump around," not "free" as in "doesn't cost $8.50 per child"). I could take the five children as a special holiday treat. It would cost $42.50, which is a large amount of money---but worth it if this creates a Favorite Childhood Memory. It would burn off some of the astonishing energy that is accumulating from being at home all day with many siblings and a stockingful of chocolate. But it's at 3:30-5:30, and the kids usually eat at 5:00, and this place is 40 minutes away from our house. Plus, it's $42.50.

********

From previous years' experience, I know that not everyone is as excited about calendars as I am. Every time I ask, hands clasped in girlish glee, what calendar everyone is buying THIS year, about 75% of you say "Uh, I just get a free calendar from the pharmacy" / "Uh, I don't use a paper calendar. That's kind of 1990s of you." But I am not squashed by your lack of enthusiasm! If anything, it fans the flames! I just posted this year's Calendar dither and I hope that if you and I are of like minds about the awesomeness of calendars, you will go leave a comment about what calendar YOU are getting. It's one of my top favorite comments sections of the entire year.

Life as a Choose-Your-Own-Adventure Book

2011-12-27T12:57:00.010-05:00

So. The Kite-Runner. Kind of a downer, huh? And I only read the graphic novel version. But it certainly helped put the issue with Paul's sister into perspective, so...score one for a soul-debilitating glance how unthinkably awful life can be!

Christmas went well. It was really loud, and there was a lot of crowd-management involved. I was inclined to glaze off, thinking of the quiet Christmases of the household where I grew up, wondering idly what my adult life would be like now with two or three children instead of five, not-that-I'd-want-to-give-any-of-them-up, wait-which-would-you-be-willing-to-take-ha-ha.

Actually, I can tell you exactly what it would be like: I'd be sitting here writing about how Christmas went well, but how I'd been inclined to glaze off wondering what my adult life would be like now if we'd had those other children I'd wanted. There would probably be some mooning and some age-speculation ("Maybe one would have been 6 this year, and another would have been 4...").

One of my gifts from my parents was Million Little Mistakes by Jennifer McElhatton. I'd read Pretty Little Mistakes a couple of years ago, and although I had many little complaints about it, I got so into it that after reading through a dozen or so adventures, I ended up reading it methodically---making sure I followed every single choose-your-own-adventure path possible in the whole book. I've seen what happens if I go to college and then become a drug dealer; now let's go back to the beginning and see what happens if I get married and then become a waitress!

Hey, did you already figure out where I was going with this, you smarty? I do wish I could do my life like a choose-your-own adventure book. Not to SWITCH to something else, but just to see how things would have gone and then come back to my real life. I'd like to see what it really would be like to have two or three children; I'd also like to see what it would be like to have the half-dozen I'd had in mind. (Or no, I guess I wouldn't, since then I'd miss that baby when I went back to my real life.) (Well, maybe as long as we're counter-reality fantasizing, we could add a thing where we wouldn't be affected by that. It would be fun to just SEE other possible children and relationships, but without the heart-hurt afterward.) I'd like to go back and see what would have happened if I'd gotten a different degree: accounting or elementary ed or secondary ed or nursing instead of business. I'd like to see how things could have gone if I'd done more extracurriculars in high school, or made different friends. Maybe I'd want to see what would have happened if I'd stayed with my first marriage. I'd even try the path where I didn't go to college but instead got a real estate license and married my high school boyfriend, just for interest's sake.

If life was a choose-your-own-adventure book, which path would you re-do first? I think I'd start with the different degree, since "What will I do when all the kids are in school?" is currently heavy on my mind. But the "different guy" paths are perhaps more INTERESTING.

Christmas Lights

2011-12-24T17:19:00.008-05:00

I have a timely question for you! Actually it is a series of questions. Here we go.

Do you prefer colored lights or white lights? (This is whether or not you yourself put any up.)

And because it seems that mixed marriages must lead to compromises: which kind do you in fact have, if any? If desired, include details such as large or small lights, LED or whatever the non-LED kind is called, flashing or twinkling or running or steady.

And which kind did you grow up with, if any?

And finally, WHY do you prefer what you prefer?---and I hope we can answer primarily by saying what we DO like about our preferred lights, rather than by saying what we DON'T like about our NON-preferred lights, to keep this from being an unfestive rumble. (But it may be NECESSARY to express a preference in terms of a non-preference, in which case perhaps it can be said with Holiday Lovingkindness rather than with Scoffing Scorn.)

I have long preferred colored lights (the steady non-LED kind), and I think it is partly because that's what I grew up with, and partly because I generally like things that are rainbow/sparkly.

BUT, recently my parents got a pre-lit tree with WHITE lights, and now I am torn. When I went tree-shopping, I preferred the white-light trees to the colored-light trees, because I felt like they looked so natural and starry and lovely. And when we go on our annual Christmas Light Drive, I find the VARIETY is my favorite part: first a house with all white lights everywhere; then a house with those 1970s-looking big-bulbed lights, the ones the size of nightlights (did you know you can use those bulbs as nightlight bulbs? green and blue and yellow are especially pretty); then a house with running lights; then a house with some of those big light structures. But that makes it kind of hard to decide what to have at my own house.

Fish Executioner

2011-12-22T07:23:00.003-05:00

Elizabeth's mystery illness was strep. She didn't have a rash; she didn't have a sore throat; all she had was day after day of fever and misery. I was a little crazy-eyed from worry and compromised sleep, and I think the pediatrician only did the strep test as an excuse to leave the room for a few minutes.

********

There was a suspect in the Snail Mystery reported earlier this week: a mosquito fish, brought home by William after a school project. This little fish, as I discovered when I looked it up online to see if it could go in the aquarium with our other fish, is a bit of a super-breeding menace/pest. But I thought with just one, it would be fine in our aquarium and would be unlikely to cause a population issue. Plus, what else to do with it, now that it had been brought home? But I noticed it seemed to keep NIPPING at the other fish. Nip. Nip. Nip. The other fish were skittish and kept clenching their fins and darting away. The snail would flinch and tuck in its feelers.

When the snail's empty shell was discovered, I came to the conclusion that the most likely explanation was that the mosquito fish's constant nipping had finally driven the snail to run away from home to get a little peace. I can identify.

As the afternoon of the empty-shell discovery progressed, I noticed the mosquito fish seemed even more aggressive---as if encouraged by its recent success at driving away the snail. As if it had developed a TASTE, as it were, for causing other fish to run away from home.

I determined that this could not go on. I did my research. Did you know it is surprisingly complicated to euthanize a Problem Fish? This must put fishing boats to a great deal of shame, since they let tens of thousands of fish flop in the air on deck, rather than following complicated and no-kidding-SURGICAL options required for individual house-based fish.

Still, I was not going to let the fish die uncomfortably, even if this fish may have caused great discomfort to others. Most likely it has not given its heart over to evil, but is just being a fish.

I found a method I could imagine using, and readied my equipment. A plastic container I didn't mind throwing out if necessary, filled with ice water. A plastic baggie, containing a scoop of familiar water from the fish's own aquarium, to submerge in the ice water at the proper time. A little spade, for digging a proper grave after the deed was done.

I got the large disposable plastic cup I use for various aquarium-maintenance tasks, and I opened the lid of the aquarium. The fish all came to the top, expecting to be fed. I deftly scooped out the suspect and brought him to the kitchen where I had set up the execution chamber.

As I fussed with my supplies, the fish flipped. He flipped himself six inches out of the cup, into the air, onto the counter. As I looked on, a little scream rising in my throat but frozen there (The Bad Death of Eduard Delacroix going through my mind), he flipped again, into the sink, where there was a large pile of melting cubes of coffee creamer from a failed experiment.

I felt the need to act decisively, but I am not a quick thinker by nature and prefer to have more time to fuss with supplies and wrestle with issues. Overcoming those obstacles of temperament and hoping I would not regret that override, I turned on the in-sink disposal. And very quickly and mercifully, the fish knew no more.

Evaluating the incident afterward, I feel it went about as well as it could have. I don't know how a fish would feel about it, but I myself would prefer the fast "not even knowing what hit it" death of the in-sink disposal over the slow, opposite-of-boiling-the-frog method of having my body temperature lowered until I went into a coma and died. I prefer the former method even more strongly if the latter method is going to involve being scooped by a fumbling, grossed-out human hand out of a pile of frozen coffee creamer.

Snail Mystery Solved; Virus Mystery Continues

2011-12-19T12:07:00.004-05:00

We had a mystery at our house: our snail disappeared from the aquarium. We realized we hadn't seen him for awhile, and then we peered and peered and couldn't find him in the tank. After much peering, Paul rummaged the plants and other fish-furniture around, but nothing. We wondered if he might have crawled out through the hole in the lid around the filter? Or could he have been hooked out by a cat paw through that same small opening? Or could he be buried down in the gravel? Or...?

Today I partially solved the mystery. Driven crazy by the idea that there could be a dead, rotting snail OUTSIDE the aquarium, I used a high-powered flashlight to freak the fish completely out---but also to let me do a leveled-up peering of the inside of the tank, where I found the snail very well camouflaged between some similarly-colored rocks and the side of the fake broken Grecian urn.

The shell was empty. I think it's safe to conclude that he moved to a farm where he'd have more room to run.

********

I'm wishing quite hard for a laptop right now: Elizabeth is still sick and has been very clingy. Sometimes she just wants me to sit NEAR her, in which case I would rather be type-type-typing than half-watching Teen Titans or My Little Pony. Paul's been doing everything else, though (all other kid-care, all dishes and food prep, bringing me the remote or the thermometer or another cup of water or a snack or a new box of kleenex, finding more shows Elizabeth might want to watch), so I'd probably feel a little self-conscious sitting there with a computer. It looks more worthy if I'm reading a non-fiction paperback or something.

I think it's possible she was ALSO having an allergic reaction to something the day I took her to the doctor, but I think it's more likely she was in the early stages of a virus. Yesterday her fever got to 104.5 and Paul said, "I think we might actually need to take her to the emergency room." But we didn't. Instead we gave her more ibuprofen and we fretted and, as she dozed on me, my mind teased me by playing through various Extremely Regret-Filled Sample Scenarios.

Last night she and I slept in the living room, so that she'd sleep mostly sitting up (she's congested and snarfy, especially when she lies down) and so that I would sleep lightly and could keep an eye on her. I also find that such measures help me switch more quickly into the mode of EXPECTING not to get more than a little sleep here and there, which makes the nights far more tolerable. If I'm in my bed in the dark, I feel injured indignation at having my sleep disturbed; if I'm curled on the couch with the Christmas lights on, I'm grateful for each nip of sleep.

Various Forms of Mental and Physical Torture

2011-12-17T17:52:00.016-05:00

I have a weird mind-exercise for you to try. Start by thinking about how old, approximately, your grandparents were when they died, if they have died. You might have to take an average, and feel free to err on the side of the older ones. Mine were all "in their early/mid 80s." Then figure out what decade you're likely to die in, if you live about as long. So if you were born in the 1970s, and your grandparents lived to be in their 80s, you're likely to die in the 2050s. If you're lucky.

It's an exercise that is currently making me feel short-circuited. If I'm fortunate, I will die in the 2050s. That is when I will likely die, but no one would be shocked if it were the 2040s instead. And my parents are likely to die in the 2030s, but no one would be shocked if it were the 2020s. Again, that's if we're all very lucky. It is already the twenty-teens. I think it's time to panic, don't you?

I may be a little short-circuited to start with, because last night was the worst night we've had since we had a newborn in the house---and maybe the worst night we've had since we had newborn TWINS in the house.

In the evening, Elizabeth's eyes got very watery and itchy, and her eyelids got pink and a little puffy-looking. I gave her benadryl, but if anything it seemed to make it worse. She fell asleep in my lap, crying. She's 6 years old, so it's been awhile since that's happened. When she was fully asleep, I put her in her own bed. Later, Paul and I went to bed---but I already suspected we were in for it, because she'd cried several times in her sleep between the the time I'd put her down and our bedtime.

Indeed, we were in for it. About 15 minutes after I fell asleep (known as the "Hell Phase" of the sleep cycle), she started crying in earnest. I got her and brought her to our room, where she cried and sniffed and groaned, either awake or asleep, about every 15 minutes all night long, and asked for cold washcloths for her face. At 1:30 I got up to go to the bathroom and couldn't believe it was only 1:30. I felt like I was in a weird fugue thing, where I was constantly drifting off and then getting immediately yanked awake, and the night was going on forever.

At around this time, Paul moved to Elizabeth's empty room.

On one hand, this was very smart: he was getting more agitated by her agitation than I was (I was more despairing/worried than agitated), and that wasn't helping; and if one of us could be more rested the next day, that would be nice for the household; and there was no reason to have us both up if the task only required one person.

On the other, more muscular, more resentful hand, this was bailing on parenting duties and leaving it all to me. And the night continued to be dreadful, so I had plenty of time to think about it. And around 2:00, Henry cried, and Paul didn't hear him because the monitor is in our room. So I went down and handled Henry, who was having ear pain (did I mention the antibiotic he went on last week for his ear infections and strep didn't work, and he's started a new, stronger one but it still hasn't worked either?) and also wanted to come up to our room. So then in addition to Elizabeth waking every 10-15 minutes, Henry was waking to talk in his sleep and/or kick Elizabeth and/or be kicked by Elizabeth.

Paul slept beautifully until morning. I woke up feeling like I'd lost my mind, or wished I could: a straightjacket would be so COZY and RESTFUL. And sure, there was a time when I would have taken a night like this in stride, or at least in stumble, but I'm out of condition: it's like taking a former marathon runner who hasn't run in several years, and asking her to just hit the track like before kthanx. I have become accustomed to nights that are briefly interrupted, 1-2 times/night max. I have become unaccustomed to nights that are interrupted every 15 minutes and include wonderings about whether my next idea for dealing with it is a good one or will RUIN EVERYTHING.

Elizabeth woke up in the morning looking like I felt: puffy swollen red-purple eyelids/undereyes, splotchy face, crying and miserable, very low fever (99.8 as measured at the doctor's). I took her to the Saturday hours at another branch of our pediatrician's office, and the doctor said it's an allergic reaction to something. I started speculating: her new jacket? the tiny live pine tree on the dining room table? the assorted nuts-in-shells she was cracking? some other holiday-related thing? The pediatrician said we could drive ourselves crazy trying to figure it out, and for now let's concentrate on trying to stop the reaction: claritin, antihistimine eye drops, benadryl. We did that all today and she's still feverish (102 by my thermometer) and blotchy this evening.

So, current state of mind: "Is tonight going to be like last night? Wait, did the doctor NOTICE she had a fever? Doctors rarely even look at the notes the nurses took. Or maybe it makes sense that an allergic reaction would have a fever, since the body thinks it's fighting something. But 102? Or maybe our thermometer is wrong. I know he said not to drive myself crazy trying to figure out what it is...but WHAT IS IT?? What if it's the cats? What if it's the nuts? She's never had a problem with peanut butter, but these were tree nuts. But hasn't she had tree nuts before? I'm sure she's had tree nuts before. We have a tree-nut tree IN OUR YARD. Maybe she never had enough before. Maybe it's only a contact allergy and so she's having a problem because she she rubbed her hands in her eyes after using the nutcracker, but wouldn't have had a problem from EATING the almonds/walnuts/acorns. Maybe she HAS had this before but it's one of those 'more each time' reactions so it's never been this bad before. Maybe next time it would be...let's not think about that. What if it's not an allergy but an illness? What if this is something we don't get resolved this week, and it sweeps through the household / ruins Christmas? Why is Henry still having ear pain after four doses of the new/stronger antibiotic? What if this also means the antibiotic hasn't handled the strep and he's still contagious? And Edward's anemia---EVERYONE IS FALLING APART." Etc.

I think in general it's understood that if someone tells you all about a situation and doesn't say they DON'T want input, it means they welcome your input on it. Or at least, that's what _I_ understand, both when I'm the teller and when I'm the hearer. But in case it would be better to say things outright: I welcome your input.

And/or, I welcome your telling me when you're expecting to die. Maybe we can share a nursing home before that happens, if our Death Decades aren't too far apart.

Stockings Plan

2011-12-15T09:28:00.009-05:00

We're doing the stockings a little differently this year. In previous years, I've kept an eye out all year long for clearanced little things (glow bracelets! kazoos! kaleidoscopes! cute pencils!). I have a box in the closet marked "Stockings," and anytime I found a good deal on a pack of party favors or on another small toy, I'd put it in the box. Then I'd fill in the gaps with things bought at regular price (Silly Putty, Slinkies) and candy.

The kids haven't all outgrown that stage, but neither can I split a 6-pack of something among them anymore. The older two, particularly, have seen pretty much every party favor there is. Every time I saw a clearance, I thought, "Yeah, but we already have some of those around from a previous year."

So here is my plan this year: Each child will get 1-2 books in the stocking, plus candy, plus granola bars and little bags of chips and other snack-type things. Done. I like this so much, I think I'll do it from now on. It was fun to choose the books (plus, a lot of them were buy-3-get-1-free), and easy to buy the snacky stuff.

Here are the books we got, if you are interested:

Rob - TCL/TK Pocket Reference (Paul assures me this will be a big-thrill item for one of Rob's current hobbies. I can't picture it.)

William - Diary of a Wimpy Kid, book 6

Elizabeth - Judy Moody & Stink: The Holly Jolliday, Katie the Kitten Fairy

Edward - Garfield's Jolly Holiday 3-pack, The Captain Underpants Extra-Crunchy Book o' Fun

Henry - Christmas Alphabet Pop-Up, Minerva Louise on Christmas Eve

Holiday-theme books will add to our collection of Christmas books and get packed away with the Christmas decorations. Other books will end up on the communal shelves. I tried when possible to get books that I knew more than one kid would want to read: my goal is to have a quiet but fun activity for them to do over the exciting days of/after Christmas, when sometimes the fun and excitement and treats get to be a bit much.

It bothers me a little that Rob and William only have one book each, while the littler kids each have two. But it feels more WORTH IT to buy books for the littler kids, because they are still in the "read a book many times, then swap with siblings, then swap back and read it many more times" stage, whereas Rob and William are in the "read it once, then return it to the library" stage. For the older kids, the book gift is more like "So you don't have to keep borrowing Paul's" and "So you don't have to wait your turn at the library," respectively. Also, four of the littler kids' six books will get packed away with the Christmas stuff, but the bigger kids' books won't. But still, I might buy another book each for Rob and William if I think of one and/or get motivated to look.

I am quite irritated with Paul, by the way. Last night I was folding laundry while he was doing the twins' storytime, and gradually the words he was reading pushed aside my meandering thoughts. "What...what are you reading?," I asked, and he held up THE JUDY MOODY AND STINK BOOK WE'D ORDERED. He'd gotten it from the library. He weakly tried the "I didn't know / You didn't tell me" defense, which I easily slapped down with an "I EMAILED YOU, SO THERE IS A RECORD OF YOU KNOWING, SO YOU CAN JUST DROP THAT RIGHT NOW."

Then, later, he said, "Oh good, I got an email from the library and the new Wimpy Kid book is ready for us to pick up!" I didn't even need to speak: I went straight for the sustained incredulous stare.

What do you put in stockings, in case I want to snitch some more ideas? (Or in case Paul comes home with a big back of chips and candy for the kids, along with the rest of the books on the list.)

Grousing/Simmering

2011-12-12T10:11:00.010-05:00

At Dunkin' Donuts, I like the #1 coffee combo: it's a coffee and two doughnuts. I like that it's what I would order anyway: a doughnut for Henry, a coffee and a doughnut for me. And it's exactly the right price: expensive enough to feel like a treat, inexpensive enough to be doable.

But HERE IS THE THING. The conversation I had with the clerk when I ordered it this morning is a variation of the conversation I have EVERY SINGLE TIME. I don't order the combo often enough to know whether it includes a medium or a large coffee, and it doesn't say on the picture that shows the combo.

Me: "I'd like the #1 combo, please."

Clerk: "Medium or large coffee?"

Me, anticipating this issue from previous experience: "Whichever comes with it."

Clerk, thwarting my anticipation: "Well, you can get it with either a medium or a large."

Me, thinking I may have misremembered the situation: "Oh! Is it the same price either way?"

Clerk: "No."

Me, waiting for her to clarify: "..."

Clerk, filing my waiting under "In Vain": "..."

Me, a little exasperated: "Okay, then, whichever one is included in the price up there."

Clerk: "Well, that price doesn't include the tax. Just so you know."

Me: "OH MY GOD GIVE ME MY SHEEP-FREAKING COFFEE."

Me, reality-version, in a tone beginning to sound a little tight: "Okay. Yes. Yes, I know."

And you might think, well, maybe Swistle just got an inexperienced clerk. Or perhaps the clerk is kindly giving Swistle all her options, so that Swistle may make the choice that best fits Swistle's lifestyle/preferences. But NO, I have an ALTERNATE THEORY.

Here is my theory: since the combo comes with the medium coffee, as I discovered afresh on this occasion, the question is meant to upgrade the customer without the customer realizing. It's INTENTIONAL: the customer is supposed to think she has a choice between a medium and a large coffee for the combo price, and think "Well, LARGE then, why not!" And then it rings up higher, but maybe she also bought a couple of other things so she doesn't even notice, or maybe math has never been her strong suit so the tax (JUST SO YOU KNOW) always throws her anyway and she chalks it up to that, or maybe she sees what happened but they're already mixing the coffee and she'll just know for next time, no big deal. We have to be on our guard EVEN IN A DOUGHNUT SHOP, and not just against the delicious, delicious doughnuts.

As long as I'm grousing, I went to the post office this morning. It's lucky I was fortified with coffee (MEDIUM) and a Boston Cream doughnut, because although I would not say the experience qualified as "a nightmare," it was a long and exasperating wait. And furthermore, the length/exasperation could be BLAMED on people. It wasn't just, "Well, it's busy this time of year, you just have to be patient," it was one woman COMING TO THE COUNTER WITH THREE BAGS OF WRAPPED PRESENTS AND HER ADDRESS BOOK, I AM NOT EVEN KIDDING YOU. I am NOT. EVEN. kidding you.

Another customer had a pile of little packages, and each one needed different things, but he hadn't thought it out in advance, so the clerk would say, "Do you want delivery confirmation on this one?" and he'd have to think it over, maybe discuss his options a bit, consult about the price at various levels. Sure, what the heck, insurance on this one. This one, no, just delivery confirmation. This one, both. He will need to see his packages again, so that he can fill out the trillion little forms.

Another customer was mailing several international items and hadn't filled out the COLOSSAL PAPERWORK.

(Some of this situation can also be blamed on the nice clerks at our post office, who err on the side of being a little TOO nice when they ought to be saying "If you want to step over here to fill those out, I'll just go ahead and help the next person, and then you can step right back up when you're ready.")

Now, SOMETIMES, and for SOME PEOPLE, this kind of exasperating crap is UNDERSTANDABLE and NECESSARY. Maybe an elderly lady needs to mail a present, but she's begun her long sad slide into dementia and she can't figure things out anymore, nor does she realize she can't figure it out, and I am willing to wait in line without sighing or rolling my eyes while the postal clerk kindly assists her, and in fact I am GLAD as a member of society to see her being kindly assisted, even though my arms are kind of breaking here. And not everyone KNOWS about customs forms, and the forms are CONFUSING, so the first time they try to mail something they probably hold up the line a bit, and that's not going to happen very often and so that's fine too. It is NOT fine when it's people who didn't bother to get their stuff ready ahead of time because "other people having to wait" is a meaningless/insignificant concept for them.

And I know, I KNOW ALREADY, that I can't tell for sure from the outside what sort of category each customer falls into (THOUGH I CAN MAKE A PRETTY GOOD GUESS), which is why I continue to wait patiently and sans-sighing NO MATTER WHAT. But I will tell you what: statistically speaking, there are not that many people who actually need that kind of help, so I know I'm likely to be statistically correct when I hold that pleasant smile on my face but simmer invisibly.

Assorted Holiday Talk

2011-12-10T07:47:00.011-05:00

Christmas Eve is two weeks from today! You're welcome for the adrenaline!

I put the lights on the Christmas tree yesterday, and I got them right the first time. That has never happened before.

Well, there was ONE glitch: I somehow accidentally purchased one string of twinkle lights. I went with it, figuring the kids would like them and it would be fun to try them. I like them when I'm just looking at the tree while walking past it, but when I'm sitting in the living room reading a book and enjoying the tree, it DRIVES ME CRAZY. I have to block the twinkle section with my book. They're like "TWINKLE! TWINKLE! TWINKLE! WE'RE TWINKLING! WE'RE CHRISTMAS LIGHTS AND WE'RE TWINKLING! HI! HI! TWINKLE! HI!!!" I still like them, but next year I'm putting them not-on-the-tree. Maybe on a railing, or around a window.

When @vandeblogger posted on Twitter about making one of the Christmas Bake Sale / Cake Walk cakes, I realized that the school never asked me to bake for the Holiday Fair this year. I'm relieved/offended/grateful/confused.

My plan to buy a Target gift card each time I went to Target worked BEAUTIFULLY. I barely even NOTICED, and didn't get paralyzed by adding up the total amount and thinking "WHY DO WE EVEN BOTHER WITH CHRISTMAS???"

One of my favorite Christmas things now is sending holiday postcards on Postcrossing. I especially love doing the stamps: it's my chance to buy the Hanukkah and Kwanzaa and holy angel stamps I like but don't want to confuse my relatives with, and international postcards need TWO first-class stamps (plus a 10-cent one) so I get to mix up some interesting combinations. But I feel dumb working on them while my Christmas cards sit completely untouched on the dining room table.

I do a lot of gift-idea posts at Milk and Cookies, in case you're getting frantic. Needless or perhaps needful to say, many of the posts that claim to be gifts for BOYS or for GIRLS are in fact for EITHER boys or girls; typically the boy/girl reference is only because the person I was buying for when I wrote the post was either a boy or a girl.

Gorgeous toy gift ideas (mostly baby/toddler)
An assortment of toys I've already played with (mostly preschool and young school-age)
Gift ideas for a 15-year-old girl
Gift ideas for 9-12-year-old boys
Gift ideas for 11-year-olds
Gift ideas for a 10-year-old
Gift ideas for a 10-year-old
Gift ideas for a 9-year-old girl
Gift ideas for a 9-year-old boy
Gift ideas for 6-year-olds
Gift ideas for a 5-year-old

An assortment of unusual gift ideas (teens and grown-ups)
Favorite craft gifts for kids
Knight and castle gifts
Dinosaur gifts
Non-toy gift ideas for children
Storybook treasury gifts

Gift ideas for an elderly person you don't know very well
Gift ideas for people you don't like
Gift ideas for people who don't want anything
Gift ideas for people having financial problems
Big looking, small costing gift ideas
Gift ideas for someone who doesn't have room for more STUFF
Gift ideas for pretty much absolutely anyone

Christmas Tree Acquired

2011-12-05T10:49:00.010-05:00

I finally bought a Christmas tree! I don't love it! It's not pre-lit!

Here's what happened: I went on, I am not kidding, TWELVE tree-shopping trips. I couldn't find anything I liked as much as each tree cost. Nearly the whole family wanted colored lights (Elizabeth wanted white, and I was undecided), but I couldn't find any colored-pre-light trees I liked as much as the white-pre-lit trees. It was as if the fake tree industry thought that people who wanted colored lights would also want shiny, plasticky-looking, unrealistically-green trees, whereas people who wanted white lights would want their tree to look like a real tree. Or else I'd find a tree I liked, but the lights were weird: red, yellow, purple, and white lights, for example.

Also, it was making me super nervous that the lights were only guaranteed for 2 years: a fake tree only saves money over a real tree if I can use it for more than 5 years, and there were display trees that already had whole sections of lights out. My parents' pre-lit tree has had no trouble with the lights and it's been years---but for every story like that, there's another "THIS HAS BEEN A NIGHTMARE. A CHRISTMAS-LIGHT-THEMED NIGHTMARE" review on some website. And contacting customer service to see about getting lights replaced under warranty is not as easy as buying a new string of lights. (Let's see how I feel about this while I'm putting up the lights.)

So, I bought a $60 non-pre-lit tree that was on sale for $50. It's this one, from Target, and I see online it's on clearance for $42 with free shipping over $50, so if you find $8 more of stuff that qualifies for free shipping, you'll get the same tree I got, plus $8 more free stuff, without having to lug anything in and out of the store/car. Bitch.

That picture they have up of the tree---how do the "artists" who designed that photo hug their children with a clear conscience?

(photo from Target.com)

Don't they go home and feel like their dogs are looking at them reproachfully? The tree I brought home is a perfectly nice tree, and in fact looks MORE like a real tree----but the tree in that photo is COMPLETELY DIFFERENT. There are NO branch gaps in that photo. It is perfectly filled in from stem to stern. Here is a picture of the actual tree:

And that's with Paul working for about an hour setting it up last night, making sure each branch was nicely splayed out to reduce gaps.

There is nothing wrong with branch gaps! I LIKE branch gaps! That is where the ORNAMENTS go! I wouldn't even WANT that tree in the first picture: each ornament would have to rest diagonally along the exterior surface of the cone, because there is no place for hanging DOWN as nature intended. But I still object on principle to them acting as if that's a photo of the tree I bought, because it obviously is not. The tree they photographed is ANOTHER TREE ENTIRELY. The branches CANNOT PHYSICALLY BE ARRANGED like the tree in their photo. Even if they took all the branches from the back of the tree and tied them to the front of the tree, they could not achieve that "photo" of the "tree."

Anyway. Here is what makes me happy with this purchase:

1. It cost the same as the cut tree we bought last year, which we were unhappy with for a variety of reasons. So if next year I find a fake tree I like better, we will financially be no further behind than if we'd bought a cut tree again this year.

2. There are always people on Freecycle.org looking for Christmas trees, so I don't even have to fret about issues of waste: if we don't want this tree next year, we can feel happy about donating it to someone else who wants it.

3. I was really, really, really sick of looking for a Christmas tree.

Gift-Buying / Twin Name Input Needed: Moisturizers for Aging Skin / Unexpectedly Early Twin Boys

2011-12-04T18:47:00.007-05:00

How's that for a complicated post title?

Your input on measuring cups and colored pencils and manga-drawing books was SO HELPFUL! I bought Paul the Williams-Sonoma measuring cups and spoons set (if it's a success, I'll buy him the odd-size cups/spoons set next year), and also an adjustable measuring cup for measuring stuff like peanut butter. For Rob I bought the Prismacolor colored pencil set especially for Manga and the book Draw Your Own Manga: All the Basics. (CRAP, he looked over my shoulder while I was linking to that and said "Oh, yay!" Sigh.) Everything cost more than I'd planned to spend---but that's what I like about input: it gives me the confidence to spend more to get The Right Thing.

I have thought of another thing I need advice on. On my mom's wish list is "moisturizer for aging skin." She says that moisturizers that used to be too moisturizing in her 30s/40s now soak in like drops of water into a sponge, so what I'm looking for here is either:

• what YOU love, if you are in your 60s or so

• and/or what your MOM or GRANDMA loves, if your mom/grandma is 60s+

• but NOT what you love if you are in your 20s or 30s or 40s (MAYYYYYbe if you're in your 50s), because that is what I want to know for ME, but not for NOW

This is a category where you should not be shy about mentioning things that are very expensive. Yes, it's true I am a fan of inexpensive stuff; and yes, I spend $9 on Oil of Olay only because my $7 Dove was discontinued. But for a gift, and for when I am myself older, I am planning to SPEND, baby. So tell me what's BEST, not what's CHEAPEST. Even if it's out of range, I'll file the info away for when I suddenly inherit money from an elderly great-uncle I never knew I had.

And while you are in the mood to offer help and advice, may I direct you to tonight's post on the baby name blog, which is for twins due in February but born yesterday, and in need of names unexpectedly soon?

The Gift of Fear, by Gavin de Becker

2011-12-03T18:51:00.016-05:00

When I wrote about fear and violence, people thought I might like to read more books about fear and violence. I didn't want to read MORE about fear: I'm scared enough ALREADY, and I was still recovering from the flu-like symptoms of the Sam Harris article I'd read. But I am susceptible to such pressures, and so eventually I put both The Culture of Fear and The Gift of Fear on my library list.

I tried The Culture of Fear first, but after two page-sides I didn't read any more. It was all questions, and I could answer all of them. Why oh why are we more afraid of airplane crashes than car crashes, when car crashes are more likely? Why oh why are we so bad at estimating the statistical likelihood of bad things happening to us? Yes, yes, I took Psych 101 too.

I put it into the library return bag and turned to the next book with a feeling of impending relief: I could perhaps dismiss this one just as briskly, and then I could turn my attention to more pleasing subjects. Yes indeed, the book opened with a Very Scary Story. I'm not reading this stuff, I don't need more scaredness, I can safely ditch it.

...But I skipped ahead, to AFTER the scary story, and within half a page I was reading it with no intention of stopping. And I just finished reading the whole thing, and here is my conclusion: it SEEMS like the book will be scary and will make you more scared, and that it will make you think about things you don't want to think about--but I ended up feeling a REDUCTION of fear (which is his goal/intention), as well as a dose of logic to counter future fears. There are occasional scary illustrative anecdotes, but you can skim/skip them if you want.

His main points:

1. It is very unlikely that anyone would want/try to hurt you.

2. If they DO want to, there are signals they're likely to send you first.

3. Here are the signals.

I found that within the first chapter I felt FORTIFIED against guys who seemed like they were just trying to be nice and yet gave me the creeps. The author says that a decent man will not approach a woman in a scary situation (deserted stairwell, dark parking lot), or try to convince her to accept help or whatever after her first "No"---and that if he IS a decent man but just beyond-clueless, he needs to be taught by your reaction that his behavior is scary. Before reading this book, I would have been the woman getting more and more anxious as I tried to be gracious and not look like a weird freak-out. Reading it was like that scene in The Matrix where people get teaching programs uploaded to their brains: I am SCHOOLED.

For those of us who are often fretful and anxious, he lets us know that we are indulging ourselves in magical thinking: we've unconsciously noticed that the things we worry about don't happen, statistically speaking, and so we unconsciously start to see a false correlation: if we worry about bad things, bad things don't happen! Meanwhile, such thoughts make us more vulnerable to the few things that actually could hurt us, since we're in the habit of thinking we're being silly by worrying. Already I've noticed a difference in my anxious thoughts: when one occurs to me, I try to evaluate it for legitimacy---and the thought "This is magical thinking" is embarrassing enough to help knock the thought out for a bit. I'm not sure if even over the long-term I'll be able to learn to effectively evaluate legitimacy, but it seems worth practicing.

Unlike in The Sociopath Next Door, the author doesn't point out a problem but leave it pointed-out-but-unsolved: he gives specific tests for determining the actual danger-likelihood of situations, and then specific instructions for how to handle them. (He claims not to like checklists, but BOY he likes acronyms.) I found that while/after reading it I would think "ALARMED THOUGHT AS I RECOGNIZE A DANGER SIGN!!!" followed by "Wait. Does this person meet any of the qualifications for actual danger? No."

My favorite new term is "Scriptwriter." It applies to people where you feel like it doesn't matter what YOU say, they go right on with the script in their head. I've noticed this in issue-based arguments: I can argue with what someone has just stated, but it bounces right off them and they go right on with their next point. Or someone is upset with me and I think "I just need to explain/clarify what I meant and then this will all be over," but instead everything I say adds fuel to their fire and they don't seem to be hearing me at all. It's a Scriptwriter: the person IS NOT hearing what you're saying, and it's safe to disengage from the discussion knowing nothing can be accomplished.

Now I'm going to say a whole bunch of complaining/critical things, so many that it will make it sound as if I didn't like / don't recommend the book. So keep in mind that I DID love the book and DO think you all should read it, and that sometimes it takes a disproportionate amount of space to mention small complaints/criticisms.

I did feel as if what he was trying to teach other people was something that came naturally to him---and that as with all things that come naturally to us, it's hard to teach someone else. "Here's how to draw perfect life-like portraits!" It reminded me of people who say they think people should "just be" less anxious: it first reveals to us that they don't suffer from that problem themselves, and secondly that the problem they DO suffer from is a lack of empathy and a lack of understanding about temperament. He thinks we should just learn which situations are genuinely dangerous---but I don't think he realizes that a good part of that may be something not everyone can acquire. He gets a little frustrated, I think, that we're not getting it. "Just draw it so it looks exactly her nose!!"

I also thought he was lacking some science/statistics for his anecdotes. He tells us the times when he thought danger was likely and it DID happen, and times when he thought danger was unlikely and it DIDN'T happen---but he leaves out times when he thought danger was likely and it DIDN'T happen, and times when he thought danger was unlikely and it DID happen. He might think this makes him more credible (because it seems to portray a 100% success rate), but it made me question his credibility completely (because I know he CAN'T have a 100% success rate, so it makes me wonder how much he's leaving out).

And his stories about other people's encounters seemed to contain a self-proving "duh" element: If they felt a pang of fear and checked things out and found them okay but they weren't okay, DUH they didn't look hard enough. If they felt a pang of fear and thought it was real but it wasn't, DUH they were letting their imaginations run away with them. Whatever the outcome, the implication was that if it went well it was because they were following the author's ideas, and if it went poorly it was because they weren't.

In particular there was a story about a mother waiting with her son pre-surgery who kept having "CANCEL THE SURGERY" flash into her mind. She ignored that, and of course her son died in surgery. But...when Elizabeth was going to have her tonsils out, I REPEATEDLY had that same thought flash into my mind, and I didn't cancel the surgery, and Elizabeth is fine. Again, the self-proving: if her son had been fine, this anecdote wouldn't be in the book, or would be in the book as an example of us misinterpreting anxiety as actual danger; because he died, it seems as if it proves the author's point about listening to signals. But what percentage of the time are those signals right? A very small percentage, is my guess. And not always something we can evaluate for legitimacy: in this anecdote the doctor was incompetent, but how can I evaluate that as I wait with Elizabeth in pre-surgery? I can still kind of get his point, but it's undermined by the absolutely zero chance that I would in this case cancel the surgery and interview the doctors (at which point they would confess to me that they were covering for another doctor's problems), and by the high likelihood that both I and my child would be feeling/acting weird and uncomfortable in a pre-surgery situation whether the doctor was incompetent or not.

Furthermore, his lead story niggled at my mind. He tells about a woman who had been raped, who realized when her attacker closed her window that he intended to kill her (because why would he mess with her window if he was actually going to leave her unharmed as he had just claimed?). But my question is: Wouldn't he have closed her window before raping her? (Maybe he thought people would ignore rape sounds but not killing-with-a-knife sounds?) This bothered me throughout, and I felt similar issues with other anecdotes. They seemed overly obvious---which undermined their realness. I think the author hasn't realized what my children haven't realized: that presenting a 100%-in-favor-of-yourself/obvious story is actually LESS believable than a mixed story where you admit some error/doubt. His stories may in fact be true just as he's telling them, but I had to constantly battle thoughts of "Wait, that doesn't sound quite...true."

His attitude about violent children and children who grow up to be violent is like this: "I'm NOT saying parents are to blame for violent children...but all violent children have violent parents, and if you don't want violent children you shouldn't be violent to them DUH." And the problem is that the parents who were/are violent will not be reading this and thinking "Oh my goodness! I never realized! It's all my fault!"; and meanwhile the parents who are NOT violent to their children-who-nevertheless-turned-out-violent will take it to heart and feel even more blamed than they already feel, as well as perhaps wishing they WERE violent so they could deal out a beating or two to this guy. It reminds me of the school notices that come home sharply rebuking all of us for the actions of 1% of parents: the 1% doesn't care and isn't going to change their behavior because a memo tells them to, and the 99% gets hurt and upset and resentful at spanked even though they're being good.

He also does that thing that made me reject the first book: offering an incredulous "Why oh why??" that I feel has a reasonable answer. For example, he wonders why oh why a man would carry a gun and say it was so he could help others in an emergency, but not carry a trach tube. And when the man says he could never cut into someone's throat, de Becker mocks him for being perfectly willing to put a bullet into someone instead. But I think that IS reasonable: there is a huge difference between being willing to injure someone who's attacking us, and being willing to injure someone in a medical crisis. I would feel comfortable using a knife to cut a rapist, but that doesn't mean I feel comfortable performing an appendectomy or even a mole removal. These are completely different things, and it's not fair to accuse someone of being irrational if they're willing to do one and not the other. I get his point that we should try to rationally consider things---but it was hard to get past the way he made it seem like he was someone who seriously couldn't tell the difference between two very different kinds of intervention to two very different kinds of people. A better example would have been to tease someone for carrying a gun but not learning the Heimlich Maneuver.

One final objection: he interviews a stalker and asks him what the stalked person should have done differently, in order to avoid being stalked. But all the other anecdotes illustrated that it doesn't matter what the stalked person does: whatever they do, the stalker incorporates it into their excuse for stalking: "She was cold to me! She's a monster who must be destroyed!" "She seemed to be encouraging me! She's a tease who must be destroyed!" "She's perfectly nice! She's an impostor who must be destroyed!" It's Scriptwriting again: it doesn't matter what the stalked person does, the stalker goes on with their script.

Let's see, is that everything? Overall: GREAT book, and I want to go work for this guy, and I kind of love him, and I think he made very good points, and I feel like he taught me some very doable and easy methods for evaluating for actual danger. I think I'll be temporarily extra-jumpy, and only time will tell if the ideas WORK---but already I feel LESS fear rather than MORE fear. I think I'd like to own a copy of the book so that I can refer to it as needed. But I mention all my objections because I hate to think of you reading the book and thinking "She didn't object to this kind of arrogant attitude?" "Wait, does she think the parents are to blame??" "Did she not notice how he seems to think it's reasonable that a child who was one time shoved into a heater (perhaps by accident; it isn't clear) would grow up to shoot his parents in the head?"

Gifted vs. Ahead

2011-12-01T07:40:00.006-05:00

I was folding laundry and mulling someone who recently mentioned his gifted childhood, when actually he didn't seem real bright to me. Kind of dim, in fact. And this is something that has happened fairly regularly over the years: someone works into the conversation that they were in a gifted program in school, and I think, "...Huh."

I have come up with a theory, and it is this: that there is Gifted and that there is Ahead, and that schools and tests have trouble telling them apart (and/or that maybe it's not possible to tell them apart early on). Which leads to many, many people being categorized as Gifted (not only in academics but in music and dance and sports and so forth), and then later suffering the unpleasant feeling of things not having panned out.

(I think there are other issues involved, too, such as Potential vs. Application, and Aptitude vs. Motivation, and Abilities vs. Interests, but here I'm only talking about the Gifted vs. Ahead thing.)

When I worked in the infant room of a daycare, we sometimes had a baby who would walk at, say, 9 months. This would make the other babies' parents feel a little funny: their babies were not measuring up; their babies were not getting a fuss made over how advanced they were.

But was the early-walking baby GIFTED? No, just temporarily ahead of the other babies. That baby was not going to maintain that gap between her physical abilities and the physical abilities of the other babies; it's just that she got there first, and then all the other babies caught up. Perhaps there will be a few star athletes among the early walkers and then we will say "Ah! The ability was evident even early on!" But the majority of the early walkers will later be only regular walkers, indistinguishable from the average and late walkers, and there will also be star athletes from the late walkers and we just won't remark on it because it won't seem significant then.

I think it can be the same with academics: sometimes the school system calls a child "gifted" when that child is just ahead of the other children at that point. A child who is reading at a 12th-grade level at age six is not likely to maintain that 11-year gap all her life: it's more likely she is AHEAD, and soon the others will catch up. It IS likely she (like all the others at her reading level) will still be a better/faster reader than many of her adult peers, but it will not be as startling a gap, nor will it be likely to have as big an impact on her adult life as it did on her elementary school life.

The problem, I think, is that a child who is told she's eleven grades ahead at age 6 gets the feeling that she is eleven grades ahead FOR LIFE. But soon there isn't "eleven grades ahead" to BE: we don't say that a 24-year-old is reading at a 35-year-old level. And this leads the adult version of the gifted child to feel a certain dissatisfaction with life: wasn't she...GIFTED? So why has the gap for the most part vanished? Where did the all the fuss and all the discussions of potential disappear to? It's because all she was was temporarily ahead.

Or it's because there was a misunderstanding about what gifted means. A child growing up with bright parents might think that gifted means EVEN BRIGHTER, or in a class of their own---when actually it means being part of a large group that is brighter than the average of the general population, an average they may have assumed is higher than it is. It's still good news, but what it means is that they get to have the kind of college-educated job they were already assuming they'd get, rather than a job that requires few mental skills. What they might have been thinking of as an ordinary and non-gifted life IS the gifted life: being able to communicate in both spoken and written word; valuing knowledge and education; being able to think things through; being able to read well and enjoy reading; being able to analyze and critique; being able to take a stab at helping the children with their homework (although I am grateful for Wikipedia, because I am more than a little fuzzy on 7th grade history) (and rules of grammar) (and what IS that lattice-math thing they're doing??).

Gift-Buying Input Exchange

2011-11-29T21:42:00.005-05:00

I have a couple of things I want to buy as gifts for other people, but it's things I have no expertise in. I keep going to the store, looking despondently at the choices, and thinking, "I don't even KNOW what to choose! If only I knew someone who was an expert at this!"

...Or as Paul often says: "If only we had access to some sort of global information network."

Here's what I was thinking: I will tell you the things I'm looking for (I'm sure there are lots, but I can only think of two of them off the top of my head), and if you know something about those things, perhaps you can advise me. If you instead have your OWN things you want to buy as gifts for other people but don't know which one to choose, you can leave that in the comments section, and then another commenter might be able to advise YOU!

I don't know if this will work, now that I think about it a little more. But I suggest we go with the spontaneity and then if it doesn't work, it doesn't work, and that would be fine too.

SO. I will go first. Here are the two things I want to buy as gifts, but I don't know what would be good.

1. Paul wants measuring cups, and his only requirement is that they "not suck." He's sick of the pretty ones I buy, which he claims are sucky because the handles keep breaking off. Well, whatever, if he's going to be PICKY about it. I'd like to get him some strong, unbreakable, MANLY measuring cups, but I don't know which those would be. The metal ones? A particular brand of plastic? So that's what I want from you, if you know something about it: Which strong, not-suck measuring cups should I buy Paul?

2. Rob wants a book that will teach him how to draw manga/anime, and he wants sketching pencils and colored pencils. I want to find him a book that emphasizes how to draw the non-porny manga/anime, and I want pencils that are more artist-quality than Crayola, but not the kind that cost $30 for six of them: we are at this stage of the game talking about a 12-year-old boy drawing cartoons in his math notebook.

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Leave your suggestions in the comments, or leave a comment about your own shopping decisions and maybe someone else here will know ALL ABOUT that kind of item and can point you to just the right thing! And maybe THEY will in turn be looking for input on something YOU know all about! Oh, this could be so exciting!

ON A TEAR

2011-11-28T11:54:00.004-05:00

I am on a tear today. A TEAR. I just went antiquing with my mom, and I don't think my mouth stopped running the ENTIRE TIME. And furthermore, look at the cheery topics I introduced during our pleasant relaxing outing:

1. One child is being a persistent jerk, and he's not stopping even when I Use My Words with him.

2. One child is a being a basketcase each morning before school, and it's now reaching into the evening when she starts dreading the next morning.

3. One child told us 10 minutes before his bedtime last night that he was supposed to have worked on a project over Thanksgiving break, and this is with us working to help him cope with his flakiness but apparently it's not WORKING. And then after I let/made him stay up until 10:00 to work on it, he LEFT IT ON THE COUNTER.

4. One child has anemia and it will probably be fine, but now that I'm WORRYING about it he looks all peaky to me, and also I feel like when I said to the doctor "we changed his diet, and as you can see there was no impact, so let's look for something else," he said "well, it's probably his diet, so let's work on that." I'm anxious to get to the next blood test, which isn't until January.

5. I'm reading The Gift of Fear, and I'm ALREADY SO GLAD I'm reading it and it has already given me some ideas that make me feel more ready to deal with situations---but it is a HIGHLY STIMULATING book and I had to tell my mom AT LENGTH about a scary/upsetting illustrating anecdote, and I kept CHOKING UP as I was telling it. Plus, I was VIGOROUS in my explanation of how the book was SO REMARKABLE, and that kind of thing is always tiring to listen to.

Plus-plus, as I was talking I was drinking a large coffee, and I was so distracted I drank it all, when my intention had been to drink half and save the other half for this afternoon. So imagine my voice increasing in both speed and volume as the blood-caffeine level increased.

Neither of us bought any antiques. I think we might have somehow gradually come to feel as if there was NO POINT IN ANYTHING BEAUTIFUL OR FUN.

Sleepover Fret

2011-11-27T04:19:00.015-05:00

William's best friend is Clarissa. William and Clarissa are in the fifth grade---so, they are in the 10-11 age range. This past weekend they asked if they could have a sleepover. Hm. How about NO.

Or...maybe we should say yes. What can we give them as a reason for saying no, considering that if William's best friend were a boy we wouldn't have had the same reaction? What IS the reason for the different reaction? I'm remembering how indignant and outraged and self-righteous and "Who is it exactly we think is going to barge into our house and see me in my room with a boy and jump to the conclusion of EVIL, and what do we care about what other people think if they're DIRTY-MINDED AND WRONG?"-ish I felt about my parents' "avoid the appearance of evil" reason when I was in that age range and wasn't allowed to have boys in my room, so I'd like to think of another way to explain it so that I don't have to have that conversation with someone like I was.

Or considering we don't even know yet if either kid is attracted to the opposite sex anyway, perhaps we have to re-think the whole part about separating boys and girls. Plus, I had many guy friends in high school who, even though I was attracted to boys, I wasn't attracted to AT ALL. Not even a little. Would have been repulsed at the thought of being attracted to them.

It's also worth taking into account that even if William's best friend were a boy I'd be looking for an excuse to say no, because hosting a sleepover sounds...unpleasant. But it's good we're thinking about this, because we are FLYING into the age range where this WHOLE TOPIC needs to be considered---not just for sleepovers but for all situations when the kids' friends are over here. I wasn't allowed to have boys in my room, but I was allowed to have girls in my room; I don't know what rules to have for my own kids. A difference to consider: I had my own room, and so does Elizabeth, but the boys share rooms.

What if we said yes, but they could have the sleepover in the living room? And then maybe when they were ready to go to sleep, Clarissa could go to Elizabeth's room? But again, if Clarissa were a boy, we might have them in the living room (because William shares a room with Henry, and because sleepovers require a parent to keep going in and asking for the noise to be kept down and suggesting it's time to go to sleep) but we wouldn't split them up at sleeping time---but if we knew William was gay, we would. Maybe we should set a rule now that for ALL sleepovers the kids get split up at sleeping time, to make it an easier standard to apply. That kind of kills the concept of a sleepover, though, and we don't have a spare bedroom, and I'm pretty sure people can walk from one room to another when everyone else is asleep, if that's what they have in mind.

Maybe we shouldn't allow sleepovers; our lives were easier before we started thinking about this. But sleepovers are a cool kid-stage-of-life experience, and maybe we don't actually want to say no to that. Plus, our kids might get invited to other people's sleepovers, where we have significantly less say in how things go...and also there are Bad Stories about sleepovers and the adults and/or older children in other households. Hey, look, I found something else to worry about!

Probably Clarissa's mom would say no to the sleepover idea anyway---or maybe she'd think we were puritanical and weird for thinking we should say no. Maybe she'd think we were Implying Things about her daughter, and/or about her daughter's relationship with our son. Maybe she'll say yes, and then William will be invited to their house for a sleepover, and we'll have to either say yes or think of a reason that doesn't sound like we're assuming Bad Things Happen if boys and girls don't stay a pew's width apart and keep both feet on the floor.

I'm trying to remember how _I_ felt about boys in the fifth grade. I'd definitely had crushes, but they weren't yet obsessing my mind. Sixth grade was when that got started, but still not in full swing. Seventh grade was when boys became a more serious consideration. So in fifth grade I could have had a sleepover with a boy (but it's hard to imagine it because I would have found that idea appalling: in my PAJAMAS near a BOY??). But I went to a small private middle school: there were only three boys in my class in fifth grade and two of them were fourth graders i.e. BABIES. Things might have been different if there had been a larger selection. And I'm remembering my friend who lost her virginity at age 12 after a long string of related leading-up-to-it experiences, and the sister of a friend who did the same. These things do happen.

It boils down to this: We don't know if there should be different rules for boy-girl friendships or how to enforce them, but it's the time to think rapidly and get some policies in place before we're arguing with teenagers. It's an interesting topic for me to think about, but also stressful.

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Review blog stuff: Home Depot (about small ways to do good environmental stuff), and Hellmann's (with a turkey-dinner-leftovers recipe and a sweepstakes to win a $100 Cooking.com gift card).

Milk and Cookies: Toy gift ideas I've already played with (alternate title: "My mom and aunt went toy shopping and I used all their successful ideas as my own").

Swistle's Punch Recipe

2011-11-22T14:33:00.007-05:00

I was looking for another recipe in my recipe box, and I came upon my punch recipe. I say "my" possessively, but also with the understanding that most punch recipes are pretty similar and made of the same stuff, so probably there are half a million other punch recipes exactly like this one. And if so, don't tell me, because I like thinking of this one as mine, and I DID invent it, through MUCH trial-and-error, even if I wasn't the firsty-first to do so.

It is particularly good with Thanksgiving foods. It's fizzy-but-not-too-fizzy, it's a little tart and not too sweet, and it goes very nicely with savory and salt. I made it once for a large family-reunion Thanksgiving, and my aunt said, "Hey, this is really good! I have to admit, I was not sure about it when I saw what you were putting into it, but it's GOOD!"

(I'd spiked her cup, so no wonder.)

(No, I didn't.)

(Or did I?)

(No.)

Swistle's Punch Recipe

2 parts cranberry juice cocktail, light or regular
1 part orange juice
1 part grapefruit juice
2 parts clear diet soda

So, that means that if you start with a 2-quart bottle of cranberry juice, you'll also need 1 quart (4 cups) of orange juice, 1 quart (4 cups) of grapefruit juice, and a 2-liter of diet 7-up or diet Sprite or something.

If you are a family of four and don't think you're going to drink a quart and a half of punch each, you can start with 2 cups of cranberry juice and add 1 cup of orange juice, 1 cup of grapefruit juice, and 2 cups of clear soda. Or you can make it for just your own self: use a quarter-cup measure twice with cranberry juice, once with orange juice, once with grapefruit juice, and twice with soda. The 2-1-1-2 is the part to remember, and change the measuring device depending on how many people are going to drink it.

If you aren't sure how many people are going to drink punch, I suggest mixing juices together in the right proportions and then adding the soda to small batches (say, a pitcher's worth) as you go along: if it's all mixed together, it's no good once the soda goes flat (though you can somewhat perk it up by adding more soda); but if you have them separate, you can keep the juices for a long time (save the empty juice bottles to store it in) and mix it with soda later as needed (2 measures of juice to 1 measure of soda).

You can also make fun ice cubes, if you make sure you have extra juice. Put a mandarin orange segment and/or cranberry and/or maraschino cherry in each little ice cube slot, and then fill up the rest of each slot with one of the juices. I do some cubes of each juice, because that's pretty. Those can be for each person's individual glass: one grapefruit cube, one orange cube, and one cranberry cube---so pretty. You can also make larger versions for the pitcher with a cupcake tin, or if you have a punch bowl you can make a huge juice-ring with a bundt pan or 1-quartish bowl (you can LAYER the juices for PRETTINESS!).

Unique Ingredients; FOUR LIKE ME; Drooling Cats

2011-11-19T06:31:00.005-05:00

The instructions for the frozen pizza I made last night included: "Due to the unique ingredients, toppings may have shifted." The unique ingredients: pepperoni, cheese, sauce, crust. Well! I can see how those UNIQUE INGREDIENTS result in SPECIAL CIRCUMSTANCES! Normal pizza toppings don't have to take physics into account! OUR pizza toppings DO!

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Henry and I went to the library yesterday. A little girl came into the children's room and said to me, "Hi, I'm Paige, I'm four!" I said, "Really? So's he!" She said to him, "You're FOUR, like ME!!??"---totally astonished. And Henry said accusingly, "If you're FOUR, how come I didn't see you at PRESCHOOL today?" It was very cute, and they had a great time playing together (they had a tea party!), and I had a great time reading the paper instead of having to drink pretend lemonade.

Then she said to me, "I have head lice!"

Inner Swistle: "NOOOOOOOooooooooooooo!!!!!! AIEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE!!! *brushing off everyone's head!!* *grabbing Henry's hand and running away!!* *dousing our heads in rubbing alcohol!!*

Outer Swistle: "Really? Does it itch?"

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I was complaining to Paul that ONCE AGAIN I have managed to acquire cats who DROOL when petted/happy, and HOW do I manage to keep doing that? If I'd wanted DOGS, I would have CHOSEN dogs. And Paul said our cats DIDN'T drool. That they drool ON ME, but do not otherwise drool. Is this...something that could be possible? Could the cats be drooling ONLY ON ME? (Note: Benchley also drools on Rob. But could there be something about a particular person that inspires a cat to drool?)

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Assorted links:

It's a little odd to link to a guest post, but I'm going to anyway: Things I've Learned From Reading Women's Blogs.

Did you know that Temerity Jane is having a get-together at her house? I am partway through my usual "fret and agitate about maybe going---and then, if past experience is to be relied on, NOT go" right now.

Paul told me about Written Kitten, and at first I misunderstood and thought you'd get a REAL kitten for every 100 words you wrote---which seemed like a difficult and not entirely practical idea. But it's better than I thought: you get a PICTURE of a kitten with every 100 words you write. It seems perfect for doing NaNoWriMo, though I thought my friend Firegirl might prefer a puppy version.

On Milk and Cookies, one of the many gift-idea posts I'll be writing at this time of year: Gifts for 11-year-olds. (There's also a girlier list for a similar age range: Gift ideas for a 10-year-old girl.)

Review blog: new post about small ways to save energy.

See's Chocolate Report: It Just Keeps Going! (But Now It's Done)

2011-11-18T12:32:00.001-05:00

Previous posts in this series:
See's Chocolate Adventure: A First-Round Report
See's Chocolate Report Continued: The Weird Intriguing Ones
See's Chocolate Report Concluded: The More Ordinary Flavors
See's Chocolate Report: REVISITED!
See's Chocolate Report: Continuing the Revisitation!

P-Nut Crunch was a very happy surprise. It's KIND OF like chocolate-covered peanut brittle, but the brittle isn't very brittle: it's somewhere between a brittle and a cookie. Like a Butterfinger (with the nice saltiness of a a Butterfinger, too), but looser, and with less sticking to the teeth. I really liked it, and would order one next time. Maybe two. Maybe three. (SEND ME A WHOLE BOX PLEASE AND THANK YOU.)

P-Nut Crunch
(photo from Sees.com)

Dark Buttercream is one of the ones that showed me that even though I can have a stack of dark chocolate bars in the house and not even be tempted, sometimes I DO prefer dark to milk. Usually when combined with something very sweet, such as vanilla buttercream filling. Top tier for me.

Dark Buttercream
(photo from Sees.com)

Because of my success with dark chocolate + sweet fillings, I thought I'd try the Dark California Brittle. I really like the California Brittle, which is coated in milk chocolate. It turns out I vastly, vastly prefer it to the Dark California Brittle. There is something magic for me about the combination of the toffee flavor with MILK chocolate. Dark chocolate gives me a startled/clash feeling with toffee. I wouldn't order these again, I'd just increase my percentage of the regular California Brittle (I got more of them in this box so I made sure I was comparing only the coating, and that also served to remind me how much I love them).

Dark California Brittle
(photo from Sees.com)

After my unexpectedly positive response to the Apple Pie Truffle, I thought the Pumpkin Pie Truffle might be a hit. But I didn't even finish it. I ate half and then thought "Why am I continuing to take little bite after little bite of something I don't like?" I gave it a fair shot, but I didn't like the pumpkin-pie-spice flavor combined with chocolate, and the filling seemed like Too Much: too spicy, too rich, too dense.

Pumpkin Pie Truffle
(photo from Sees.com)

The Apricot Delight, though, was another unexpectedly positive experience. It has apricots, which I think of as not having much flavor but these were really tart and yummy, and coconut, and white chocolate, and a sweet filling. The white chocolate wasn't a strong flavor (mostly to hold things together), but everything else pitched in with good enthusiasm. I wouldn't want a bunch of them, but I'd want ONE.

Apricot Delight
(photo from Sees.com)

The California Crunch has the same hybrid of peanut butter cookie and Butterfinger bar as in the P-Nut Crunch, but then coated in white chocolate (not much contribution to the taste) and crushed walnuts. It was yummy, and kind of messy, and I think I'd rather have the P-Nut Crunch because that peanut-buttery stuff was so good with the milk chocolate.

California Crunch
(photo from Sees.com)

One last note: in my last order, I was surprised and pleased by both the Blueberry Truffle and the Pineapple Truffle. This time, I was sort of ho-hum about both. Neither seemed as tart and flavorful as I'd remembered. This could be that conditions changed: last time, I expected both to be losers so I was pleasantly surprised, but this time I expected both to be yummy so I was less wowed. Or it could be that batches vary a little. Or perhaps I'm getting a cold. I still liked the Pineapple Truffle enough that I think I'd order one piece in my next custom order, but I don't think I'd order the Blueberry Truffle again.

Stunt Sandwich

2011-11-16T06:41:00.006-05:00

I'm feeling embarrassed and upset over something MINOR that was nevertheless embarrassing and upsetting.

Edward's lunch has been a problem since the first day of school. His lunchbox comes back with one bite taken out of his sandwich, and he says it just doesn't TASTE right. About a month ago I came up with what I thought was a clever plan: a bunch of little nutritious snacks instead of A Sandwich. It worked well: his lunchbox started coming home with evidence of him having eaten something in the 7.5 hours he'd been away.

But yesterday at lunchtime, the school secretary called, saying Edward's teacher had asked her to call to find out "what they should do for Edward's lunch," because "all he had was peanuts, pretzels, and raisins."

I get how when you say it like that it kind of sounds like...snack mix, or something, or somehow "not a real lunch." Especially if you put the words "all he had was" in front of it. But keeping in mind that a peanut butter and jam sandwich would have been a no-explanation-or-phone-call-needed lunch, I think peanuts are a nutritional step up from peanut butter, and I think raisins are a nutritional step up from jam, and I think pretzels are sitting on the step right next to bread.

Luckily, luckily, LUCKILY, I did not do my usual thing where I don't feel like I can defend myself because I'm so worried it will sound like I'm lying. And in fact I just said pretty much exactly what I would have later come up with while lying awake in bed: that Edward had been coming home with only one bite of his sandwich eaten, so I was experimenting to find foods he WOULD eat at school; that I'd thought he could have peanuts for protein and fat, raisins for fruit, and pretzels for carbohydrates. And the secretary sounded perfectly fine with that and said she'd let the teacher know.

So it went PERFECTLY, didn't it? It really did go perfectly. But I'm still fretful because they looked at his lunch and felt it warranted a call to a parent. It doesn't seem like I should have needed to explain that lunch.

The fact that two people DID think so makes me feel upset: they thought I'd made a mistake when I don't think it even LOOKED LIKE I'd made a mistake. I don't like that kind of being at-odds with someone else: I like it when the actions I think are right also LOOK clearly right to other people, without being so uninterpretable that I'd need to explain why it was right.

So even though this actual incident is minor, and went surprisingly well and ended fine, I still sent a sandwich with Edward today. He won't eat it, so I also sent peanuts, raisins, and mini-wheats. But then I'm here feeling unsettled because I sent a STUNT SANDWICH to reassure school teachers/secretaries, and because I still feel unhappy that I had to explain that other lunch.

See's Chocolate Report: Continuing the Revisitation!

2011-11-15T13:37:00.010-05:00

Previous posts in this series:
See's Chocolate Adventure: A First-Round Report
See's Chocolate Report Continued: The Weird Intriguing Ones
See's Chocolate Report Concluded: The More Ordinary Flavors
See's Chocolate Report: REVISITED!

By the way, I suggest taking a screen shot (or writing it down, pfff, whatever) of your custom-mix order before you place it: the boxes arrive labeled, but with a small handwritten label that only mentions a couple of varieties in the box, not all of them. Oh...I wonder if it was printed on the packing slip as well? I forgot to notice.

But if you forget to write it down (or if you remember but still can't tell some of the pieces apart), the custom-mix ordering form doubles as a chocolate-identification cheat sheet. I appreciate the way they make them all look different, so I don't have to bite into what I think is a vanilla cream only to find a chocolate cream. Because that is true suffering.

Also, if you're ordering more than one pound of custom-mix, customize each pound separately. You can choose up to ten different kinds of candies per custom box---but if you select "3 pounds," it considers that "a 3-pound custom box" and you can choose ten different candies total for it. Whereas if you say "1 pound" and you do it three times, you can choose ten different candies for each pound---or up to thirty different kinds of candies total. Is this clear? No? Here's the "Don't try to figure it out, just obey me" version: add each custom pound to your cart separately if you want to try more than ten kinds.

One more note: the smallest amount you can choose for a variety is 5%. There are ABOUT 20-24 pieces per pound-box, but of course this varies depending on piece-size. Still, it's a good rule of thumb. So 5% is about 1 piece, and 10% is about 2 pieces and might be 3, and 15% might be 3 pieces or might be 4 pieces. I think of it as "one piece per 5%, but round up." I ordered 10% Polar Bear Paws and I got 3 of them.

Now back to the flavor-trying:

Milk Cocoanut is the first OMG reaction of this order. I like coconut fine, and I'll eat a miniature Almond Joy out of the Halloween bag after I've eaten all my favorites, but I often share the Russell Stover coconut ones with Paul because they're his favorites and I'm just so-so with them. But this! This is not just all-coconut like I'm used to: it's like a dense buttercream filling combined with coconut flakes. YUM YUM YUM. It's very sweet, especially with the thick milk chocolate coating, so I can imagine it being too sweet for some people---but it's upper tier for me, and I would definitely order more next time. I'm sad that I only ordered one piece this time.

Milk Cocoanut
(photo from Sees.com)

The Raspberry Truffle was also delicious. Nice raspberry flavor, with LOTS of dark chocolate flavor: the inside of the truffle and the nicely-thin coating. Upper tier for me; I'd want several in a box.

Raspberry Truffle
(photo from Sees.com)

I wouldn't have thought to put lemon and chocolate together, but it works! I like these more than the Key Lime Truffles, less than the Raspberry Truffles. I'd want one in a box.

Lemon Truffle
(photo from Sees.com)

I'm not sure I would have bothered to try a Polar Bear Paw, but SOMEONE sent me a Crappy Day Present that included some and I loved them. It's salty peanuts and some caramel (but just a little caramel, not a huge chewy amount), covered in white chocolate. So good. Upper middle or lower upper tier for me, and I love them mixed in with the more chocolate-dominated flavors.

Polar Bear Paws (photo from Sees.com)

I think of marzipan as yucky, without ever having had any. Did I have a children's book that described it as gross and dry and disappointing? That's the sort of opinion-forming memory I have of it. But in fact it turns out to be yummy if you like almond flavor, which I do. My mother-in-law had a pastry recipe that called for an almond-paste-based filling very similar to what's in these chocolates, and although I didn't bow down before that pastry as she said everyone in her town did (only because she repeatedly told them they were expected to do so, is my guess), I thought it was quite nice. In the Marzipan chocolate, there's too much of it for me, and I'm not crazy about the texture: it's probably the same texture that makes me think "Little bits of apple peel and pie crust!" for the Apple Pie Truffle, but I liked it less in the Marzipan. I finished the piece and was glad to have tried it, but I wouldn't order it again and I'd probably give it to someone else if I encountered one in a mixed assortment.

Marzipan
(photo from Sees.com)

Chelsea is one of the varieties I ordered so I'd be sure I'd have a nice number I already knew I liked. It's like a piece of chocolate walnut fudge, coated in milk chocolate. Except that description sounds way too heavy and sweet, and it isn't. It IS one of the sweeter ones, though, like the Milk Cocoanut.

Chelsea
(photo from Sees.com)

Strawberry Cream is another I already know I like. Nice strawberry flavor, and I like the milk chocolate with it.

Strawberry Cream
(photo from Sees.com)

Ditto the Vanilla Nut Cream: already a favorite. Some vanilla cream, a nice number of walnuts (i.e., not just a fragment here and there, but a lot), and a nice amount of milk chocolate coating.

Vanilla Nut Cream
(photo from Sees.com)

There are still more to go!

How to Change the Blogger / Blogspot Icon Next to Your Blog Name in Google Reader

2011-11-14T10:03:00.008-05:00

Hello! Have you noticed that lots of blogs in your Google Reader have cute little icons next to them, but yours has a stupid orange B? Have you just about lost your mind trying to figure out how to change that? Never fear, Swistle is here!

I combed through every option in the entire Blogger panel thingie, working on the assumption that it HAD TO BE SOMEWHERE, and eventually I found it! And I have a blogging philosophy that if I lost tooth enamel over an issue, I'll post about it when I figure it out.

Go to the Design tab, where normally you can add things to your sidebar or change the order of the things in your sidebar or whatever. See at the top of the "Add and Arrange Page Elements" section? That little orange B and then the word "Favicon" and then the word "Edit"? CLICK EDIT. Then upload your own image. Whew.

It should also show up on browser tabs, but you might need to clear your cache and restart your browser first. (And once I did that, I still don't see my icon when I'm in writing/editing mode. Only when the tab is of the actual blog itself.)

(P.S. I'm still not seeing it changed in Google Reader, however. Is patience required, or is this Enamel Loss Part 2?)

(P.P.S. Now I'm seeing it in Google Reader for Swistle Baby Names, but not for Swistle or Swistle Reviews. Paul says: "PATIENCE.")

See's Chocolate Report: REVISITED!

2011-11-11T13:07:00.004-05:00

Remember when I tried all those See's candies?

(See's Chocolate Adventure: A First-Round Report,
See's Chocolate Report Continued: The Weird Intriguing Ones, and
See's Chocolate Report Concluded: The More Ordinary Flavors.)

That was fun, wasn't it? Normally the price per pound would have inhibited me from much experimenting, but it was different when I knew I'd be writing about them so ~~it became an excuse to place the order to begin with~~ I knew even a flavor I didn't like would be fun to write about. And then I found there were a several I wouldn't have expected to like (pineapple truffle, for example) that I liked VERY MUCH INDEED, which left me wishing I'd tried ALL the flavors.

So I tried to be bold again this time. I ordered enough pieces I knew I liked so that I'd be happy no matter what, and then I used a "Let's try one of everything!" approach to anything that looked appealing. The boxes were once again heavier than I paid for: almost exactly one and a quarter pounds per pound box (including the box itself, but still).

I wouldn't have bothered with Cashew Brittle two boxes ago: I like brittles but I wouldn't normally think of them as a FAVORITE, and I don't like white chocolate anywhere near as much as milk/dark. But I loved California Brittle and wished I'd ordered more, and I liked their Polar Bear Paws (also white chocolate-based), so I tried Cashew Brittle. It was fine, and definitely appealing in the box and interesting to try. But I'm not sure the combination of white chocolate and brittle was my thing. I don't think I'd order it again, but if I were getting a mixed box for someone else I'd want to put a piece in for variety and coolness and fun.

Cashew Brittle
(photo from Sees.com)

The Almond Square reminded me of the Walnut Square from last time, but it had a saltier and more roasted flavor that I liked, along with the caramel and chocolate. I think I'd prefer it with more chocolate, though. Probably wouldn't order again, but I'd want a single piece in an assorted box.

Almond Square
(photo from Sees.com)

Apple Pie Truffle is another one I never would have tried pre-last-experiment. White chocolate is not usually my favorite, nor is apple flavoring, nor are truffles. But remember the Pineapple Truffle? MMMMmm. So I tried the Apple Pie one, and it's uncanny how much it tastes like apple pie---and how much the TEXTURE reminds me of it. It's like...little bits of apple peel! and little bits of crust! The spice flavor is pretty strong, and I liked it. The white chocolate didn't seem like a dominant flavor---more for sweetness and to hold the filling. I would only want one per box, but if I were ordering in the fall I would definitely include one, and I can imagine really looking forward to it. Middle tier for the piece as it falls in my particular preferences, but upper tier for an unexpected/fun idea and an excellent execution of it.

Apple Pie Truffle
(photo from Sees.com)

Anne recommended the Dark Nougat to me, and since she and I are Rum Nougat twins, I trusted her advice. DELICIOUS. It's described as having honey, roasted almond, vanilla, and coconut flavors, and it's all chewy and delicious and coated in dark chocolate. Upper tier for me; I'd definitely order a few next time. I didn't taste any coconut, but I may have just been overwhelmed by the almonds and dark chocolate and chewiness. Plus, I LIKE coconut, so if you don't like coconut you might notice it way more than I did.

Dark Nougat
(photo from Sees.com)

I also tried the Peanut Nougat. It was good, like a gourmet Snickers bar. I think at this price level, though, I would just get the Snickers and have about ten times as many of them.

Peanut Nougat
(photo from Sees.com)

I wouldn't have been interested in the Key Lime Truffle last time: white chocolate, fruit flavoring, truffle---meh. This time I tried one, because I am reformed and adventurous! As with the Apple Pie Truffle, the coating was mostly to hold in the filling and wasn't a strong influence on the taste. The inside was dense as you'd expect with a truffle, and the texture made me think of fillings/frostings made with powdered sugar (like the filling in a buckeye, if you've had those). Nice intense key lime flavor. I'd definitely order this in a mixed box for someone else because it was so cool and different. For myself, I'd probably want one in a box but it wouldn't be a top priority.

Key Lime Truffle
(photo from Sees.com)

More later, when I've made more progress through the box!

Sluggish

2011-11-10T08:07:00.007-05:00

I've been waking up feeling hungover, which might not surprise you after all the gin-and-a-funnel jokes I've been making---but in fact I HAVEN'T been drinking, because my years working in a pharmacy solidly convinced me of the idea that tranquilizers and alcohol don't mix well (Customer: "Can I drink alcohol with these?" Pharmacist, cheerfully: "Depends on how you feel about waking up!"), and I'd rather have the tranquilizers than the liquor, especially since liquor tends to leave me wide awake at 3:00 in the morning imagining people breaking into the house.

Besides, I don't seem to get hungover, and in fact usually feel BETTER than usual in the morning after drinking. This was confusing until I found a list of alcohol withdrawal symptoms (which includes hangover symptoms, since that's what a hangover mostly IS) that included positive symptoms such as good mood. That's a nice deal I got from the genetic pool, isn't it? Except that then when I wake up feeling lousy, I think "Dang, should've had more to drink last night."

Where was I? Oh, yes, I've been waking up feeling lousy, but I said "feeling hungover" even though for me that would be an inaccurate description of the feeling, because I know what "feeling hungover" means in the usual parlance and wanted to use communication to communicate an idea TO YOU, rather than TO MYSELF, so I used words in their usual meaning instead of pretending that I can make words mean anything I want them to mean and then act incredulous that people are misunderstanding me. Still, I guess I could have achieved the same effect by saying "feeling lousy." It was more that I ALSO wanted to clarify that it WASN'T that I was hungover, and so calling it "feeling hungover" right off the bat seemed a cleaner and less defensive segue into the "not actually hungover" clarification than if I'd said "feeling lousy" and then followed it by saying "BUT IT'S NOT A HANGOVER, SO SHUT UP."

I've lost my place again. Okay, so I've been waking up feeling lousy, and then feeling kind of crummy on and off all day. Part of it is the despair caused by the issues of yesterday's post, and let's not even link to it, okay? I don't want to open it up and see parts of it again, and I'd have to do that to make the link.

Part of it is Elizabeth still crying every morning before school.

Part of it is that Edward has started crying AFTER school, saying that he CAN'T GET HIS WORK DONE in class because EVERYONE IS TOO LOUD; and also we got a notice from the speech therapist at school saying he's way behind with his speech even after being in therapy all last year; and also I got a call from the doctor yesterday saying that his second set of blood work came back and he's still anemic, so they need to see him next week.

Part of it is that Rob's voice is changing and his skin is looking dicey and I have a top-of-the-rollercoaster feeling about this upcoming stage of parenthood.

Part of it is that William went to the dentist for a cleaning/check and now the dentist wants to discuss (1) orthodontia, (2) speech therapy, and (3) a tonsillectomy.

Part of it is that Henry has been in a particularly careeny/uncareful stage (he's ALWAYS like this, but even more so recently) and that, combined with his INCESSANT TALKING, is wearing on my nerves and making me feel like I can't focus---and then I'm also continually being startled by loud crashes.

Part of it is that our dishwasher has been broken, and I finally got myself to do something about it when I found out to my delight that the dishwasher repair place HAD AN EMAIL ADDRESS FOR SERVICE---and after I emailed them, they CALLED ME BACK to make the appointment, even though (1) I hadn't given my phone number, which means they had to go to the trouble of looking it up when they could have just hit reply, and (2) IF I CONTACT BY EMAIL, THAT MEANS I WANT TO TALK BY EMAIL. Plus, now there will be an expensive stranger in my house sometime today.

Part of it is that I'm reading Joan Didion's? new book? and it seems like? every single sentence? is an unanswerable question? and it's giving me a headache?

Part of it could be too much sugar and/or too much caffeine, taken in the attempt to combat the Feeling Lousy.

And of course I'm worried about my Sims family.

NONE of this is a big deal. EVERY SINGLE ITEM on this list falls into totally routine LIFE. And there is no reason I can't cope with it, and I AM in fact coping with it. But I think it's like how when you're doing something big on the computer, like a big download or upload or something, and then everything else runs all sluggishly: the computer is handling it, but it's not running at its usually brisk cheery pace. That's how I've been feeling: SLUGGISH, and as if I have a large program constantly running in my background.

Disobey and Escape

2011-11-09T06:16:00.020-05:00

In college I put off most of my PE requirements until my final semester, so I had a very active final semester: racquetball, aerobics, and women's self-defense. The women's self-defense instructor was good, but grim. A girl from my dorm floor had been taken while out running. She was in excellent physical condition, had several years of martial arts experience, was in a public park, and had mace in her hand, but that didn't stop anything from happening. Our instructor taught us how to slam someone in the nose, and taught us to go for the eyes, and taught us that a strike to the knee is better than a strike to the head---but she also spent a lot of time emphasizing that the important thing was to avoid being in the situation to begin with, because your chances against a prepared and unexpected opponent are...grim.

She also told us about a million times the thing about DON'T LET THEM TAKE YOU TO THE SECOND LOCATION. That is, if someone comes up to you as you're getting into your car, puts a gun to your back, and instructs you to drive, your odds of survival plummet to nearly zero if you obey. Most attackers won't shoot you if you run or scream, even though they say they will: instead, they'll consider the whole thing a failed attempt and go find a new victim. And if they do shoot you when you run or scream, your odds of survival are still exponentially higher (and your odds of suffering/torture are still exponentially lower) in that parking lot than they would have been if you'd gone with them to the place they'd prepared for you.

I consider this a tip on par with "stop, drop, and roll" or "Don't swerve to miss an animal" or "If you're trapped in the trunk of a car, kick out the headlights": it's something I rehearse again and again, in the hope that in the actual situation I'd remember it. As Sam Harris says in his recent article (the first thing you'll see when you click it is a gun pointed right at your face), the overwhelming instinct is to freeze and then comply, assuming that if you just obey everything the attacker is saying, the attacker will go away and you'll be fine. Spoiler: you won't be fine. The promises of being fine are only manipulation to ensure your compliance, and nothing more.

The problem is that it feels as if you have two choices: obey and be fine, or disobey and die. That's the choice the attacker is in fact specifically telling you that you have. But your actual choices are "obey and almost certainly suffer and then die" or "try to escape and maybe not suffer and then die (but probably still suffer and die)."

Here is the part that made me immediately take a sleeping pill when I read it yesterday evening, because I knew I had some lying-awake torment ahead of me: this is true even if you have children with you. If you obey, thinking it will save the children, you are wrong: the attacker is using the children to control you, and the children's odds for survival are exponentially improved if you ABANDON THEM WITH THE ATTACKER AND RUN FOR HELP.

Would you like a sleeping pill? My temptation after reading this was to just take the whole bottle and get it over with. On the other hand, the reason I'm sharing this horror with you is that when I thought it over I found it helped to RELIEVE some of my lying-awake frets. Because it gives me a plan and a perspective, in a situation that I fret over because there is no plan: how can I save a household or carfull of children? I likely can't. And it does it in math terms: the child's odds of survival with you also in the power of the attacker are slimmer than the child's odds of survival with you running away getting help. And as Sam Harris says, if the attacker was going to kill the child, he was going to do it whether you were there or not, and probably he was going to "take his time" (sleeping pill words) and quite likely he would kill you first, leaving the child alone with him anyway but with no help on the way. Whereas if you run, you're still leaving the child alone, but the attacker knows he doesn't have time and has lost the power the child gave him over you, and he's better off considering this a failed attempt and running the other direction leaving the child unharmed. It goes against every single instinct, which is why you have to be told it in advance. (Don't swerve to avoid hitting an animal. Roll around on the flames. Put on your own oxygen mask first.)

One point Sam Harris makes that is so horrifying and yet so educational, is that if someone breaks into your house while you're there, they are there to kill you: plain old burglars make sure the house is empty first. This was enlightening: I'd been thinking that if people broke in, what I would need to do is cooperate so that they would take the valuables and leave. I would have done exactly what Sam Harris says is so exasperating to police officers: I would have believed and obeyed the attacker, thinking it was improving my odds. Never believe and obey the attacker, is the point here. The only goal is to get away and get help.

So as I was lying awake, here are the things I was rehearsing:

1. If the attacker was going to kill someone, he was going to do it either way: it's not a matter of obeying him to save anyone's life. No one's life will be saved by obeying. Someone's life might be saved by immediate disobeying.

2. Leave the child. It exponentially improves the child's chance of survival. Leave the child. Leave the child. (Don't swerve to avoid hitting the cat. Don't swerve to avoid hitting the cat.)

3. If someone breaks into the house, their carefully-thought-out goal is to kill you. Once you know that's the goal, it changes YOUR goal.

4. The only goal is escape. The only goal is escape. The only goal is escape.

This naturally led me to the thought "What if I can't leave the child? What if I CAN'T?" Even that was reassuring: I thought, "Well, then we will be like almost everyone else in that situation, and we will be terrified and suffer horribly, but then we will be dead and it will be over, and the world will go on about the same except there will be a couple of fundraisers and yearbook pages in our memories."

I don't know if this will be as reassuring to everyone as it was to me. (I also found it reassuring to think "And if my attempt didn't work, and the child was killed and I was still alive, I could just kill myself.") I think it's because before, I was thinking that my success/failure lay in manipulating the situation successfully, so I needed to lie awake and practice how I'd do that. Now I'm thinking of it as any other of the other horrifying things that can happen to human beings: car crashes, deadly flu strains, tsunamis, wild animal attacks, leukemia, earthquakes, fluke accidents that shouldn't have happened but did. There are some things you can do to prevent and/or avoid them; there are some things that improve your odds of survival if you find yourself in them anyway; but basically, it's something that happens to some of us, and it's horrifying and tragic but it fits in with the other horrifying and tragic things that mostly can't be avoided or escaped from, and it's worth taking your slim chance. WHICH IS TO DISOBEY AND ESCAPE.

(You can read the whole article here, and I do suggest it. It's hard to do, but his tone is sensible and direct and calm, and it left me feeling the relief of "called the doctor about that lump" rather than the fear that comes from "not wanting to think about the lump, so I won't do anything about it.") (Also, how much do home security systems cost?)

High; Shoe-Tying; Decluttering; Spoilers and Complaints for Everybody's Fine

2011-11-08T11:41:00.002-05:00

Too much coffee + exercise + too many Mr. Goodbars + laughed about something until I got dizzy = I think I might be high.

********

Teaching a child to tie his shoes is hellish. No, I'm not going to modify that with a perspective-acknowledging statement. It's hellish. Oh, it's part of parenting? DON'T CARE, STILL HELLISH.

********

I got some very satisfying de-cluttering done today. We have a closet I use for storing gifts I bought ahead of time, gifts for the kids to bring to birthday parties, items for care packages, stuff I don't know what else to do with, and gift bags and ribbon and stuff.

ANYWAY, the thing about buying ahead is, it doesn't always pan out. Usually it does, but sometimes I see a great clearance on a whole bunch of mix-and-match Dwell Studio baby girl clothes when my sister-in-law is pregnant with what turns out to be a boy. Or I buy a bunch of Gymboree blankets because I get kind of obsessed with them and start collecting one from each line, figuring I can give them as baby gifts---but then ~~I can't make myself part with any of MY PRECIOUS~~ my friends stop having babies before I run out of blankets. Or I buy gifts for the birthday-party shelf, but party after party goes by and none of the kids choose those gifts to bring and I start getting tired of them taking up space (the gifts, not the kids).

And here it is, the time of year to hide gifts in earnest, so I really NEED the space, but I can't really GET RID OF this perfectly good stuff. The timing was perfect: my blog-friend Misty is reluctantly gathering auction items for a non-profit, and she says she can make an auction item out of ANYTHING. So I packed up a box, and now my problems are her problems and my gift closet is more manageable.

********

The next part is going to be full of spoilers for the movie Everybody's Fine (Netflix link) (a movie I think I have now referred to as Everyone is Fine, Everyone's Fine, and The Kids are All Fine). It's the last topic of the post, so if you don't want to read the spoilers you can click away without having to squint-scroll to find the end.

Short version: I didn't buy ANY of it, and I wondered how they got such a good cast to put on this crazy talk. (Long version continues from here.) Maybe a couple of generations ago, a dad would have needed to realize that by pushing his children too hard he was pushing them away, but a guy like Robert De Niro's character, in his sixties living in contemporary times, would not have to be lied to by his wife about such issues as the existence of a grandchild---nor could I picture the whole family being in on such a thing AND being able to pull it off. And if his wife DID lie to him, I think she would have changed her mind on that when she was DYING. And I can't picture four children ALL telling their dad the kinds of AMAZING WHOPPERS they come up with in this movie (they even try to lie to him about THE HEART ATTACK HE JUST HAD, as if that would be a sustainable lie after the doctor came in to talk to him), OR a dad being dim enough to continue to believe stuff he's been allowed to assume. How could he think his son was a conductor and his daughter was a starring dancer, without ever insisting on seeing a performance? Also, I didn't believe his doctor would have discouraged the trip OR that he would have had such immediate results from missing a single dose of medication (though it looked to me as if he was significantly overdosing on his remaining crushed tablets, so maybe that was supposed to be the reason).

Also, everybody is NOT fine, and there is some really nauseating stuff about the dead son going to join his dead mother in heaven and forgiving his dad on his way up. (YES, I cried through it, but I felt MAD about it.) And certainly everyone seemed to take the death of a family member tremendously in stride: a little pang of bittersweet memories and then everything is happy again and the dad is telling his wife's gravestone that all the kids (including the dead one) are fine. And now that the lies are out in the open, everyone can gather around the holiday table in glowing acceptance, yay!

But I liked some of the ideas (parents learning that they have to be open to their children being ordinary; parents putting disappointments into perspective; parents finding that they can pressure their kids to the point that the kids start lying to them) enough that I think I'll try Stanno Tutti Bene, the movie on which this movie was based. Perhaps the original did a better job at keeping things believable. (Oh, shoot, Netflix doesn't have it.)

Also, I liked the exchange between Robert De Niro's character and his son Robert. Also, I loved the part with his early-teens grandson Jack. Also, I liked Robert De Niro, just OVERALL, and I thought his whole performance was very touching (although that made it even harder to believe he could have brought up his children to lie to him like that). Also, I thought they got a lot of really good-quality bit-part actors. Also, I liked the dream scene where he talks to his kids around a table in the yard, and they're children again and the various truths come out. So I'd say my primary feeling is of DISAPPOINTMENT: the movie had such potential, but failed to reach it. Which is kind of funny, since that's one of the major themes of the movie.

How to Get a Kid Into Private School on Sims 2 or Sims II

2011-11-07T08:19:00.002-05:00

I realize this is an uncharacteristic post: it's about how to solve a hard part on a VIDEO GAME. But I spent so much time trying to solve it, and had to apologize for snapping at the children over it, and CRIED over it, and vented to Paul in a quavery voice about it, and so I am PUTTING THE INFORMATION HERE in case anyone else wants it. The last time I was this frustrated was when I wrote my Evenflo car seat post, and that's been one of my most enduringly popular posts of ALL TIME (as well as one of the few in which I use Bad Language), so it seems to me this is one of the things the internet is FOR: searching for solutions to EXTREMELY FRUSTRATING PROBLEMS and finding what worked for other people. And so when I solve something extremely frustrating, I like to post it. I think you should, too, in case you were wondering how I thought you should live your blogging life. SHARE THE WEALTH.

So. On Sims 2. Or Sims II, if that's what you typed into the search engine. When you want to get a kid into private school, this is how I finally solved it:

1. Save the game right after you have a Sim call the headmaster to come over for dinner. Don't save it again until you succeed and the child has been accepted into private school. This way, every time you fail you can quit the game without saving, and then you can try again. You can call it cheating, but I'm not listening: EVERY video game my kids play lets them start a level again and again until they get it right, and The Sims is the only one that doesn't allow a single redo.

2. Also, be prepared that your Sims will turn into crazy thwarty McThwartersons as soon as you try to accomplish this task. Mine were all "I think I'll go to bed now!" and "I think I'll take a shower" and "I think I'll suddenly go work on a painting!"---even though normally they were not so strong-willed. I had to keep pausing the game CONSTANTLY, just to make sure all of them were ACTIVELY FOLLOWING MY INSTRUCTIONS. And even so, a Sim was answering the phone when I'd x'ed out that idea THREE TIMES and ALSO replaced it with a new activity, which he ignored! It was...very frustrating. (I should have just switched off free will, but I was too flustered to think of it.)

3. When the headmaster comes over (he will come over right at 5:00, and he might be any one of several different headmasters), ignore the prompt to give him a tour. Don't give him a tour. If you WANT to give him a tour, what you do is select Entertain and then Give Tour, and then click "Go Here" in a room so your Sim will go there. The headmaster will follow. Then click the headmaster and choose "Show Room." Then repeat with a different room. But don't bother! It's incredibly frustrating and takes forever, and my tour-giving Sim kept trying to wander off to take an unneeded shower or sit down for an unneeded rest.

4. Instead, have one Sim talk to him: just Talk, and select Chat, over and over. NO SCHMOOZE. Ignore the suggestion to schmooze. I know there's a Schmooze Score, but ignore it. JUST TALK. DON'T NOBODY SCHMOOZE. The schmooze score will go up with the talking. The schmoozing is like with flirting or hugging or whatever: the score goes DOWN if you do it before there's a relationship established. Probably you can schmooze after there has been enough talking, but I didn't even try, I just talked and talked, and the Schmooze score went up and up.

5. The other Sim should cook a meal. You're supposed to have that Sim select Entertain and then Call to Meal, but this is BUGGY and might not work and might in fact VANISH as an option after you select it. DON'T PANIC. Once the meal is served, have the talking Sim stop talking to the headmaster and go eat, and the headmaster will come over to the table. (I hope. I HOPE the headmaster will come over to the table. It's glitchy, and in a couple of my attempts he wouldn't go there no matter what, which is why you should save the game first. But in the one where I finally won, he did go to the table.) Get as many other people as possible to sit at the table too. (I don't actually know if this is important. But it's what I did the time I succeeded, so now it's like a lucky rabbit foot to me.) Other sites told me not to cook chef salad so I didn't; other sites said to cook pork chops or lobster or salmon, and my Sims always burn the lobster and salmon, so I had them do pork chops. Other sites told me to make sure the Sim doing the cooking was the best cook in the house and that the Sim was pretty high in cooking; the Sim who did the meal had 8 skill points in cooking.

6. Things that I thought might be important, but weren't: having all the family meet the headmaster; having the child talk to and/or impress and/or schmooze the headmaster; entertaining the headmaster by letting him play chess; the tour; the schmoozing; everyone eating together; everyone being awake during the visit.

7. Things that were in fact important: having someone talk a bunch of times to the headmaster to build the relationship; feeding the headmaster a meal; knowing that this part of the game was full of bugs. I ended up with a ZERO score for the tour, and still got the child into private school with a score of 98 out of an apparently necessary 90 points (when I got 83 points, the child's application was rejected). I also ended up with a new facial tic.

Fall-Back (Standard Time) Printout to Avoid the Endless Discussions About Whether It's EARLIER or LATER Right Now

2011-11-06T05:39:00.010-05:00

I will tell you what kind of talk sends me immediately to the kind of squirmy rage that makes me want to flail futilely at someone: "Wait, it would be SIX o'clock, but now it's FIVE o'clock, so it'll be EASIER....wait, no, HARDER to...wait, no. Okay, it WOULD be six o'clock, but we CHANGED..."

I'm not saying I don't start these very Daylight Savings Time discussions myself: I'm powerless not to, which makes me want to flail at my own face. And then I have to listen to Paul doing them and ALSO correcting me that "actually, it's saving, not savingS, and actually that's in the spring," which he's super-lucky hasn't gotten him killed. PLUS, the kids get involved, so there's the added bonus of having these discussions with people who are not understanding the concept at all.

Anyway, this has got to change. (CHANGE. See what I did there?) I'm not going through this again. Well, no, I'm going through it ONE MORE TIME, but this time I'm WRITING IT DOWN. Every time we do that stupid hour-math in the next couple of days and come to an accurate conclusion, I'm writing it down. Next year I will be able to copy this to a word-processing document, increase the font size, print it out, and hang it next to the clock. (Paul tells me I could also make a Google docs document so that ANYONE can print it out. I will work on this, so perhaps when we are looking for this post next year we will find a link to something printable.) (Ha ha, like I'll actually follow-through with that.) (Well, I might.) And in the spring, I can swap all the "earlier"s and "later"s and be ALL SET!

FALL BACK
(changing back to Standard Time)

It will be EASIER to wake up in the morning: you will feel wakeful earlier than usual. However, the children will wake up at a clock-time one hour earlier than usual, so you will actually feel THE SAME amount of restedness, except with the unpleasant feeling of resentment and injustice at the early time on the clock. If you have a teenager, he or she may emerge an hour before you would usually expect, blinking in confusion.

It will be EASIER to go to bed at night: you will feel sleepy earlier than usual. If you have a small child, you'll be dealing with an hour of crankiness and sleepiness as their little internal clock tells them it's sleeping time and you tell them it isn't.

It will be HARDER to wait for meals: you will feel hungry earlier than usual. The children will be cranky and whining for lunch, and you will say, "OMG stop whining for food, it is only TEN O'CLOCK IN THE MORNING." Then you will sneak into the kitchen and have a little nibble because OMG HUNGRY.

It gets light EARLIER in the morning. This is kind of nice for waking up: the kids have awakened us at 4:30 instead of 5:30, but there will be less time sitting sipping coffee resentfully in the dark: soon we will be sitting sipping it resentfully in the morning light.

It gets dark EARLIER in the evening. This sucks right now, and the evening commute is depressing, but it will soon be nice for holiday light enjoyment.

People who forget to change their clocks will arrive places an hour EARLY. If you are having a party on the Sunday of a time change, you should make plans for early arrivers, just in case, and you should put a reminder of the time change on the invitations. If you have a church, it would be thoughtful to arrange to have someone there an hour early with coffee and doughnuts for anyone who otherwise is unlikely to want to wait around in the parking lot for an hour kicking themselves. If you have a store, same possibility as church, especially if you're in a plaza with a bunch of stores: opening an hour "early" one day a year might get you some loyal and grateful customers browsing around while they wait for the rest of the stores to open.

If you want to prepare the children for the change ahead of time, don't bother. Or if you must, you can spend the days before the change waking them up later and putting them to bed later.

If You Saw a Blogger Out and About, Would You Say Hi?

2011-11-05T07:39:00.005-04:00

A couple of weeks ago, Elizabeth was invited to a birthday party at someone's house, and it turned out to be one of those ENORMOUS parties where not only the whole class but also the whole neighborhood and the whole extended family were invited, and where most of the adults stayed because they were friends too. I'd been thinking I would leave and come back after the party, but it was clear I needed to stay: there were over a hundred people there, and people were even having trouble keeping track of their OWN kids, let alone someone else's.

I suffered, but I survived. It was three hours of hanging around with people I didn't know but who knew each other, and I'd say it was exactly as character-building as you'd expect for an introvert. And yet even repeated exposures to such experiences are not changing me into a comfortable and eager social person, despite our culture's unquenchable belief in the idea that exposure = total extinction---and related belief that such things REQUIRE extinction, as if being social and outgoing is the Right Way and being otherwise is Wrong. (BE YOURSELF, unless you're not social, outgoing, beautiful, calm, thin, confident, free of interesting neuroses, and in the top 1% of careers! In which case you should be someone else!) At best I'd say that for me, exposure seems to result in the gradual development of more sophisticated coping mechanisms.

ANYWAY. My point. When I was at this party with so many people, I saw a LOT of women who looked Kind Of Familiar. And it seemed to me that some of them were finding ME Kind Of Familiar, too. And although the most likely explanation is that we've just seen each other in other large groups of parents, it occurred to me that it would not be SO bizarre to run into another blogger at something like this.

And so this is what I was wondering: if YOU recognized a blogger at something like this, or perhaps out shopping at Target, would you say something? I THINK I would, but I'm not sure. It would depend on so many things: How well do I know the blogger? Like, would it soon emerge embarrassingly that I barely skim her blog, or do I read her so carefully I know her pets' names and the name of the paint color she used in her dining room? Do THEY know ME? Like, do we read each other's blogs, or do I just read hers? Do I feel like either of us would be blowing our cover by introducing ourselves? How sure am I that that is indeed her?

What about you? If you saw a blogger out and about, would you say hi? If someone recognized you, would you want them to say hi? HAVE you ever seen a blogger out and about?

Why Don't People Like My Blog?

2011-11-01T06:39:00.025-04:00

I have had a thought. Stand back.

If you do much blog reading, you've probably noticed people making negative remarks about their popularity and the size of their readership. "All three of my readers," "I'm not one of the popular kids," etc. It's sometimes expressed as self-deprecation, or sometimes as sad wonderings about what's wrong with them and why no one likes them, or sometimes as confessions of jealousy.

And you might think it would be just the bloggers who have only a few readers, but it's also bloggers who have dozens but wonder why other bloggers have hundreds, and bloggers who have hundreds but wonder why other bloggers have thousands, and bloggers who have thousands but wonder why other bloggers have hundreds of thousands. It's hard to comment on such posts. What can be said other than, "It's not your fault per se: it's because your blog, for whatever reason, lacks the kind of mass appeal you (and pretty much everyone else) are hoping to have"?

I have thought of a different way to think of this situation. I think the blogger/blogging relationship can be thought of like the actor/acting relationship.

There are actors I love who choose projects I can't stand: even if I love love love a particular actor, I'm not going to watch him in a weekly zombie drama. I can want to be SISTERS with a particular actor, and yet I'm not going to watch her in that stupid movie.

And there are actors I think I can't stand, but I'd like them tremendously if I knew them in person. I don't like their WORK, but I'd like THEM if their work wasn't my only way of knowing them. But their work IS my only way of knowing them.

And there are actors I think I love, but I'd cringe and try to get away from them if I knew them in person. I love their WORK, but if I knew them I'd want to cry from the wringing disappointment of who they really are. But...I DO only know their work, so I love them.

Bloggers and their blogs are a comparable situation. There are bloggers we love, who take blogging jobs we're not interested in reading. There are bloggers we think we love, but if knew them (not just met them: some bloggers, like some actors, can be "on" in short-term meeting situations) we wouldn't love them anymore, because what we love is not them but their BLOGS. There are people we know and love in person, but we can barely stand to skim their blogs. And there are bloggers we think we can't stand, but it's really that we don't want to read their writing and/or what they choose to write about---which is quite a different thing from not liking THE PEOPLE. (Of course we might also dislike the people, if we knew them. What I mean is that the blog alone is not sufficient information for a conclusion.)

I think the feeling has been that if the blog is liked, the person is liked---and that therefore if the blog is not liked, the person is not liked. "Why don't people like my blog?" becomes "Why don't people like me?" Thinking of it in a different way (i.e., that the blog is the person's work/hobby, just as acting can be a person's work/hobby) does not automatically solve the problem: most bloggers, like most actors, would of course still prefer that their work be admired, and by as large an audience as possible. But rejection of the work/blog doesn't have to be interpreted as rejection of the person.

Some hobbies (acting, blogging) require an audience. Some (writing in a journal, running, scrapbooking, stamp-collecting) don't. Some (art, music, dance) can go either way, depending on what the person participating in the hobby wants. The audience can't be forced into existence (or complained into existence, or wanted into existence), so the trick is to find the natural fits. There are some things we like to do, and other people like to watch us do them. Yay! There are some things we like to do, and no audience is required. Yay! There are some things we like to do, and no one wants to watch us but we don't mind and we can happily do them without an audience. Yay!

And then there is the category of things we like to do, but only if we have an audience of a certain size---and our audience is not large enough, and so we're miserable and it makes us feel rejected and unliked. Non-yay. I think those are good hobbies to eliminate, to leave more room to focus on the others. (This is why I no longer model, act, sing for an audience, or try out for football.)

Mixed Media

2011-10-28T10:09:00.009-04:00

My aunt was visiting and we were having a wonderful time talking and eating hot fudge sundaes and admiring the things she and my mom bought on shopping trips, so it was a really fun week and now my mom and I have post-holiday-blues-like feelings. I've been consoling myself with hour upon hour of a game called Sonny, and I REALLY cannot explain to you why I am playing it. I mean, I CAN: it was Henry's fault, because he was DESPERATE to play it but couldn't figure it out, and so I started helping, and then somehow it was two hours later and I'd been playing a SHOOTING game all that time.

I don't think of myself as LIKING shooting games, but Paul tells me it's because I think of them all as being First-Person Shooter games, which I hate because I hate scared-anticipation and I hate being startled and I don't think quickly. When in fact some games are Turn-Taking games like Sonny, where you can take your time and figure out your move, and then when you're all set you say go, and then it waits patiently for your next move. Plus, it's not gory or gross. Still, there's no getting around the part where I'm aiming guns, shooting them, and saying "DARN it!" when they don't do enough damage.

As soon as Rob got home, Henry and I made HIM play it TOO, because we kept getting really stuck and not knowing what was going on (now we have a Striker's Helm, but how do we get it out of our inventory so we can use it? and what's a "helm" when we are not steering any ships?), and we needed someone else to play it so we could ask questions. Now Rob, Paul, Henry, and I are ALL hooked on it.

Speaking of out of character, I also watched and loved an action movie: Red (Netflix link). We watched it with my aunt one evening, and I was all "I don't know about this," but then I LOVED it. Bruce Willis plays this totally charming, deadly ex-CIA agent. I'm pretty sure the director just had him look at the camera with a wry, amused, affectionate, sidelong-glance tough-guy expression, and put a green screen behind him so he could put that expression in every single scene, and I think I speak for all the ladies in our group when I say IT WORKED.

There was plenty of shooting and action, but nothing gory. And although it got a little scary at the peak of the action, MOST of the action was broken up with humor. And almost all the characters were, like, baby boomers coming out of retirement to kick some mid-thirties next-generation butt, so this is a good movie to watch with your parents. And Helen Mirren is in it, and Morgan Freeman, and John Malkovich playing on the funny/endearing end of his creepy/scary/crazy spectrum. Plus there's Karl Urban for the ladies who prefer a man in his 30s, though it was Bruce Willis who had all three of us looking up his age on Wikipedia to see if it was creepy for us to like him. AND, the female romantic interest is Mary-Louise Parker, who is only a decade younger than Bruce Willis and only LOOKS young enough to be his daughter, so that's kind of awesome too!

And I'm reading Divergent, but in my last reading session something icky and scary happened to one of the characters, and now I feel nervous that that's going to escalate.

Getting Too Big For Those Britches

2011-10-24T09:42:00.006-04:00

Yesterday Rob and I had an argument in the car that went extremely well but was nevertheless very unpleasant. He wanted to discuss his theories that no one should be "against" anyone else, and that no one should make any laws that affect anyone else, and that if you can't prove something is untrue you have to treat it exactly as if it's true. I discussed these topics with him for over 30 minutes and didn't lose my cool AT ALL, even when I was making good/calm points and asking good/calm questions, and all he was doing was repeating his few points over and over in an increasingly upset voice and implying he considered me too stupid to follow the obvious logic.

So I should have gone home feeling good about my performance in this first of what will be many, many chances to exercise patience and restraint and the kindness that comes from having a more developed frontal lobe. One of my big worries about the teenage years is that I will lose my temper in a near-constant fashion, because I really do hate Immature Philosophizing---and I DIDN'T lose my temper. But instead of feeling cheered by this, I went home feeling logy and full of ennui. Because it turns out that even when I handled a discussion very well, I STILL hate Immature Philosophizing and having arguments with people. I felt so weary at the idea of the years and years of it I have ahead of me as the kids grow up.

I also felt logy/ennui/weary at the idea that they might not outgrow the ideas I consider immature. It is upsetting that there is so little I can do to control the children's brains so that they will grow up thinking thoughts I agree with. I already knew this was the case going in to this project, but it's bad for morale to be imagining what life could be like when he comes home with his family for Christmas and is still talking this way. Maybe all five of the kids will sit around talking about how much better the world would be if they ran it, and how stupid Paul and I are for not agreeing with them. Then we'll all sit around grimly unwrapping our presents and feeling dissatisfied with each other.

Also, he's outgrowing his pants so I went to my bins to get the next size up and found there WAS NO NEXT SIZE UP. I was going to have to buy him MEN'S sizes. Then I found that actually it's only The Children's Place that doesn't have size 16, but Old Navy and Target still do, so we have one more size to go. But after THAT, it's the MEN'S department!

Inception SPOILER SPOILER SPOILER

2011-10-22T07:37:00.003-04:00

In this post I am going to tell you what I think the ending of Inception is (discussed without spoilers in this post) and WHY it's that way, and so perhaps it goes without saying that this post will be RIFE with spoilers. There won't be anything else in the post: just that one subject. This is the part where you should leave if you don't want to read spoilers about Inception.

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SPOILER LINE! SPOILERS AHEAD! SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS!
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Here is the ending I demand that you believe: Dom (Leonardo DiCaprio) is back in reality. He successfully completed his dream mission, Saito followed through with his promise, and Dom goes home to his kids.

Here are the reasons this is true:

1. Because Dom makes it clear again and again in the movie that he is not interested in living in dreams. He has to do a lot of work to convince his wife to leave Limbo, but he is determined to convince her of it---even though they were very happy there. When she wants to go back and live in dreams again, he doesn't want to---even to try to save her life. He tells Mal in his final Limbo scene that her dream self is an insufficient shadow of his real wife, and that that's not good enough for him. He doesn't want to interact and live with his DREAM children: he's had many opportunities to live permanently in Limbo and recreate his wife/kids there---but he wants ONLY his REAL children. It would be inconsistent with everything we know about him for him to suddenly say "I don't even CARE if this is reality or not, I'm so happy!" He might feel that way for a short time, but not permanently. They'd be shadows of his real children, and not good enough---and he'd be remembering that his own dream happiness wasn't solving reality for his real children who were still waiting, parentless.

2. Because Lynn linked in the comments section to this Inception FAQ, and there are assorted mentions of the writer and actors believing that Dom IS home in the end. If MICHAEL CAINE thinks Dom is home to reality in the end, then DOM IS HOME TO REALITY IN THE END.

3. Because if he's not home to reality in the end, the movie isn't over. See #1: Dom is not interested in living in a dream. So if this is some wonderful dream, he'll soon figure that out and then he'll have to start a new quest to get home. There would need to be Inception II. (This would be the only situation in which I would go with the "It's still just a dream" ending: if it will lead to a sequel in which he tries again to get back to reality.)

4. Because the spinning top at the end is the perfect dramatic/non-sappy end to the movie. Fading out on Leonardo DiCaprio hugging small children would have been okay, but kind of sappy after all the shooting, and it would have left us all in the theater feeling a little awkward with each other. I can just SEE someone working on the movie saying "Oh my god, you know what would be AWESOME?" and everyone else going "WHOA. YES."

5. Because if he's not home to reality in the end, I hate the whole world and everyone in it, and especially everyone who makes movies.

Inception; The Leftovers

2011-10-21T08:25:00.011-04:00

I just finished Inception (Netflix link), and I loved it.

(photo from Amazon.com)

I know I'm not literally the last person to see it, so I'm not going to do any spoilers, but I wish I could because I want to hear what you thought about the ending, by which I mean I want to convince you that I am right about it. And I would like to say also that I hate it when there is uncertainty about the ending. Would it have killed them to make it clear? Because I know I know what happened, because it is the only possible satisfying ending, but I want THEM to know I know, and to admit THEY know too, and not for them to tease me like we all might not know and/or as if "not knowing" = "deep and meaningful." I KNOW WHAT I KNOW.

Anyway. Netflix thought I would like it 3.2 stars, but I gave it one of my very rare 5-star ratings. To get 5 stars from me, I have to love it AND it has to make me think "WHAT just happened to my BRAIN?" I can see why Netflix couldn't predict my rating: there was a LOT of shooting in it, and I dislike shooting. But it wasn't the kind of shooting that distresses me (i.e., in war movies where young men are cut down in slow motion to sad opera music, or anything where it's scary and/or gory), so I didn't mind it much, though I did turn the volume way down. It also helped that I watched it while exercising, not only because I could burn off the adrenaline/stress as it accumulated, but also because that means I watched it in four chunks and could process each chunk for awhile before moving on to the next.

Man. I cried so hard at the end I gave myself a headache. If you watch it, remember: there is no uncertainty about the ending, because there is only one possible ending.

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Speaking of reviewing stuff, I finished The Leftovers.

(photo from Amazon.com)

Here are the things I didn't like:

1. I couldn't tell the guys apart. Their names and their personalities seemed mostly the same, and very bland. I had to figure them out from context: oh yeah, this is the dad, because here's house/breakfast; oh yeah, this is one of the guys in that group, because here's bottle/kissing; oh yeah, this is the son because here's that girl.

2. I'm trying not to give anything away, but there is a ritual in a cult, and the ritual would have worked perfectly well without a certain relationship element. Tying it to the relationship made it sadistic and mind-gamey, which made no sense. Definitely it made the plot more thrilling---but it SEEMED like an element to make the plot more thrilling, as opposed to seeming like it fit.

3. At the end, I didn't feel like I'd been given enough information about the characters to get a feeling for how things were going to go. It's not that I needed every plotline finished (though I do enjoy that), it's that everything was still swinging wildly back and forth for everyone (and for the whole disappearance plot itself) and then the end just snipped it closed randomly, like the book wasn't going the way the author thought it would and now he was sick of it and wanted to be done with it. I felt like I knew what was going to happen with a couple of the characters (one was probably going to be okay; another was probably not), but the others could have gone any direction. And yet I felt like the last scene was meant to imply a sort of resolution.

4. I would have enjoyed more talk about the disappearance itself. What percentage of the population, for example? Or perhaps I missed that part. I'm always nervous I'll criticize something and it'll turn out I was just dim and missed a page or something. And was not one single person an actual eyewitness to the disappearance of so much of humanity? We heard two eyewitness stories, and neither one actually witnessed anything with their eyes. I would have preferred a more Stephen King-like approach for this section: more glorying in the surprising horror.

Just OVERALL, I felt like the book fell flat. It felt like reading the second book in a six-book series.

Purple

2011-10-20T08:40:00.011-04:00

Today is the day to wear purple to visually demonstrate that you think that gay teenagers shouldn't be bullied or beaten up (non-gay teenagers shouldn't be beaten up or bullied either, but the emphasis here is on what motivates the bullying/beatings), and to show overall support for those teenagers. Problem: finding purple shirts, particularly for those of us who didn't hear about this in time to clearance-shop. Elizabeth and I had no trouble, though my purple shirt was in the laundry so that caused a scramble. Rob had a purple plaid shirt he coincidentally chose last year on clearance, so I snipped the tag off of it and he wore it. But the three younger boys---none of them had purple shirts.

I was not panicked about this, because it is pretty clear that just because WEARING a purple shirt is meant to show support for a cause, NOT wearing the purple shirt doesn't mean THE OPPOSITE. It can mean "supporting the cause, but not owning a purple shirt." Or it can mean "supporting the cause, but didn't know about this because it was so poorly publicized." Or it can mean "supporting the cause, but forgot when I got dressed." Or it can mean "supporting the cause but thinking it's stupid to show support for any cause in any way except by personally becoming a research scientist who personally solves the problem." Or it can mean "supporting the cause, but not choosing to demonstrate it via clothing." Still: I DID want to demonstrate it via clothing, and I was hoping the kids could too---especially with all the kids old enough this year to understand about bullying being wrong (Henry would like me to clarify that anti-bullying does not apply to white blood cells, which are allowed to bully and ostracize germs).

Fortunately, all three boys had shirts that contained at least a suggestion of being rainbow-striped. For example, Edward had a shirt striped in red, yellow, blue, and green. It's not RAINBOW-rainbow, and it's not purple, but I think there's room to interpret it as participation in this event---or at least not as active non-participation. If I was out today and saw a sea of people wearing purple and a few people wearing rainbowish stripes, I'd assume we were all on the same wave-length, intention-wise.

(I also changed the blog color for today, in case you read this in a reader and so have not yet been freaked out by it.)

Swistle Cards for the Holidays

2011-10-17T11:49:00.009-04:00

I have been very busy and flustered this morning, because I got an email from Zazzle that holiday cards are 50% off today and through October 20th (code is CARD4HOLIDAY) [edit: new sale is 60% off through November 4th with code UPTOSIXTYOFF], or 75% off if you order more than 75 (code is JOY2THEWORLD) [this one I don't know if it has a new code/expiration, but I don't think so] and I've been meaning since LAST Christmas to update the Holiday Card Scoring System card (it ties in to this post), so that I'd be poised to order more for THIS year as soon as a deal like this came along. LAST year I made the "Swistle's Holiday Card Scoring System" card---but then when I ordered some, I realized it didn't really make any sense to have my name on there. So on the new version I've taken that out. (The old version is still in the shop, so don't get confused.) Here's the new version:

Swistle "Holiday Card Scoring System" Holiday Card by Swistle

The inside says "Happy/Merry Holidays," and between the word Merry and the word Holidays is a list of holidays. I went back and forth on whether to include Eid, because it's not always at the same time of year as the others---but then I thought, really, I've already got things kind of messy by having the "pre-Dec 1st" and "post-Dec 25th" part in the rules (hmm, I wonder which holiday Swistle herself celebrates!), and leaving it out might look like exclusion for reasons other than timing, so perhaps this is a time when inclusiveness can be prioritized over ~~making sense~~ accuracy.

I ordered some myself, and because I bought more than 75, I got them for 76 cents each including the shipping, which I'd say is PRETTY ROCKING considering they're $2.95 each without the sale.

And I'm posting it in case you are still looking for holiday cards for this year, because I think we all have some people on our card list who could stand to review the rules.

What I've Been Up to This Weekend

2011-10-16T08:25:00.007-04:00

• Watching Breakfast at Tiffany's (Netflix link) for the first time. I had NO IDEA what the plot was (I'd expected it to take place mostly in a restaurant), but it seemed like the sort of cultural literacy I should acquire. I think of it as being mostly famous for Holly Golightly's fashion style, and I'd say that is what I most enjoyed about the movie. I didn't feel any romantic chemistry between the stars (they seemed like good friends who had to force themselves to kiss) or any hope for their future romantic relationship (as with As Good as It Gets ((Netflix link)), I thought a far better plot resolution would have been for the stars to form a non-romantic family unit), but I did weep openly over the cat storyline. The portrayal of the upstairs neighbor is embarrassing but historically interesting. I loved the clerk at Tiffany's.

• Ordering another 3-pound box of Russell Stover Bloopers. It went SO WELL last time and, like a gambler, either success or failure makes me feel even more intrigued. Will the next box be as good? or will it be a TOTAL BUST? It's due to arrive Thursday. It is fun to have something to anticipate.

• Starting Divergent, which I'm trying ONLY because of all the talk on Twitter. For Twittercultural literacy. The cover doesn't look like my kind of book at all, and I think of young-adult stuff as not my thing either, so I let it sit on the library pile for two weeks. I kept finishing a book and taking another book from underneath it. But this morning I sighed and thought I'd just get it over with---and 5 pages in, I was hooked enough that I had to rip myself away from it.

And now I have to STOP reading it, because writing the above paragraph reminded me to renew it because it's due tomorrow, and I noticed The Leftovers was also due tomorrow so I tried to renew that one too but I couldn't because it's on hold for someone else. So I need to read THAT, and THEN I can go back to Divergent. The Leftovers is another one I have been putting off reading, because I'm still not sure if I liked Little Children (that's weird: the one I read had goldfish crackers as the cover art, but the one I just linked to has cookies; I wonder if Pepperidge Farm complained?), and because fiction that involves a religious plot element can be dicey: sometimes it's helpful and thought-provoking, sometimes it's good for recreational anger, sometimes it's just kind of tiring and upsetting.

• Painting my nails with Sally Hansen Xtreme Wear in 130 Blue Me Away.

It is difficult to get a photo of fingernail polish that looks good and represents the color accurately. But this is a polish that looks exactly the same on the nails as it looks in the bottle, so if you pick up the bottle you will know what it looks like.

Soldier Care Packages

2011-10-15T13:06:00.003-04:00

When I posted about the frustration of not knowing what to send to soldiers, jennie w. commented that there was a site called Any Soldier, where people could find actual lists from actual soldiers. I clicked over there and I am a little dazzled. For someone who likes to send care packages but gets anxious about overdoing it and/or sending someone a bunch of stuff they don't need/want, this is like some sort of heaven.

I think this ties in beautifully with Doing My Best's Crappy Day Presents idea (see the upper-right of her blog for more about CDPs, with examples), and it's another outlet for those of us who love to do things like that. It is extremely fun for me to buy things for people, especially when I can find those things on clearance (GOOD things, not cheap ugly things---but at 1/4th the price). Looking through the lists of soldier wish lists, my heart was pounding. They need twin-sized sheets, and I OFTEN find twin-sized sheets on 75% off---and in fact, I have several sets still in their packages for when the current sets wear out, and so have had to pass by many a nice clearance. And they want things like snack foods, and I often see those on clearance. And vitamins, and I sometimes see those on clearance. And really, I now see the clearance sections in a WHOLE NEW LIGHT. I'd been thinking, "Oh, that's such a great deal on cute stationery, I wish I didn't already have more than I can ever use," and "Oooo, gum on clearance, but that's not the flavor Paul likes," and "Wow, all those DVDs for only $5 each, but I use Netflix now." BUT I CAN BUY THEM FOR THE SOLDIERS.

And I subscribe to People magazine, and there are GIRL SOLDIERS WHO LIKE PEOPLE MAGAZINE. In fact, you can send a package specifically to "any FEMALE soldier" if it seems more fun to put together a package of nice shampoo and tampons and hair elastics and People magazines and Maeve Binchy paperbacks from the library 25-cent book sale, instead of a box of SpongeBob DVDs and car magazines and Speed Stick.

And I can just buy an item here (box of caffeinated fruit-flavored water enhancer, $2) and an item there (set of twin sheets on 75% off, $6.24), and set them aside until I have enough for a box. I think one of the best parts is knowing that if something in the box is something that's needed by the recipient, they can definitely find someone else who will want it.

It's hard to CHOOSE someone, though. There are SO MANY. SuperJules and I were wishing we had more filter options: you can already sort by service branch, where the unit is from, number of women/men---but we'd like to be able to sort in other ways. I'd like to be able to search for specific items, so that I could find areas that specifically want books, or specifically want People magazines, or whatever. Jules wants to be able to double-filter, so that we can find, for example, a larger team that has received fewer packages. I'd also like to be able to sort by pitifullness, so that I can give priority to the lone female asking for hair elastics and wishing the base store had pads instead of only tampons, and ignore the group looking for a mini-fridge for their PlayStation area. Just clicking through one request link after another is overwhelming, and makes it feel like it's not even worth it to send a single-drop box into the need-ocean.

By the way, the USPS has free flat-rate boxes for this, and I lovvvvvvve flat-rate boxes. I can get a little squirrely about mailing stuff, otherwise. But with a flat-rate box, you just fill it up and you know exactly how much it will cost to mail. And it's pretty amazing to be able to mail a box across the world for $12.95. It's not like $12.95 is pocket change, but I can come up with it now and then---and it's nothing like the cost it would be if it weren't APO/FPO: I once mailed a very small package to Norway and it was so much money I nearly blacked out, something like $30 to mail a baby outfit and a rattle.

I'm a little nervous about the customs forms, though. I don't know how to do those, and new things make me fearful and avoidant. I will hope that the fun of mailing the first box will motivate me to plow through that experience, and after that I will know just what to do and won't have to fret about it anymore.

Light-Headed Sentimentality

2011-10-14T09:07:00.003-04:00

Whenever I donate blood, there is a nice wide range of other people also giving blood. But last night was a particularly good mix, the kind that a writer might well take liberties in INVENTING, just to make a story about the milk of human kindness a little more touching. But no, these were my actual companions:

1. A goth girl, late teens, looking like she wanted everyone to know this did NOT mean she cared about HUMANITY or anything, she was JUST trying to increase her PALLOR.

2. The classic cheerful, loud, tall, balding, beer-bellied, beer-logo-baseball-cap wearin' man, also wearin', I am not even kidding, a United States flag shirt where the entire shirt was made of flag design. With light-wash jeans and high-top sneakers.

3. A petite churchy Midwestern-type lady in slacks and a turtleneck and a little blazer all in appropriate dark neutrals, sitting with very good posture and ankles crossed, using reading glasses to study the book she was holding up right in front of her face to avoid curving her neck down.

Oh, it is SO TEMPTING to make this list EVEN BETTER. Like, I could add a guy in a suit and tie, right? And another guy from a messy trade---a painter, maybe, or a car mechanic, with paint/oil all over his clothes. And then I could add a party-type woman, and perhaps a geeky high school boy. Or at the very least I could add a necklace worn over the petite woman's turtleneck.

But I will refrain from embellishing. Those three people who were actually there, plus me as the "plump make-up-less mother-type in jeans and a not entirely clean t-shirt and sporty mary janes" made a FINE tear-eliciting, we're-all-in-this-together assortment. More would just be pushing it.

Swistle Accent Vlog

2011-10-13T08:54:00.003-04:00

FINE. GEEZ!

I wish it had included the words people remark on my pronunciation of: comfortable (which I say as four syllables: com-for-ta-ble, not comf-ter-ble) and always (which I say OH-wees, to Paul's unceasing amusement).

Here are the notes:

Say the following words:
Aunt, route, wash, oil, theatre, iron, salmon, caramel, fire, water, sure, data, ruin, crayon, toilet, New Orleans, pecan, both, again, probably, spitting image, Alabama, lawyer, coupon, mayonnaise, syrup, pajamas, caught

And answer these questions:
What is it called when you throw toilet paper on a house?
What is the bug that curls into a ball when you touch it?
What is the bubbly carbonated drink called?
What do you call gym shoes?
What do you say to address a group of people?
What do you call the kind of spider that has an oval-shaped body and extremely long legs?
What do you call your grandparents?
What do you call the wheeled contraption in which you carry groceries at the supermarket?
What do you call it when rain falls while the sun is shining?
What is the thing you use to change the TV channel?

Litany

2011-10-11T07:30:00.004-04:00

I read Life of a Doctor's Wife's complaint department post this morning and started to leave a comment---and after four paragraphs I cut and paste it over here, because HONESTLY. But then I went and did a summary comment on her post, too, because I got conflicted: if one of my commenters took AWAY a comment because it was "too long," I'd be all "BRING IT BACK!! I WANT IT!! THERE IS NO SPACE LIMIT!!"

So anyway, these are the things making me crazy this morning:

1. My 12-year-old son keeps turning off his alarm clock, then getting in the shower---and 9 minutes later it turns out he hit snooze instead of turning the alarm off. And he shares a room, and his room is across two feet of hallway from the room of his other two brothers. So then I have three sleepy, cranky boys awake, and one oblivious boy in the shower.

2. My 6-year-old daughter has been pitching sulky fits over EVERYTHING. And I mean like LONG-ESTABLISHED rules that make TOTAL SENSE. For example, she'll out of the blue assume that even though she ALWAYS goes to bed earlier than the two older boys, she can stay up as late as they do. And then when I say incredulously that NO, she ALWAYS goes to bed at this time, she SULKS. Or, after her teeth have been brushed and it's only 10 minutes until bedtime, she asks for ice cream---and when I say no, she acts as if she had been PROMISED ice cream and then was UNFAIRLY DENIED it. This morning she is sulking and weeping and stomping because she has to GET DRESSED. As if she has been WRONGED in some way.

3. We keep getting memos from the school, filled with giant typos. The MANUAL is filled with giant typos. On one hand, big deal. On the other hand, this is a SCHOOL!! A school that has come up short on its last two state evaluations! So perhaps we could make a little effort to appear as if we know the difference between "your" and "you're" ourselves, before we teach it to children! KTHX for you're consideraton in this matter!

4. Our grocery store keeps being totally out of a few things on my list---different things from visit to visit, but with common repeat offenders. So every time I go, there are a few important things I can't get. I realize we are lucky not to have to stand in line with ration tickets or whatever, but we ARE IN FACT fortunate to live in a time and place of abundantly-stocked grocery stores and so I WANT TO BUY MY GROUND TURKEY AND BABY SPINACH, AND I DO NOT WANT TO COME BACK TOMORROW FOR THESE COMPLETELY REASONABLE THINGS.

5. Mother-in-law's estate is still not settled. In 3 weeks, it will have been 2 years. And it is a simple estate, with not much value and with only two children to receive it equally. I realize these things take time...but perhaps they SHOULDN'T.

6. I need to make a recipe, for a post. And the recipe is meant to use leftover turkey, but I don't HAVE leftover turkey. I went to the grocery store and looked at turkeys and concluded that no, I did not want to buy and cook a turkey just to get leftover turkey, so I asked the meat department guy about it and he was kind of crabby, as if he isn't really getting joy out of matching the right customer with the right meat. I told him that what I was looking for was "like, just like a package of chicken breasts, but turkey," and he said crabbily, "Well, they wouldn't be the same size: a turkey breast is much bigger." Me: "...Okay. But what I mean is 'LIKE' that: a smallish piece of turkey, without bones, in a package, not ground." So then he was willing to admit that he guessed he did have one tenderloin (me: not knowing what a tenderloin is, not really caring at that point), and then he was trying to tell me where it was and he was getting exasperated: "No, THERE. No, DOWN MORE. *sigh* Next to the ground turkey!" Me: looking at the three tiers of ground turkey, wondering which of the three shelves he means.

Anyway, I left with a 1.6-pound turkey tenderloin, and now it occurs to me that I have to somehow COOK it. Before tonight. And I don't know how, and I still don't know what a tenderloin is, and when I look it up I keep finding recipe for "turkey tenderloinS," and it shows these little discs of meat, and that is not what I have. I have a CHUNK. Somebody just TELL ME HOW TO COOK IT SO THAT I HAVE WHAT LOOKS LIKE LEFTOVER TURKEY MEAT. Or else tell me quick that I screwed it all up, and I'll go back and get a turkey and cook that sucker.

HolidayPools

2011-10-10T11:45:00.007-04:00

Paul has the day off today, and the schools are out too. We have William's friend Clarissa here for the day, because her parents both work for companies that don't get Columbus Day off. Every time there's an odd day off like this, I get cranky again on behalf of working parents. People can't be taking every third Monday off for non-celebrated holidays, Teacher Workshop Days, etc., just because they have children. What a huge pain in the butt for them! There has to be a better way.

One idea would be to form little groups---like carpools, but HolidayPools. Except that term makes it sound like sharing a holiday, when actually it's more like sharing an unpaid vacation day and the care of children who would normally be in school or daycare. And SchoolPools would be catchy, but sounds like a homeschooling concept. Well, let's use HolidayPool for the purposes of this post, but with the understanding that it's only a working title until we think of something better.

Let's say two 2-child families HolidayPooled: every other holiday, ONE family would arrange take a day off, and BOTH sets of kids would stay with that family. If all four parents were able to take one day off each, that means each employee would only miss one day of work for every four problem days.

Or, for example, in Clarissa's family, she's the youngest, and her older brother no longer needs care on days off. If there were four such families, each family would cover one out of every four problem days (and could be on call in case any of the four older siblings had an emergency)---but if there were eight parents, that means each employee misses only one day of work for every eight problem days.

Sigh. But oh, man, what a hassle to set up the groups each year, and lots of people don't know enough families with same-age children, but also wouldn't want to leave their kids with strangers. Well, it's a huge hassle no matter what. And it seems like a ton of people must be in this boat. Surely there is a market for a business to handle this? The school sometimes has partial coverage: like, during week-long vacations and Christmas break, they have a (pretty expensive) program kids can attend. (Which also provides jobs for any teachers who can't afford to take the vacation time.) But right now they don't have anything for one-day holidays or for Teacher Workshop days. And even in a household with an at-home parent (Beth Fish had an article long ago about how "never having to worry about taking a day off for all this stuff" is one of the benefits she hoped her working husband was aware of), I feel like these days happen really often---so they must seem all the more often to people who have to think of a solution every time.

The More Likely Explanation

2011-10-09T07:54:00.007-04:00

A ladies' organization in our town is collecting letters to send to a unit of soldiers overseas. I've contributed a few cards, because I've seen the pleas in the paper and it's increasingly clear to me that the people collecting the letters are making a strong connection between "number of letters collected" and "whether anyone could care less whether these soldiers live or die," and are getting themselves very upset about the town's apparent lack of feeling/caring, and I'd like to help alleviate that. But they've failed to take into account the more likely explanation in situations like this (where one group is begging another group to take action but failing to get the desired response), which is that people care very much whether the soldiers live or die, but don't think the letter-writing thing is such a great idea.

I'm in that group, as you have cleverly surmised. If I knew a soldier overseas, I would BOMBARD him or her with letters. But I suspect anonymous letters from strangers to "Any Soldier" are less heartening/pleasing---especially when the letters are wrung from a public being pressured to send them. "Here, we've bought the cards, and we're paying the postage! All you have to do is sign your name to one of them! You don't even need to write anything! You don't even have to use your real name!!"

I'm also remembering back when I was in high school and got involved with a big Christmas-cards-to-soldiers campaign. I sent out a whole bunch of cards, and I got a whole bunch of replies, and almost every single reply took the conversation in a sexual direction right away---sometimes for pages and pages. One guy, after a couple of letter exchanges (mine: prim Christian schoolgirl persevering in my earnest attempt to bring homefront comfort to soldiers; his: continuing to ask about the color of my underwear and what size bra I wear) said that they had a bet going among the soldiers in his building to see who could get a woman to mail a pair of underpants first.

That's the sort of thing that sticks in my mind when I imagine writing a letter to build up the morale of a soldier. It's the sort of thing that makes me think a pile of earnest floral notecards from middle-aged women is a waste of everyone's good intentions---and possibly the kind of sepia-toned fantasy (homesick upstanding young man reading letter by lantern in army tent; the music swells as we see the tears beginning to shine in his eyes; he fights on with a renewed sense of the love of the homefront he yearns to protect) that shouldn't be indulged. So although I filled out a few cards to please the people collecting them, I also went out and bought Twizzlers, Skittles, a Best of Saturday Night Live DVD, foot powder, lip balm, instant energy-drink powder, an electronic Solitaire game with batteries, floss, pens, and baby wipes, to please the actual soldiers. (Though I did not include a pair of underpants THIS time, EITHER.) It's possible these things, too, will be wrong: as I was shopping I was wondering if maybe they already get lip balm and foot powder easily, and if they have whole video game systems and don't really need a primitive handheld. I think this is why it works better to mail things to people we know, who can tell us what they need/want. But either way, these things will please the people trying to do nice things for the soldiers, the ones who are nervous that lack of response to their idea means bad things.

********
New on the review blog: Through November 4th, Unilever (Degree, Dove, Suave) deodorant for tweens, with a $100 Visa gift card giveaway. The entry question is how old were you when you started using deodorant, and/or how old were your kids. (I like to make the prompt something that I'm interested in hearing the answer to, since I'll be reading a few hundred of them!)

Over-Stimulated

2011-10-06T17:16:00.012-04:00

Are we all still lying awake at night, going through our entire mental rolodex and trying to figure out who is a sociopath? This will pass as the information is absorbed. But in the meantime I am a little bit over-stimulated.

********

I propose a new term. (Aw. Remember Sniglets? Yes. We remember Sniglets.) The term is "recreational anger." Recreational anger is the kind of anger that is fun or entertaining or enjoyable to participate in. The kind of anger that people SEEK OUT because they like the exhilaration of being angry, not because the anger makes anything different. Recreational anger is not SUPPOSED to fix the anger-inducing problem, because if it DID fix the problem, there would no longer be the fun of being angry about it. The POINT is "being angry about it."

Recreational anger ties in to The Giant Internet Hand of Spanking: people who work themselves into a large and exciting froth over some small and often accidental/unintentional violation are participating in Recreational Anger. They are outraged not because the violation is so outrageous, and not because the outrage will change/fix/improve the violation, but because it is so much fun to be outraged in a group. Recreational anger is a hugely bonding and exciting and fun activity for participants, but causes a backlash of both recreational and genuine anger from others.

I am neither FOR or AGAINST Recreational Anger. Or rather, more accurately, I am BOTH for and against it, depending on whether or not I am participating in it.

********

Rob is 5'6" and is getting a suspicious pre-pimpley reddening around his mouth and nose. He will be 13 on his next birthday. His best friend is dating someone. One of his homework assignments this week involved asking a parent about the Gestapo. My friend's son is a year older than Rob, and his voice has changed and he is SHAVING.

********

Elizabeth is so shy in class, she can't talk to her teachers. I asked her what she does if she needs to ask a question, and she said she tries never to have to do that. At Open House, the teacher asked "Oh, who did you bring with you tonight, Elizabeth?" and Elizabeth was unable to answer or to even look up from the floor. At home, Elizabeth is confident to the point of bossiness; we have to say to her, "Elizabeth, you are not the grown-up." We've just learned that things are different at school. (OH NO. MAYBE IT'S BECAUSE HER TEACHER IS A SOCIOPATH!)

********

I'm supposed to help Elizabeth and Edward practice their spelling words. After three nights of practice, Elizabeth could spell all the words. Edward was still spelling them as if we'd never practiced them a single time. (Example: spelling "pencil" spelled "pesl".) But Edward is comfortable in his classroom and with his teacher, and that makes this a sub-fret to the Elizabeth shyness fret.

*********

Henry has on two occasions bitten another student. I used to work in a daycare and I remember how serious an issue biting could be. When the teacher reported it to me, my mental circuits got too overloaded for me to say my PERFECTLY EASY AND SCRIPTED LINE ("Thank you for telling me. I'll have a talk with him"). Instead I launched into a pained, awkward, slightly-crazy series of remarks and facial expressions, in which I was trying to subtly communicate everything that was overloading my circuits ("I believe you! I am on your side! My mother was a teacher, and I will not flip out and defend my child like I know other parents do!! I used to work at a daycare and I know how serious this is and I am nervous I will not be able to stop him from doing this and he will get kicked out because you will think he might be a sociopath!") without coming out and saying any of it, so that I accidentally communicated things that were blathery, awkward, ambiguous, and hard to respond to. Now I keep going over it in my head, comparing The Way It Should Have Gone (and so EASILY, too!) with The Way It Did In Fact Go. Woe.

The Kids are All Right; The Sociopath Next Door

2011-10-05T09:27:00.017-04:00

I've been watching The Kids are All Right, and OMG AWKWARD/TENSE.

(photo from Amazon.com)

Do you see on the cover, how the two mothers and two children are having a lovely laughing lunch on the patio with the sperm donor? NO. The whole lunch is an interview of awkward bad questions and awkward unexpected answers that go over poorly ("But I distinctly remember you said in your donor profile that you were interested in international studies?" "Nah, I just ditched all that, because college is a waste of time!" "...I see"), and I just wanted to be ANYWHERE BUT AT THAT LOVELY LUNCH.

And then throughout the movie there is all this snippy bickery unreasonable psychobabble between the two women, and then there is teenagery mouthing off from the kids. And the sperm-donor guy is all laid-back and go-with-the-flowish, and sometimes people were finding it awesome that he was like this and sometimes they were finding it intolerable, and I found them annoying no matter WHAT their reaction was.

Multiple times so far while watching it I have said OUT LOUD, "Oh no no no no no" accompanied by HEAVY WINCING, and I am only on the first hour of it. I don't like the parents or their relationship, I don't like the children or their attitudes, and I don't like how the donor is changing everything around. Also: gratuitous sex. BUT: I keep watching. Because I want to know what happens, and because this is interesting subject matter to mull when I'm not wincing.

Next! I finished reading The Sociopath Next Door.

(photo from Amazon.com)
(also, I am kind of done seeing those creepy eyes now)

As with other sociology/psychology-for-the-masses books, it seems like it's one chapter's worth of material forced by necessity into book-length. I always imagine the authors repeatedly using word-count: "CRAP, still 70,000 words to go!!!...*checking again*...CRAP, now it's 69,901 to go!! I'll take out all the contractions, that'll...I mean THAT WILL help!" I did a ton of skimming: I'd hit a section that was such a total repeat I thought I must have mis-marked my place in the book, and I'd just glide past until it got back to something new. Or I'd get to a case study that was so drawn out I felt like I was reading an actual transcription of that person's life (MUST WE read EVERY LINE of the NEIGHBORS' dialog? MUST WE read what they were EATING as they TALKED?), and I would skimmmmmmmmm until I got to the next little burst of actual material. I also skipped right past stories of animals being hurt/killed: I'm familiar with that part of sociopaths, and I don't need a several-page description to remind me. It's too upsetting to read, and not necessary.

But I strongly recommend that you ~~read~~ skim/read the book too, because the actual material SHORTED OUT MY CIRCUITS. I think of sociopaths as being, you know, the cold-blooded serial killers who as children tortured animals. But the author says that about 4% of the population qualifies as sociopaths, and that the definition includes a lot more than our stock image: most sociopaths aren't violent; they marry and have children; they have jobs as teachers and psychologists and managers. In fact, ESPECIALLY those jobs.

The gist is that a sociopath is someone who understands concepts like love and empathy, but doesn't feel them---and furthermore thinks those concepts are for idiots and cattle, and doesn't WANT to feel them. They tend to be bored, so they play life like a game. Sociopaths can't be "fixed," or trained to feel those feelings. It's not a matter of explaining how they're hurting you so that they'll stop, because they already know that they're doing it, and they're doing it on purpose for that very reason. Most mind-blowing to me: most sociopaths are excellent at FAKING that they DO feel love and empathy: tears, declarations of love and friendship and admiration, being charming and friendly and sweet, etc. If you accuse them of the things they're doing, they'll act hurt---while behind the scenes, they're wondering how far they can push you to believe them instead of yourself, and whether they can make you believe you're the crazy one. As in a mystery novel, such false clues are there for camouflage, and as part of the game. CRAZY.

Reading it, I recognized one of my mother's former co-workers. It was very, very odd to read each sentence and think "Wait!! That's what happened with HER!!" "Wait!! That's EXACTLY how things went!!" I told my mother about it over lunch, and she was remembering little details and pretty much every single one was IN THE BOOK. I found it a huge, huge relief to read it and know that there was an EXPLANATION for why the world seemed to go nuts for awhile there, while other people just WATCHED---and in fact GATHERED AROUND the sociopath in support. It was so perplexing and stressful, and it makes more sense now. It was all a game, a very cleverly played GAME.

The author says that one of the odd things about experiences with sociopaths is that people don't DO anything about it. They can't believe it could actually be happening, and they can't understand how a sociopath's mind works, so they keep thinking "But how could someone do something like that? How could someone have so little regard for someone's feelings? And WHY would they do something like that to someone who never did anything to them?" It makes no sense, so we conclude it isn't true. And the way a sociopath sets things up, WE'D look crazy if we said anything. So we don't, and we fit into the game.

One of the most helpful parts of the book for me was how to figure out if you're dealing with an actual sociopath, as opposed to someone kind of mean and thoughtless, or someone you just have a personality conflict with. A sociopath will (1) repeatedly do mean or inexplicable or thoughtless or inconsiderate things, AND (2) do a "pity play" so you don't do anything about it. The author says: "...bear in mind that the combination of consistently bad or egregiously inadequate behavior with frequent plays for your pity is as close to a warning mark on a conscienceless person's forehead as you will ever be given."

Anyway. I think you should read it. I felt like after I read it, I had a very different outlook on a lot of things, and felt more aware of things around me---but WITHOUT suddenly feeling paranoid about everything. It was more like "Oh!! I felt crazy about ditching that friendship/boss/boyfriend, but this is exactly how it was happening!" And also a good reminder that just because it knows how to quack like a duck doesn't make it a duck: those of us who tend to be a little trusting of smiles and nice words can use a reminder from time to time that we can't let those things distract us from actions that don't match.

Assumptions

2011-10-03T10:55:00.007-04:00

Normally my grocery cart is completely representative: three gallons of milk, five loaves of bread, two big blocks of cheese, four pounds of ground turkey, two dozen eggs, a bag of apples, peanut butter and pizza sauce and bananas and baby carrots and apple juice. You could make a pretty good guess about my life, seeing me in my jeans and ponytail at the grocery store at 9:00 in the morning with that cart.

But the other day, when I was running in to get just a couple of odd things and then doing a little impulse-buying, my cart looked totally different: diet Coke, bottle of wine, bag of baby spinach, two small individually-wrapped pieces of salmon, box of Dove ice cream bars, large bag of cat food, small potted plant. It was odd thinking about what kind of different guess someone would make about my life with THAT cart.

I know people sometimes assume certain things about me because of how many children I have. It's not common in our culture or in my area of the country to have so many, and sometimes I don't get a haircut for a long time and I have my hair twisted up in a clip, and no make-up on, and people are thinking, "Hm, religious sect? But she's not wearing a skirt. Catholic, maybe?" People are more likely to think (true or not) that I bake, that I homeschool, that I breastfed, that I'm good with other people's kids, that I believe in God, that I'm opposed to birth control and swearing, that I'm a Republican, that I'm possessed of cow-like patience.

This doesn't make me feel prickly: I know the signals I send out can be misleading, and I make assumptions all the time, too. For example, when I see a woman out with children, I almost inevitably make the mistake of unthinkingly assuming that the children she's with are (1) all hers and (2) all the children she has. If she has an infant, there's no reason she couldn't have several other kids in school or whatever, but I look at her and think, "Awww, I remember those days, just me and my infant firstborn!" She could be looking back at me and thinking, "Awww, I remember those days when it was just me and my 4-year-old, before I had the other eight kids!" Or, if it's when Henry is in preschool, she could be thinking, "She's not a mom, so she's probably feeling critical about the way my kids are acting up."

One reason it's fun that Henry is going to the kind of preschool where the parents have to wait outside to be let in at pick-up time is that over the course of the year I get to find out many of my misassumptions. I see a woman waiting with her little boy to pick up her daughter each day, and then one day when she's telling me about her pregnancy, I find out she has a third-grader, and this will be her second baby, and the boy and girl are a nephew and niece she's taking care of because her sister is on bedrest. Another woman is picking up her own son, but the baby girl in her arms is a child she babysits. One woman has what I think is late-in-life only child, and it turns out he's a caboose: her other children are in high school. A woman my own age turns out to be a preschooler's grandmother: she was a high-school-aged parent, and so was her son. The one guy in the group isn't a stay-at-home dad: he works second shift.

Do you ever feel like people are assuming something about you that's different than what the situation is? Have you learned a real story behind one of your own misassumptions? I love stories like that.

Happy Song; Gel Pack; Free Coffee

2011-10-01T08:24:00.006-04:00

Here's a happy song Paul found:

Handheld, by Momus

It's a person singing a love song to his favorite handheld device, and then the handheld device sings back to him. The funny thing is that I can get genuinely choked up over this song. Well, it isn't funny or surprising to my family, as they have also seen me get genuinely choked up over a child's project on the life cycle of the monarch butterfly.

********

One of the irritating short people who lives in our house took a plastic ice pack and, while it was thawed and pliable, wove it in and out of the middle bars of a freezer shelf.

I went several months thinking that probably one day we'd defrost the freezer and we could get it out THEN, and then yesterday I couldn't stand it anymore and I used a knife and a hammer. There are shards of this stuff scattered, though I got as many as I could because I see the packet says DO NOT INGEST and DO NOT GET INTO EYES and OMG PLEASE DON'T EVEN LOOK AT IT.

********

You know how some bags of Starbucks coffee say that you can exchange the empty bag for a coffee at Starbucks? Do the Starbuckses located within Target stores take those? I could just ask them, I suppose, but I hate asking questions like that. Sometimes the person I ask seems like their goal is to explain at length why it is outrageous of me to expect a positive answer to the question I asked so extremely deferentially and non-expectantly, and so then I end up saying over and over, "Yes, no, I get it....No, I just wondered...No, I completely understand...No, of course you couldn't...Really, you SHOULDN'T, it would be WRONG to...no, I see. Okay. Okay. Okay. YES, okay! Okay, I think I hear my mother calling me."

So I thought I'd just ask you.

Skinny Pants; The Girl My Boyfriend Cheated on Me With, Revisited; Gift Card Plan

2011-09-29T08:14:00.011-04:00

I accidentally bought Rob a pair of skinny pants. Ha ha ha, he looked so funny! And he's mostly clueless about what he wears, he just takes the top pair of pants and the top t-shirt from his drawer, so he didn't even notice that he was wearing nearly-skin-tight stretch corduroys all day. With loafers and athletic socks and a polo shirt, I am not even kidding you. Paul and I were exchanging snort-suppressed glances all day. I put the pants in the donation bag as soon as I saw them come through the laundry. Luckily they were on clearance---and besides, the day of snorting was totally worth the price.

********

Do you remember me telling you about the girl my boyfriend cheated on me with in high school? She's the one I felt some pity for because when we ran into each other last summer she was wearing a Winnie-the-Pooh t-shirt, and I've seen her a number of times since then and she is NEVER wearing such things, she is ALWAYS wearing cute clothes (not ANNOYINGLY cute, just basic cute---like, cute capris and a pretty cami with an unbuttoned casual-but-fitted shirt over it), so I felt sorry for her because it was probably Desperation Laundry Status at her house and she borrowed a shirt from her oldest child or from her High School Memories box or something, and then THAT'S the day she runs into the girl whose boyfriend she messed around with. Embarrassing.

ANYWAY, her daughter is in William's class this year. As I discovered when I went to Parent Night last night. Oh, HI.

********

I was thinking about how many gift cards I was going to want to buy at Christmastime this year, with all five kids in school. Well, really FOUR kids, because Rob is in middle school, and once a child has half a dozen teachers I don't do holiday teacher gifts anymore. So it's six teachers total: one for William, one each for Elizabeth and Edward plus a teaching assistant shared between their two classrooms, and two for Henry. Plus two bus drivers. Plus we have an excellent mail carrier and I like to give her a gift card too.

That's nine gift cards. Which made me feel like ditching the whole thing, until I realized it's about twelve weeks until Christmas and I usually go to Target once a week. If I add a gift card to my cart each time I go, the cost will be more evenly spread out, and I'll be less likely to get overwhelmed by it. Plus, I won't hold up the line by getting my giant heap of small-amount gift cards charged up. I'm glad to have thought of a solution, because it IS something I WANT to do.

One problem I noticed today: they don't have the holiday-themed gift cards out yet. But they did have a pretty butterfly one, which sounds like it would look spring-like but I don't think it does, and so I chose that.

See? It's not holiday, but I don't think it looks ANTI-holiday. If I squint, it looks like two Christmas ornaments! Or a bikini top. Festive!

Can't Get a Date

2011-09-27T23:04:00.009-04:00

Have I ever steered you wrong with book/movie recommendations? If so, never mind. But if NOT, then may I suggest Can't Get a Date? (Is this ONLY available on Netflix? Surely not! And yet. And that's the disc I watched, with six episodes. So if you don't have Netflix, NEVER MIND AGAIN.)

Here is what it is: it's a show about people who are totally and perfectly charming people, and yet can't get a date because they are accidentally representing their awesome selves as non-awesome. There are six of them, and I would date ANY ONE OF THEM except that they are all gay and so none of them would have a flip's interest in me. Okay, and also Mandy is too crazy for me and Robert is too uptight but WHATEVER, what I mean is that every single one of them made me feel like why CAN'T they get a date when they are SO AWESOME?? Including Mandy and Robert, because MY taste in laid-back guys has NOTHING to do with other people's intrinsic dateability.

And the real star of the show is the voice-over narrator guy, who asks the hard/funny questions and gets the hard/funny answers and also can I date HIM? because he would probably be my first choice, despite being (1) faceless and (2) kind of unflinching, hard-truth-wise and (3) maybe also gay? it's hard to tell.

Anyway. I laughed. I cried. I had another drink and stayed up way past bedtime for pretty much the first intentional time since having children (i.e., staying up because someone is barfing doesn't count). So you might like it too.

Everyone Can Go Back to School Tomorrow

2011-09-27T10:28:00.003-04:00

We have a virus going through our house. Henry got it first: he was kind of tired and dazed and quiet, which should have tipped me off but I was just grateful, and then he got a fever of 103, and he said his throat hurt so I thought "Oh please not strep, please not strep"---and then the next day he was fine. No fever. No sore throat. No quietness.

I wondered at first if maybe the fever killed it off before it took root? or something? We go by what our pediatrician says, which is basically "Fever is good! Make friends with it! Invite it to come over and play! Unless it gets Unspecified Too High, at which point you should panic and freak out and we'll reproach you for not panicking earlier!" (Note: they do not reproach us, except in my head when I am fretting.) The pediatrician's nurse said she draws the line at 102: before 102, let the fever do its work; at 102 and above, medicate if the child is uncomfortable, or let it go if not. My own line is "Try to medicate before they start fever-barfing." (This is a difficult line to find.)

Anyway, I would have been patting fever on the back in a congratulatory manner, except then Rob and Elizabeth got 103 degree fevers and sore throats, and Rob's was 1/10th of a degree from being 104, and they were red-faced and miserable and didn't want to watch television, and both of them fell asleep on chairs in the living room. And they both felt better the next day---and that's when William and Edward got 103-degree fevers and sore throats. And Paul came home from work early with a 103-degree fever and a sore throat, and THAT'S when I got a little alarmed, because kids get fevers all the time but adults often don't. So I googled it, and all I could find were reassurances that adult fevers under 101 were nothing to be concerned about, except of course if it's the first sign of cancer, so don't be ridiculous! Okay, thanks! I'll come back when I'm wondering about an adult fever under 101!

Today EVERYONE IS HOME. Paul is home from work. None of the kids are going to school: two of them are probably well enough, but I didn't want to be like "Oh, hi, I'm calling in THREE of my children with high fevers and sore throats, but here are the other two for you okay bye see you after school!" The good news is that everyone's pretty much fine today: even the sicker kids' fevers are down to "just a little warm," throats are no longer sore, or else sore but not getting worse. Requests for juice, water, applesauce, toast---those continue. It's the kind of sick where everyone is kind of enjoying being sick. Except me, the only one not sick and so HANDMAIDEN TO ALL.

This morning I escaped to the grocery store. We were running low on toast and apple juice and MIND-ALTERING SUBSTANCES. I took my sweet time. I walked down every single aisle. I also got a cup of coffee, which I've never done before because I don't get how it's supposed to work: it's a non-lidded styrofoam cup, and I don't know how to walk around with that while pushing a cart. Today I was willing to sacrifice the time it would take to play out that experiment. And it turns out I'm right: you kind of just have to stand there drinking it. I did manage to walk around, but I was pushing the cart with one hand and my waist, and there were a couple of times that clarified why I so often see coffee spilled all over the plastic seat and handle.

I came home reluctantly, with milk and eggs and juice and applesauce and bread and apple cider doughnuts and Kit-Kats and wine.

Some Mild Whining, Accompanied by Insignificant Fears and Disappointments

2011-09-25T16:33:00.009-04:00

I am a little disappointed, because as soon as Miss Grace wrote this:

I realized what I had on my hands here was a perfect excuse for a giveaway. So this morning I went rushing back to Target---and there were no more owl quilts. Nor were there any of the turtle quilts I'd dithered over and decided not to get and then changed my mind about when Stimey mentioned them.

So then on the way home (it was not really on the way) I went to a SECOND Target, and that Target had a few owl quilts and one turtle quilt, but still at full price. I even carried them all over to the price checker just to be sure.

So. Perfect chance for a giveway, thwarted. Plus, there was no other good clearance. I came home with a box of laundry detergent.

I also bought Elizabeth a pair of leggings because she has to wear pants twice a week for gym class and she haaaaaaaaaaates pants and her jeans don't fit her comfortably, so we'll try these. They're the kind that are kind of like sweatpants except a banded waist and bootcut ankles instead of elastic-cinched. But I'm pre-agitated because according to the school dress code, which I had to sign a paper saying I'd read and agreed to follow, "lounge pants and pajamas" are against school policy. And I ASSUME this policy is in place to prevent 8th grade girls from wearing low-slung pajama pants to school and NOT to prevent 1st grade girls from wearing non-jeans pants to gym class, and I further assume that NO ONE is going to (1) care or (2) call me out on this---but I don't really KNOW these things, do I, not ANY of them, so I'm mildly fretterpated and imagining conversations with the principal.

Also, Henry was sick over the weekend: his fever got up to 103.1, which is where even I start raising my eyebrows a little and wondering what the heck. And then...nothing really happened. His fever went down, and he didn't develop any other symptoms. But then today Rob has a fever, and just now William said he was so sleepy and did I think he should have a nap before dinner. So. Sick house time. I shouldn't be surprised: we have children in FOUR different school buildings now. We are going to get EVERYTHING.

And I chaperoned a field trip last week, and now I want to send a bunch of photos to the preschool because someone did that one year when I DIDN'T chaperon [this spelling bugs me too, I assure you, but spell-check and the dictionary both tell me it's the primary spelling even though "chaperone" looks better AND makes more sense] and I LOVED getting a couple of pictures of my kid on a field trip. But Snapfish is having an upload problem, and I emailed them about it and they say it's a known problem and they're working on it---but it's been several weeks and I am getting impatient and fretful.

And also I recently watched a movie and read a book, and both were sub-par. So as you can see, I have a hard life.

Owl Quilt; Practical Bath Mat; Your Duet With Jerry Seinfeld

2011-09-24T18:01:00.008-04:00

I've had my eye on a quilt at Target for ages.

This quilt.
(photo from Target.com)

Today I saw clearance stickers dotted all over that department, but I didn't get all excited because I hadn't seen clearance stickers there before. (That is, it was likely to be a 15% or 30% clearance, and Elizabeth already HAS a quilt so I wouldn't be able to justify it until 75% off and might as well not even get excited by the first sighting of clearance stickers.)

But then I saw some guy with four quilts in his cart, and that's an unusual thing to see, so I did a really fast sidle into the aisle: zoooooooop! And the owl quilt WAS 75% off. So I yoinked one into the cart (I resisted the urge to get caught up in the moment and take two or three) and it came home with me. It is adorable. I love it. There are hedgehogs and squirrels and owls and mushrooms and rainbow-striped trees, and the whole thing reminds me of something I might have had on my 1970s childhood bed. (What I actually had on my 1970s childhood bed was a white bedspread covered with little tiny white balls forming boring white patterns. I didn't like it. Which means in another 25 years I'll be scouring antique stores for one.)

********

We needed a bath mat for the downstairs bathroom, a bathroom that is mostly used by the boys. The bath mat goes in the small space between the shower and the toilet. I went with a color that could have been named Pee Yellow. It seemed practical.

********

I dreamed the other night that ONE OF YOU was singing a duet with Jerry Seinfeld. Jerry was sitting fully-dressed in a bathtub for his part, and YOU were singing your part in an adjacent room, also fully-dressed and looking very pretty standing in a sunbeam. I woke up thinking you would LOVE this story, but then I forgot about it until hours later when I was driving along and suddenly remembered it. But I couldn't remember any more WHICH OF YOU it was singing with Seinfeld, and that seems like a CRUCIAL ELEMENT of delighting you with this story.

Getting Smoke Smell Out of a Stuffed Animal; Timing Charity for Better Incentives; Sweets Placement Error

2011-09-21T11:54:00.005-04:00

Let's say that I ordered a replacement lovey for Elizabeth on eBay, and that now I vividly understand why sellers are so quick to say so when they are a smoke-free household. Let's further say that this is a LARGE stuffed animal (so that I'm not sure Febreze would get down deep enough) and not machine washable. What would we say I should do in this situation? Right now I have it sitting outside in the sun.

********

We give the same annual donation to St. Jude's no matter what, but I always time it so I send a check right after they send us a notepad and a sheet of address labels, because I use those things and want to encourage them to continue that method of trying to get money out of me. I never send them a check right after they send me a sad photo with a sad story, because that makes me go "ACK ACK ACK" and try to put those things in the recycling immediately so I don't accidentally see/read anything, and I DON'T want to encourage them to continue THAT method of trying to get money from me.

********

Upon further testing and reflection, the coffee-mug cupboard is not the right place for the stash of sweets. First thing in the morning, I open the cupboard to get a mug and it's "HI, REMEMBER US?? THINK OF US ALL DAY LONG, HOW 'BOUT!"

How Did You Meet?

2011-09-19T18:13:00.006-04:00

After reading this post ("I think we, as a society, have taken the ideas of 'fate' and 'taking the time to find that special someone' too far. And by 'too far' I mean 'nearly to the end of my childbearing years'"), I thought again about something I've thought of before, which is HOW DO PEOPLE MEET PEOPLE AFTER THEY'RE NO LONGER IN SCHOOL?

I didn't realize it at the time, especially with all the adults telling me to LIVE MY LIFE and ENJOY MY YOUTH and NOT SETTLE DOWN TOO SOON and NOT TRY TO GROW UP TOO FAST---but school is pretty much the only time of life when a person is surrounded by a pool of many single people of one's own approximate age. THE ONLY TIME. After that, it's workplaces, where people of varying degrees of age, intelligence, ability, and marriedness gather in varying degrees of randomness (i.e., if you work at Twooters, your coworkers will be of a more homogeneous type than if you work in a large office building).

I hedged my bets by finding TWO husbands in school. But what if instead of making a study of getting married, you used school as a time to distinguish yourself academically? What then? WHAT OH WHAT THEN?

Here is the information I am trying to elicit from you: where/how did you meet your significant other, especially if it was not in school? (But also if it WAS in school, because I don't know about you but I hate to be left out of answering such questions. And besides, the number who met someone outside of school means nothing if we don't have the number who met in school.)

It doesn't even have to be Your One & Only: if you met someone and had what you'd consider a solid relationship with that person, anything where the two of you felt like you were making a go of it (even if that relationship eventually wrecked), where/how did you meet that person? You can list several/many people, if applicable. _I_ would, if YOU were writing this post: I'd say I met three different Serious Relationships, and all three were in school. Then I would probably add that, since then, I'd met mayyyyyybe one eligible guy in one of my many jobs but he was married, plus one available guy I would have been interested in dating because he was super cute/nice, but he had a child and a volatile relationship with his ex-wife and was 10 years older than me and wouldn't have been a good match anyway.

As a side note, were you trying/hoping to meet someone at the time, or no? I know it's classic to say things like "As soon as I decided I would be happy being single, THAT'S WHEN IT HAPPENED"---but for an outsider it's a little hard to tell if that decision was genuine or if it was a FAKE-OUT, a RUSE to trick the fates after hearing many other people claim to have met significant others that way. And/or if it's a retroactive delusion, like when Rob says "Oh, great: on the ONE DAY I can sleep in, I wake up early," when actually he is just really bad at scientific observation and statistical record-keeping.

Proof

2011-09-18T17:44:00.004-04:00

Paul went to the library and the thrift shop yesterday, and came back with proof of his love:

Interesting/pretty china, and a book about sociopaths.
Yeah baby.

Good Life; Snail Cat; How to Use Powdered Creamer in Iced Coffee

2011-09-16T10:13:00.005-04:00

I am really living the good life right now. The older four kids got on the bus and then I took Henry to preschool, where I got into the teachers' good graces by signing up to drive for a field trip BECAUSE I HAVE ENOUGH TIME NOW THAT I DON'T MIND DOING IT. Then I went to the library, BY MYSELF, but it wasn't open yet, so I drove to McDonald's and got a LARGE coffee and a sausage McMuffin, which I ate (without sharing) in the library parking lot listening to the radio and not having to entertain anyone. By the time I was done, the library was open, and I browsed in a leisurely, meandering way, not feeling like I needed to grab WHATEVER and get out of there before children started running/yelling. On the way home I stopped at Subway and got a foot-long turkey sub to share with Henry when he's out of preschool, because of the five children he's the only one who'll eat pretty much anything I eat. Then I came inside and a nice cat jumped on my lap, and I'm sitting here listening to her purring and the clock ticking, thinking, "OMG DOES THIS MEAN I'M GOING TO HAVE TO GET A JOB NOW??"

********

Speaking of the cat, look at this silly girl:

I've never had a cat do that before. She curled her tail around her body, then leaned down until her forehead was resting on the puff of her tail, and then went to sleep.

********

Every morning I make a full pot of coffee in my 4-cup coffee pot. I drink one mug in the morning, and in the afternoon I pour the rest over ice and have iced coffee. For MONTHS now I've been struggling with the problem of how to get flavored creamer into the iced coffee, because powdered creamer only dissolves in hot liquid.

The simplest and best solution is to use liquid creamer, but I don't use it fast enough so I always waste most of the bottle---and also, I like to have several choices of flavors. So I've been microwaving a small (1/4th cup?) amount of the coffee in that morning's old mug, and then adding powdered creamer to THAT, and then pouring that over the ice with the rest of it. That works really well, but it's a bit of a fuss.

Hershey's syrup and Nestle Quik both stir in nicely to cold liquids, but that's only chocolate flavor, no creaminess. This was okay when I could add a slosh of whole milk, but nobody at our house drinks whole milk anymore. (It does still work well if, for example, I get a coffee at a drive-through and don't finish it and put it in the fridge for later, because that already has some creamer in it and then I just add the chocolate.)

It was only today that I realized I could stir powdered creamer into the entire pot of hot coffee.

Frustrating Emails; A Depressing Look at the Capacity for Evil in Any of Us

2011-09-15T06:31:00.017-04:00

I am in such an agitated mood this morning. First, I got yet another solicitation from Google Ads. But Google Ads BANNED ME FOR LIFE a few years ago. I spent a long time composing a reply to the most recent one. I explained the situation, and then asked that if they weren't going to tell me why I'd been banned, and their form letter was correct that there was no appeal for this lifetime ban, that they at LEAST take me off the mailing list imploring me to join the club I'm not allowed to join.

I worked pretty hard on it to get the right tone and to use the right words and to not make it anything I'd be embarrassed later to have written. Then I noticed it was a no-reply email address.

Then I got an email from Amazon about their latest deal from a business that is not Amazon. I was pretty sure I'd already "managed my subscriptions" to remove messages about deals from their partners, but I thought maybe I hadn't done it right so I clicked that link again. No: I'd done it right, but this one was categorized as an ELECTRONICS offer, not a PARTNERS offer. Because it was an electronic item offered by a partner, I guess. It's not like this is RUINING MY LIFE, all I had to do was delete the email, but it's just kind of IRRITATING on top of an ALREADY-BAD mood.

Then, I've been continuing to mull over an article excerpt I read somewhere that said The Help was a bad book because it made it seem as if only bad people owned slaves. I thought that was an extremely good point, and not something I would have noticed, and I was glad to have had it pointed out.

But this morning I started working out why I didn't think it was right in an all-the-WAY-right way. And why, if it WAS right, I came away from the book feeling horrible and embarrassed and stricken---as opposed to thinking "Whew! At least _I_ wouldn't have been like THAT," as you'd expect me to think if the mis-portrayal had been effective.

I find that kind of thinking very agitating and frustrating. I'm a slowwwww thinker, so there's all this time of me "feeling like something is wrong but not being able to figure out WHAT IT IS, or HOW TO SAY IT," and that kind of thing leaves me snappish and irritable because I'm working so hard at it but I'm not finding an answer, or I FEEL an answer but can't ARTICULATE it, or things keep legitimately interrupting my focus to ask for breakfast or to be brought to the bus stop. It riles me up unpleasantly as I sort it out---and especially as I imagine the whole new task of trying to communicate the thoughts to anyone else, and then imagine having to listen to them knock those thoughts down Facebook-fight-style.

But here's a piece of what I came up with through much wrinkle-browed effort, and will now wrinkle-browedly try to communicate without screwing it up:

I was remembering the book Switch (I reviewed it here, after the part about Rob Lowe), which is a book basically about getting people (including yourself) to do what you want them to do. One sample challenge was a situation in another country, where they wanted old men to stop paying young women for sex: it was spreading disease like crazy. They didn't think a moral campaign would work, nor a health campaign.

Instead they made a series of ads featuring a sleazy old guy who preyed on young women, and they gave him a name I've forgotten but it started with F. So in these ads, F____ would be pursuing a young woman and looking pretty foolish and unattractive doing it, and then someone in the young woman's life (a friend, a relative, the waitress at the restaurant) would say to the young woman, "Oh, gross, you wouldn't hang around with an icky old F____, would you?" And this name-starting-with-F became a cultural term, so that old men who pursued younger women were associated with this sleazy character, and younger women felt like it would be gross to go along with that, and their behavior actually changed as a result.

Were these ads fair? Did they accurately represent the older men as ridiculous icky sleaze-bags, and the younger women as creatures to be pitied and rescued from their own dimness? Of course not! The real-life old men and the real-life younger women had multi-layered personalities like everyone else---and they were an assortment of good/bad just like everyone else. Some of them were sleazy, but many (maybe most) of them were perfectly nice people, and probably attractive too.

The idea behind the ads was this: if people think to themselves, "Hey, perfectly nice and attractive people do this," they feel comfortable doing it themselves. But if it is widely agreed that only a weak person drinks too much, only a heartless jerk has affairs, only a poorly-brought-up person thinks it's okay to shoplift, and only a bad parent slaps a child, only an ignorant unlikable person would be racist---then it becomes harder to participate in that behavior without compromising my sense of self, and my sense of self MUST include the information that I am a basically good person, and so my inclination is to avoid those behaviors or to feel very uncomfortable if I participate in them.

This is, I think, something that is done in many areas where we as a culture have agreed that something is wrong, but haven't figured out how to get everyone on board behavior-wise. In television and movies and books, then, we see these behaviors deliberately associated with icky people to make it unappealing---just like in an obvious children's television show. Wife-abusers are shown as mouth-breathing cavemen in sleeveless t-shirts (despite how many of them are bright and wear nice suits and go to church), in order to try to make people think "Ick. Is THAT how that comes across? I don't want to be like THAT. I would rather be associated with that pretty girl." Not this always WORKS, or never BACKFIRES, but that's the idea.

I'm talking here about the messages we receive from ENTERTAINMENT---the ones where we're not supposed to NOTICE that our behavior and attitudes are being influenced and that our characters are being worked on. Associating bad behaviors with bad people is a way to get the behavior we want out of people. But certainly in non-entertainment arenas the information that good people owned slaves, and that smart well-dressed men beat women, and that some cultures have made a project out of obliterating other cultures, should be explicitly stated and fully accepted, and everyone who studies the subjects should understand it, and it should be emphasized carefully in schools and discussions.

In fact, I think we should take it further: not only do we need to realize that any of us, if we'd lived in that time, could have been perfectly comfortable owning slaves, we need to realize that any of us, ANY of us, could have been comfortable with it, if we had lived in that particular set of circumstances. ANY of us, no matter what our skin color or nationality, could have gone along with it: not just "us, if we'd been our ancestors, but also "us, if we'd been our ancestors' persecutors." That ANY group of us could enslave or kill or discriminate against any other group of people, and that this is why it's so important that we all learn on many levels and by many methods how terrible such behaviors are.

So, basically, two thoughts:

1. If what we want is to influence behavior, it can help to use fiction to connect a bad guy with a bad behavior.

2. It's important for us to understand that, born into the right circumstances, most of us have a capacity for the kind of wrongdoing we considering astonishing in historical people. And it isn't only the descendants of the wrong-doers who need to consider their potential for evil, itt's every single one of us. History has shown that wrongdoing isn't based on skin-color or nationality, but on humanness.

Third Cat

2011-09-14T06:23:00.005-04:00

Periodically we stop at the animal shelter to browse the cats. This time we came home with one.

Hi.

She's about four years old, and she has a good Shelter Story: she was found with a wee little sign around her neck that said her name was Madeline/Madeleine/Maddie (all three names were on the sign in various places) and please take good care of her. We're going to change her name, but we don't know what it will be yet. I'm campaigning for Sally. (Or Lydia or Silvie or Phoebe or Hillary or Ginny or Linny or Bonnie or Heather or Angela or Ivy. You'd never guess it, but I find names interesting and important.)

She is the sweetheartiest cat I have ever met. The shelter has "interview rooms" where you can spend time with any cat you might be interested in adopting, and most cats (even the really sweet snuggly ones) spend most of their time exploring the room and sniffing all the corners, because that is the cat thing to do. But not this cat. She stayed right on my lap, snuggling in and wanting skritches. She was a cat that WANTED TO GO HOME RIGHT NOW PLEASE.

You don't understand: I'm not MEANT for shelter life.
I don't BELONG here.

She doesn't mind being picked up, even by children. This next picture was taken about 5 minutes after she came to our house, when by all rights she should have been skittish and freaked-out:

Doot-da-dooooo, just dangling my paws

I like to bring kids with me to the shelter, not only because it's a fun thing to do with kids but also because if I find a cat possibility, the children's presence is essential. A cat that doesn't flinch when Henry makes a sudden loud sound, that doesn't object to being scooped up inexpertly and unexpectedly, is a cat that will likely do well in our household.

She is not, perhaps, the sharpest kibble in the bag. She leapt up onto the windowsill of a closed window, an action that made a sound like this: "Scrabble scrabble scrabble!!! ...THUNK."

That was ONE HUNDRED PERCENT intentional.
(And thank you for opening the window.)

The Local News

2011-09-12T09:05:00.005-04:00

I just finished The Local News, and if I had to give a quick review I'd call it "compelling and squirmy." It's about a high school girl whose high school brother vanishes. At first it hits a really good introspective note, with the girl talking interestingly about the weird feelings involved in sustaining that level of anxiety over time, and the different ways the different family members handle it---and about what it's like when the missing person is kind of a cruel dumb jerk.

The Local News, by Miriam Gershow
(image from Amazon.com)

But then a certain distance in (1/4th of they way? 1/3rd?), I started saying aloud, "Okay, if something doesn't HAPPEN or CHANGE in the next ten pages, I'm giving up and skipping to the end." I think a pretty big chunk could have been snipped out of the middle---but on the other hand, I DIDN'T give up and skip to the end, so maybe not. If I were trying to spin it positively, I'd say it gave a good idea of what it would be like to be IN that situation where you had to sustain that kind of anxiety even though nothing was happening.

It's a book for adults, I think, but it has a young-adult theme. I found I identified way more with the parents, but then I was cringey because I was having to look at what _I_ considered "them doing pretty well, considering," but from the point of view of someone doing a good job of pointing out how kids don't really see it that way---or how it doesn't really matter if the parental behavior is totally justified, it's still harming the kids.

It also spends plenty of time visiting the stupidness and carelessness and meanness and bumbling mistakes of high school kids.

Another big cringe for me was the way I saw how "supporting a family in crisis" can look from the point of view of someone in that family. Fundraisers, candlelight vigils, kind words, cards from strangers: I saw them all from a point of view I wasn't comfortable seeing them from. I already second- and third- and fourth-guess so much, adding this kind of material sends me for a bit of a spin. But on the other hand, I felt like it was done in a way that let me appreciate the added perspective without feeling attacked and accused for good intentions.

And this is a huge thing for me: the story line resolved.

So! In short! I don't know if I recommend it or not. It wasn't the cheery/entertaining kind of book, it was the thought-provoking kind---but so many of the thoughts it was provoking were kind of downers. But I was glad I read them. So.

The Pledge of Allegiance

2011-09-09T17:14:00.028-04:00

There is a Facebook thing (and also an email-forward thing) going around the bugs the crap out of me, and I know I need to be MUCH more specific than that. It's the one that talks in all-caps about how schools no longer have children say the pledge of allegiance. This is reportedly because schools are SCARED of OFFENDING someone. And you're supposed to REPOST IF YOU DON'T CARE ABOUT OFFENDING SOMEONE.

LEAVING ASIDE the issue of whether this would be SUCH AN OUTRAGE, or whether the cause could be correctly diagnosed as "fear," or whether it's good or bad to care about offending people, there is a problem: at my kids' schools, they DO still say the pledge of allegiance. They say it every single morning. And on Parents' Night, they had the parents say it, too---complete with the non-original "under God" part, for those of us worried that the rule about separation of church and state is being enforced.

So I think of this silly repost/forward as being nothing but fear-mongering: let's drum up an INDIGNANT MOB over something that HASN'T EVEN HAPPENED. So many Facebook things and email forwards ARE like this: they state something HORRIBLE, and no one re-posting/forwarding it checks first to see if it's, you know, TRUE.

But I DO check. And just because MY kids' school still says the pledge of allegiance each morning doesn't mean EVERYONE'S does, or even that MOST schools do. Ours could be a fluke. And so I would like to take a little poll if you wouldn't mind. Over to the right, if your kids go to public school in the U.S., please tell me if your school system DOES or DOES NOT still say the pledge of allegiance. (It doesn't have to be daily.) And if your child's school DOESN'T say it, could you leave a comment about what the deal is (like, is it CARING ABOUT OFFENDING SOMEONE, or is it some other explanation), so that we can figure out the source of this rumor? (And so we make sure they aren't false-no votes, like when the school is not in the U.S., or when it's a private anarchist academy.) [Poll closed; see results below.]

There is Money in This Recurring Letdown; It Was NOT in Fact Mine

2011-09-07T21:13:00.009-04:00

It has happened to me twice in the last year that I've felt like I finally figured out how to eat less, finally got it straightened out so that NOW I know how to do it---and then found out that I had a hidden infection raging in my head somewhere. Five or six days on antibiotics and I have lost my new-found knowledge. Oh come back to me, brief sweet window of simple easy eating!

I think we could market this. Let's think how.

(Also, if you know someone who's like, "You just have to DO IT. You just have to CHOOSE to eat right," she should probably have a doctor check her ears/throat/sinuses. Ten days of Augmentin should clear that annoying little problem right up.)

********

SarahLena linked earlier today to this Steve Burns video you should probably watch when you have a spare 17 minutes. (That's a daunting length, isn't it? What I do is I think, "I will watch 30 seconds of it, that's all." By then I'm either hooked and it no longer seems daunting, or else I close it feeling like I got a sample of what someone was referring to.)

He mentions that he got a lot of fan mail, like FROM LADIES, and that Nickelodeon filtered most of it for him, but that they let one get through. It became evident that his funny story was going to involve this letter, at which point I started thinking "Please not mine, please not mine, please not mine."

It's 17 minutes of my favorite kind of talking: something that wasn't funny at the time but is funny now, some self-deprecating humor, some stuff he thinks about, some little hints about why he left the show (a twinges-when-it-rains injury for so many of us), some interesting discussion about parts of his job I hadn't thought about, etc. *Happy sigh.* My favorite line, if you watch it, was "And I thought: 'Believe it or not, this is the only game you have, man'."

State of Wonder

2011-09-06T21:49:00.011-04:00

I have just finished a book I think you should try, and there are problems with the recommendation. I will list them.

1. The title and the design of the book are uninspiring beyond what I can emphasize. The expression "You can't tell a book by its cover" may or may not be true (I'd say it's one of those expressions that sounds so true, people generally believe it without evaluating it for trueness), but this book's cover misleads: the title is dull and unmemorable and non-evocative of the contents (even after reading the book, I can't call the title to mind without peeking); the cover is pretty but dull and unmemorable; BUT THE BOOK IS NEITHER DULL NOR UNMEMORABLE.

State of Wonder, by Ann Patchett (photo from Amazon.com)

2. There are some distressing scenes of the sort I would feel betrayed by if the book had been unqualifiededly recommended to me. Have you read The Poisonwood Bible? Remember the various jungle horrors? Snakes, vines, endless insects, malaria, hallucinations, contaminated water, determined zealots, dying children? It is not as bad as that. But there is some similar material. Here is the REAL major problem: if I had read it unwarned, I would have felt betrayed when I read it---but if I HAD been warned, I would NOT have read the book. AND I WANT TO HAVE READ THE BOOK.

3. There is a very tense labor/c-section scene. And another. There is a scene where things look dramatically grim for a child. There is an injury to an infant. I want to give you spoilers, because I would myself have wanted spoilers. But I don't know if YOU would want spoilers. I've heard that for some people, spoilers spoil a book, rather than allowing them to read it without dying.

4. If I'd read the inside of the book jacket, I would have had NO INTEREST in the book. NO INTEREST. The second sentence would have made me all but certain I wasn't interested; the third sentence would have sealed it. I HATE this kind of book. Or so I'd thought. If I tell you what the book is about, you might think, "Bleah, I hate that kind of book." You might not read it. You might read it but indeed not like the book. WHAT IF YOU DON'T LIKE THE BOOK?? What if you WOULD have liked it, but because of something I say you don't read it??

This book was a problem for me, because it had already been my turn on the hold list but I'd run out of time to read it and had had to return it unread. I put myself reluctantly back on the hold list, my number came up again, but I couldn't get to it until only a week of the check-out period remained. I thought, "I will just START it. It looks so dull, I probably won't like it. Then I'll be able to return it and let the next person read it." I got three pages into it and said to Paul, "I have bad news. I think it's a great book. I will have to finish it."

Luckily I was able to finish it in three days. When I finished reading it, I burst into tears and I cried for a couple of minutes. I will try to define the type of crying, because this sort of thing seems important: it was crying for a wonderful book, for a wonderful story, for a complete package that worked from beginning to end, and for an author who PULLED IT OFF. It was also crying for what a STUPID title and STUPID cover, which MIGHT HAVE MADE ME MISS IT ENTIRELY. It was great crying, and I wanted to do more of it but Paul finished the dishes and took off his headphones and I didn't want to be crying in front of him.

Er, not to oversell it. Which brings me to the last problem:

5. One crucial element to my enjoyment of the book was that I went into it not even remembering why I put it on my hold list, not knowing what it was about, and not expecting to enjoy it. I looked at the cover, I looked at the title, I didn't bother to read the inside of the jacket, and I thought, "Let's get this over with." You can't recreate that experience after I've told you about it like this. I have ruined it by recommending it.

The Unbearable Irritatingness of Hardboiled Eggs

2011-09-06T08:48:00.007-04:00

This morning I have been brought nearly to tears by the difficulty of peeling hardboiled eggs, and I both DO and DON'T want to ask for ideas. Because you know how it is: the ideas tend to be 70% Things Everyone Already Knows To Try ("Put them in cold water right after they're done boiling!"), 20% Things That Have Already Been Tried After Googling But Didn't Work ("Add vinegar / salt / dragon's tears to the boiling water!" "Crack the shell slightly right after boiling!" "Peel them under running water!"), 9% Things I'm Not Going To Do Even If They DO Work ("Don't store them in their shells!," incantations/chanting, that thing where you BLOW the egg out of the shell and I am not kidding), and 1% Ideas Not Yet Known To The Asker But That STILL Don't Work When Tried.

It seems to me that the way a hardboiled egg peels or doesn't peel must rely almost exclusively on Element X, because I get the same eggs at the same store every week, and I cook them the same way each time, and some of the boiled eggs peel like dreams, like DREAMS, with the children gathering around to oooh and ahhh as the shell comes off in two large neat pieces, and some of the boiled eggs peel like NIGHTMAAAAAAAAAAAAARES, with little picky bits flaking off and taking chunks of white with them until the egg is a nasty pitted mess and no one wants to eat it. If there was one good solution that worked every time for everyone, that would be the only solution going around.

It reminds me of ice cubes, and the way some of them pop out of their plastic trays beautifully and cleanly and with only a slight twist of the tray, while others require a strong twist and then break into shards. (My brother did a whole study on this phenomenon once. I should see if he's willing to tackle eggs.)

Mug; Enthusiastic Sharing of an Enjoyed Video in the Hope That Others Will Feel the Same

2011-09-05T08:01:00.007-04:00

I have a new mug that I love enough to feel a little surprised by it, because why feel so strongly about a cup? But there it is.

I first saw it at Marshalls, AND it was on clearance, AND the last one left---and then I noticed it had a huge crack down the side. Dang it.

Then my mom and I went to another Marshalls another time, and there it was. On clearance ($3), last one left, but no crack!

I love the appearance of it, of course, and that's a lot of the explanation for my passion (that shade of green! the pairing of that shade of green with the black-and-white! the shape of the handle! the slight flare-out at top and bottom of the mug!). But I also love the hand-feel (comfy handle with little thumb-rest on top; nice balance) and lip-feel (rim the right thinness and right angle), and those are crucial for long-term mug enjoyment.

********

Maybe you saw Title of the Song (here's the lyrics version) when it was going around before, but when Paul played it this morning I found I had forgotten it and was ready to hear it again:

"Regret over the lateness of my epiphany." "Naïve expression of love." "Repetition of the title of the song (can you hear the title?)." "Drop to my knees to elicit crowd response." I love all of it.

One of the best parts is the comments section. "Pointless comment about how I came here via Metafilter." "Continued glorification of the video. Realization that in all likelihood someone else has probably made a similar comment. Declaration of how little I care if it is the case! Repetition of my glorification."

So Much Going On!

2011-09-02T13:57:00.006-04:00

I feel like there is SO MUCH GOING ON, even though a lot of it is over:

1. Elizabeth's tonsillectomy (over) and the resulting difficulty she's having with articulation (not over)

2. Paul's trip to DC, and the change in plans that had to be made because of Hurricane Irene (over)

3. Buying school supplies, and school starting (about three-quarters over)

4. Nephew being born (over as of this past Tuesday, yet ongoing because of wanting to visit and bake stuff and find a good present)

My sister-in-law's sister took this great picture

5. A visit from my aunt, and my uncle's death after a very long and painful illness

6. Edward's anemia, which I assume is mild or else they would have made a bigger deal of it, but I think of it at every meal

7. Our life insurance premium due the day after I write my annual check in memory of the boy who took me on my first date, who died when we were 30

8. My high school boyfriend has left his wife and two children and "wants to talk" (fat.chance.)

[snip]

10. I have a massive, advanced ear infection that I didn't even know I had. I saw the doctor this morning because my teeth were hurting and my ears were itching, and she says there is to be no Messing Around: if after 24 hours on the antibiotic I feel any worse, I have to go to Urgent Care and not wait for Tuesday to make an appointment

11. My youngest baby starting preschool next week

12. A friend's marriage is teetery

I've kind of jumbled those all up, the serious and the less-serious. They're all jumbled up in my mind, too: I feel like I have so much to do and think about and remember! I don't feel STRESSED, really---but I do feel WIRED. I've had to cut wayyyyy down on coffee, because I feel like my baseline is at the 2-cup point right now, before I've had a single sip.

Eat Carbohydrates Only When the Moon Has Not Hidden Her Face Behind the Clouds

2011-08-29T10:40:00.003-04:00

I'm beginning to feel as if all nutrition information is like the medical information from the days when we still thought illness was caused by evil spirits instead of germs. One old woman tells you that if you have a wart you should put a certain leaf on it, then bury the leaf under a full moon; another old woman tells you that on the contrary, you should put the juice of a certain berry on it, then sleep on the non-wart side for a week. Meanwhile, the old man in a hut in the next village over says that the wart is a manifestation of a resentment you have toward a friend, and his neighbor says it's that your blood is full of heat and you need to eat cooling foods.

I think to myself, "I will not try to get all COMPLICATED with Specific Eating Restrictions, I will just start with what I KNOW"---and I am lost first thing in the morning at breakfast. Do I eat a good hearty serving of whole grains? Or do I instead avoid grains and eat only protein? and should it be LEAN protein, or doesn't that matter as long as I'm not eating sugar? Or is it important to eat grains and proteins and fats in particular percentages? Or is what's REALLY important that it be a WHOLE food, not a processed one? a raw food, not a cooked one? Only foods that conform to an arbitrary limit on number of ingredients? readability of ingredients? (Yay, smart people and people who took Latin aren't affected by the same things as other people!) Is breakfast the most important meal, or should I "listen to my body" (what does that...MEAN?) and not eat if I'm not hungry? Should I have a piece of fruit packed with fiber and antioxidants, or is fruit full of sugar that will throw off my whole day? Are legumes power foods that do everything but our taxes, are they not intended for human consumption? Does coffee speed up metabolism and also contain important antioxidants, or is it a dangerous dehydrating stimulant that will make me hungrier when I crash?

I like the "Just do the best you can" attitude and the way it avoids the pursuit of unattainable perfection---but it only works when we know what perfection we're not attempting to fully attain. There can't be a "best we can" when we don't even know if fruit and whole grains are EXCELLENT for us or THE VERY THING KILLING US.

Eat whole grains under the full moon! Eat antioxidants between the spring and winter solstices! Eat proteins but only on days when the goddess's face is visible on the side of the moon, and bury a pear at dusk on the days you eat whole grains! CONTROL THAT BLOOD HEAT. HARNESS THOSE BAD SPIRITS!

Weather Emergency Plans; Sock in the Toilet; Lose-Lose

2011-08-26T17:59:00.013-04:00

If I were facing a potential weather-related emergency, I don't think I would go to the grocery store, because that's always an anthill of crazy, and because I think I could scrape together enough food for temporary survival out of my stockpiles of cans of foods we used to eat all the time and now never do but still have giant stashes of. I think instead I would do laundry. We can eat cans of pineapple tidbits and fill the bathtub with water to drink, but if the power were out for awhile it would be challenging to re-wear the clothes that have been in the laundry basket under some wet washcloths for a few days in hot weather.

********

Speaking of kind of gross, I had to fish a sock out of the toilet yesterday. Don't ask me how it got in there, because I pursued that line of questioning fruitlessly with the children for awhile, and even if I'd gotten an answer it wouldn't have changed the fact that the sock was in the toilet. Luckily, I'd recently read that snippet of trying-to-make-you-feel-bad that's going around Facebook, the one about how the water in U.S. toilets is cleaner than the drinking water available to 95% of the world. I have no idea if that's true (nor, I suspect, do most of the people who repost it), but it made it easier to put my hand into the water and get the sock. I did it quick, like pulling off a bank robbery.

********

Do you know where Paul is right now? Washington D.C., that's where. Do you know what day he's scheduled to return? Sunday, that's when. So. He and I have been reading up on Hurricane Irene, trying to figure out her secret plan and whether it involves us. The problem is, meteorologists get so! extremely! excited! about everything that isn't normal boring weather, it's very difficult to tell the difference between something that is actually a problem and something that is just really fun to talk about for a change. Sure, AFTER the fact we can beat ourselves up about how we Didn't Listen, but I think there have been a dozen Huge Important Weather Catastrophes already this year, none of which were ANYTHING AT ALL. If we all evacuated every time a meteorologist peed down his leg, we'd just live permanently in the bomb shelter. But of course if we DON'T Take Measures, we'll feel like idiots if it turns out we should have. WHY OH WHY DIDN'T WE JUST FLEE FOR THE HILLS?? It would have been SO EASY!! Lose-lose.

And I don't even want to give Paul my opinion, because what if I say, "No, don't spend a million dollars and change all your plans and come home a day early, assuming you can even FIND a way home that isn't completely booked," and then he DIES IN A HURRICANE? Wouldn't I feel bad THEN? Or what if I say, "Yes, spend a million dollars and change all your plans and come home a day early," and then there is some rain and some wind? Wouldn't I feel bad THEN? Lose-lose.

[Update: Paul's Sunday transportation has been canceled. This is kind of annoying, since THIS VERY MORNING he called them to reschedule for Saturday, and they told him there was absolutely no need to do that because they were absolutely not going to cancel Sunday plans.] [I am pretty crabby about this.]

[Update on the update: Fortunately my dad found out it had been canceled before even THE TRANSPORTATION ITSELF knew, so when Paul called, the agent he talked to was seeing the cancellations happen right in front of her eyes, and it was early enough to get him in on Saturday morning instead.]

Lying-Awake Brain

2011-08-24T06:43:00.005-04:00

I'm gradually learning that if I have wine in the evening, I have trouble sleeping that night. Gradual connections are being made, one night at a time. Last night I had wine, and then I lay awake. First I kept seeing shadows down the hall, made by cars driving by, and thinking they were the shadows of people creeping around in the house. Then, when I'd reminded myself that a cat can't walk across our floors without making a creak with every step, I started thinking I heard Furtive Sounds, perhaps PEOPLE TRYING TO BREAK IN. That went NOWHERE GOOD, let me tell you. At one point I realized that my entire body was tense, including clenched fists, and that I'd spent the last five minutes or so imagining defending myself against intruders with a floor lamp: I could bash them with it for awhile, and there would be pointy glass when the bulbs broke, and if I got the upper hand I could use the cord to strangle them. I'd gone on to imagine that they'd lost consciousness--OR SEEMED TO--and what would I do to make SURE they were either dead or incapacitated until the police could get here? If I have learned one thing from movies, it's that you don't get overconfident that a Downed Attacker is actually down. So would I do something that would stain both my hardwood floors and potentially my conscience (though I think it's highly unlikely I'd struggle with my conscience if it was an intruder in a house with my children)? and what would I use to do it? and would it be easy (because I'd be so scared) or would it be much harder than I expected it to be? and boy, I wish there was such a thing as a gun that would materialize only when needed. Or would I...somehow tie his hands and feet (with what? and I couldn't really leave him to go root around in the dark basement for some rope) and then call 911?

This was when I noticed every single muscle was tightened up and my fingernails were hurting my palms. And also realized that the floor lamp I'd been envisioning grabbing with one swift smooth action-hero-like motion (ha ha, now I'm picturing James Bond wielding an attractive floor lamp) is one we Freecycled a few months back because we never used it. And the other floor lamp in the room is plugged in behind the bureau, so I'd have to shift the bureau, then lean as far as I could and make sound-wave shapes with the cord until the plug wiggled out of the socket, etc.

So I tried to think of something more relaxing, but instead my mind drifted to something that had been bugging me earlier in the day, which was the word "jailbait." I hadn't given the word much thought over the years, since I don't move in circles that have a use for such a word. I started out feeling that the word was mildly icky and wrong, and by the time I'd thought the thing out thoroughly, I was ready to go back and EAGERLY take out some feelings on that imaginary intruder, perhaps by lifting the entire bureau and slamming it onto him. I wish we didn't even HAVE that word. It isn't that I don't UNDERSTAND why we have the word; OH I UNDERSTAND WHY WE HAVE IT. That is the PROBLEM: that I think I see exactly why we have that word, instead of just having the word "teenager." "Bait" implies a trap, a set-up. Men are being LURED by this child, TRICKED into a TRAP by...the child? society? And so they resist the child, NOT because it would be wrong to get involved with a child, NOT because they are personally icked out by the idea, NOT because they are horrified at the thought of accidentally getting involved with someone so young---but because of the potential for jail, and because they are too wily and clever to be trapped. Jailbait. And congratulating themselves. I hate everybody. Please turn me loose on a building scheduled for demolition, so I can gnaw on it until I feel better.

Tonsillectomy Recovery: What It's Like (Days One Through Nine)

2011-08-23T08:52:00.011-04:00

That title is kind of funny, because as the ENT doctor said, and the nurses said, and all of you with experience with tonsillectomies said, the experience varies WIDELY. But that's the search term I was using when I was anxiously looking for more information, so that's what I'm using as the title.

Day One (day of surgery): We had to be at the hospital at 6:30; the surgery was at 7:30; the doctor was coming out to tell me everything went fine at 8:10; they called me back to see her at 8:25; we were headed to our car at 11:00. Between the surgery and the time we went home, Elizabeth mostly dozed. When she did wake up a little, she was cranky and wasn't interested in the little stuffed hamster I'd bought at the gift shop, but didn't seem to be in much pain. When she woke around 10:20, though, she was saying "Ow ow ow" and crying, so the nurse brought her a dose of tylenol/codeine, and by the time we were leaving the hospital she was even CHEERY, and was able to walk to the car, and sang along hoarsely with a few songs from the Phineas & Ferb CD on the way home.

At home she had some popsicles and watched some TV and everything was going way better than expected. They'd told us she'd likely nap on and off all day, but she didn't. Then she got kind of blank-faced and slumpy. Then she started throwing up. She had three sessions of it: afternoon, early evening, later evening. She was miserable. I was highly fretful and lay awake that night worried that I should have called the doctor about the throwing up, worried that she wasn't holding down either the antibiotic or the painkiller, worried that she would have to go back to the hospital. I felt hugely under-qualified to be handling post-surgical care.

Day Two: She was much better. In my fretful lyings-awake, I'd thought "She HAS to be improved in the morning, or else I'll call the doctor." I woke her around 4:00 to take pain medicine, which was a gamble: it could let her absorb it while asleep and non-barfy---or it could make her throw up all over our mattress and herself. Gamble paid off: she woke up better and held down her antibiotic too, and then I kept right on top of giving her the pain medicine every 4 hours exactly. She still felt crummy all day, but NO BARFING, and a couple of times got off the couch and wandered around for a minute before going back. Refused to nap. No smiling. Wouldn't talk, and would barely shake/nod her head (said her jaw hurt when she moved her head). Ate a little applesauce with flax seed meal stirred in, and maybe 1/4 cup of a non-dairy smoothie I made with banana, strawberries, blueberries, spinach, rolled oats. Also ate popsicles and ice cream. Some interest in Tonsillectomy Presents.

Days Three and Four: Doing prematurely better: up and around, doing some talking, seeming to feel much better, very interested in tonsillectomy presents. Then on the evening of Day 4, two more episodes of throwing up.

Day Five: She woke up crying from the pain but wouldn't take her pain medicine. She is SIX, but she has been acting THREE. When I put a little medicine in her mouth, she let it dribble out; I tried not to be angry at the sick child; when that failed, I tried to at least mostly HIDE being angry at the sick child. I gave her a Sucrets (numbing cough drop) and then she took the medicine---I think because the cough drop let her back down graciously from the stand-off, rather than because it helped, but maybe some of each. She barely ate anything all day, just a few popsicles. At dinner she wanted to try pizza, so Paul cooked it a little less (normally he makes the crust crispy and the cheese chewy, but he went with a soft crust and melty cheese) and she did eat a few bites. At 8:00 she put herself to bed.

Day Six: For lunch she asked for and ate half a peanut butter and honey sandwich and a cup of milk. But it's so back and forth: for even a few hours she'll seem almost normal, but then she'll be weepy and crabby and saying she has a headache, and she'll sit still for hours watching a movie. Her voice is different: a little lower, and she's saying vowels differently, like "hev" instead of "have." Her jaw/throat still look a little swollen. She's very nervous about Day Ten, which is when the ENT doctor said there's usually a setback (because of the scab, and that's probably all you want to know about it).

Day Seven: She woke up crying in the middle of the night but wouldn't say why. We've been using a system for measuring pain: I hold up my hand, fingers splayed, and I point to whatever finger is farthest to her left and I say "no pain," and I point to whatever finger is farthest to her right and I say "the worst it's been so far with this," and she chooses a finger. It's always finger 1 (no pain) or 2 (small amount of pain) now, but she complains of headaches, and she says in calmer moments that when she's crying and won't tell me why, it's because she Feels Terrible---not pain really, not queasiness really, but just feeling really really bad all over. So now when she cries and I can't figure out why, I hold her hand and I tell her to squeeze once for yes, and I ask is it pain? (no squeeze) Nightmare? (no squeeze) Feeling terrible? (squeeze) The squeezing system isn't because it hurts her too much to talk but because she gets in these stubborn mute phases when she's upset, and this is a way around that; we use it when she's not post-surgery, too. This afternoon she went into her room and closed the door, and when I looked in on her later she was asleep.

Day Eight: She doesn't seem to need the tylenol/codeine for throat pain, exactly, but when I skip a dose she gets crumply and weepy and doesn't eat or drink. I'm glad the doctor was generous with the prescription so I can keep giving it to her. (But I am feeling some renewed resentment with my OBs, who have always given me a prescription for 1.5 days' worth of painkiller after c-sections. Thanks, OBs! Obviously it's exactly the right time to apply Just Say No!) I haven't been waking her to take it or keeping her on a rigorous every-four-hours schedule---but I'm giving it to her first thing in the morning, two doses during the day, and one more before bed (she's been sleeping in our room every night, and usually doesn't go to sleep until we do).

Day Nine (today): Today she has a follow-up appointment with the ENT doctor, and she desperately DOES and desperately DOESN'T want to ask him about the status of the scab. The ENT doctor warned us, by the way, that her breath would likely be "like a chain-smoking alcoholic's"---but it hasn't been bad at all. I notice mostly that she smells a little fruity and medicinal.

So! That's how it's been going. I'm feeling a little worn out, mostly I think from being cooped up in the house and from trying to get her to eat something nutritious. I had such a good list of soft/pureed foods, and it seems like she'll eat each one once and then never again. I'm not fretful, because the ENT doctor said he didn't care if she ate nothing but ice cream for two weeks---but on the other hand I think she's a lot crankier when she's subsisting on ice cream. Look, isn't this a good list of liquid and soft food possibilities?

scrambled eggs
applesauce (with or without flax seed meal)
yogurt
mashed potatoes
peanut butter stirred into ice cream
pudding
Jello
macaroni and cheese
canned fruits
shakes
smoothies of various sorts
bananas
ice cream
popsicles
juice boxes

But here is the list she is actually eating:

ice cream

CORN

2011-08-20T09:35:00.005-04:00

Every time I turn around, this bag of corn startles me:

Use the Force...Kirk

2011-08-18T11:20:00.002-04:00

SarahLena mentioned on Twitter that some days she gets so sick of things being overdramatized on social media. That reminded me of a tip I'm not sure I've shared with you: when I'm being bothered by someone Pumping Up The Drama, or Manipulating For Attention, I use the Captain Kirk voice to read whatever they've written. You are familiar with William Shatner's Star Trek acting style? And, more importantly, with the way he spoofs his own acting style, which is something that makes me love him with teary-eyed love? Anyway, that's the style I use when I read people's Overblown Drama, and it really helps. Just put Drama Pauses in wherever (they're funnier if they're at unnatural breaking points), speak as if acting woodenly, and look intently at the corner where the wall meets the ceiling.

Conflicting Medical Instructions

2011-08-17T07:37:00.012-04:00

Elizabeth's tonsillectomy went just fine. She was the first patient of the day on a non-busy day, so she got a lot of attention and everything was done sooner than predicted. I barely had time to have a cafe mocha and a strawberry-cream-cheese danish in the coffee shop before they were calling me back to see her.

Our main nurse was exactly the style I do best with: she told me the whole story in advance, like this: "First I'll do x, y, z. Then the anesthesiologist will come in, and he will ask you some new questions, but he'll also repeat some of the questions I already asked you, for safety. Then the doctor will come in, and he will do the same thing, and also he will listen to her heart and lungs again. After he leaves, that's when you should get dressed in your paper suit."

After we went home, things were pretty rough. Elizabeth threw up a lot, and she tried to cry about how much her throat hurt but couldn't cry because it hurt too much, and I lay awake that night fretting that she wasn't keeping her antibiotic down, and that I didn't know if I should wake her up for her pain medicine or if that would just make her throw up all over our bed, and that she might have to go back to the hospital (the ENT doctor said that if she couldn't keep fluids down he would check her right back in and give her an IV). (A measure of my phone anxiety is that I was just as nervous about the possibility of having to make that phone call as I was about having her back in the hospital.)

Another thing making me nervous was all the conflicting information. The post-tonsillectomy sheet from the ENT doctor was different than the post-tonsillectomy sheet from the hospital. The verbal instructions from the ENT doctor were different than the verbal instructions from the nurses. I didn't know who to follow.

The nurses, I'd think, would be more familiar with the practical effects: the doctor gives his instructions and then is gone like a summer breeze, while the nurses are there caring for the barfing patients. But the doctor is at least in theory the boss/expert of this show, and he's the one I'd have to answer to if something went wrong as a result of me NOT following his instructions, and it's hard for a layperson to tell the difference between the nurses who can wear the "Thank a nurse: we keep the doctors from accidentally killing you" t-shirts and the ones who really shouldn't take that adversarial tone.

Oh, I could ask for clarification when I find differences in instruction? Genius! But often such questions don't crop up until after I'm home and the potential complication mentioned on the sheet presents itself---so I would need to call. And more importantly, ask WHOM? If I ask the doctor, he'll tell me to follow his instructions; if I ask the nurses, they'll tell me to follow theirs. And both will have good reasons!

You know, maybe the professionals could work these differences out among themselves, rather than putting patients in the middle to figure it out and make guesses and "trust their guts" (which I find seems to work only in hindsight, during the self-congratulating/rebuking stage of a decision). I have EVEN LESS of a medical degree than either of the two groups, so I don't really care how much "YOU have to be the ADVOCATE of your HEALTH!!" is going around, I am not QUALIFIED for that POSITION. Which is why the Large Checks go FROM me rather than TO me: I'm paying people with education, expertise, and experience to tell me what to do, because "my gut" doesn't know anything ABOUT tonsillectomy recovery.

(She was way better on the second day, thank goodness.)

Spinach Smoothies Recipe; Room

2011-08-14T21:19:00.008-04:00

I read somewhere that you could put spinach in a smoothie and not even taste it. And I thought: "Ha ha, yes; I'll bet this is from the same people who told me that tofu is undetectable and that fruit makes a GREAT dessert."

But then I read that Minnie puts spinach and even KALE in her smoothies. I was particularly persuaded by this part of her post:

...the added bonus of making me feel so very accomplished to have eaten 2 servings of leafy greens for breakfast. It’s like I expect some kind of angel of leafy greens to come down, bless me and give me a medal every time I have one.

So I tried it and lo, I will use the word "lo": it was barely detectable, if at all, and indeed I DID feel as if I deserved a visit from an angel of leafy greens.

Smoothies are a "wing it" kind of recipe, but I can't get behind any recipe that doesn't even say if we're talking about 1/8th teaspoon or 2 cups of an ingredient (see also: my late mother-in-law's cinnamon roll recipe), so here is my Winging It Spinach Smoothie (measurements are approximate---but I HAVE approximated them):

2 T. flax seed meal
1/4 c. rolled oats
2 t. sugar
big firm 5-fingered pinch of spinach leaves, plus another 3-fingers pinch
about a third of a cup of yogurt
about a third of a cup of orange juice
something like 6 or 7 frozen peach segments
about a half a cup of frozen blueberries

(sub any frozen fruit for peaches/blueberries)
(you could also use fresh fruit, and then ice cubes)
(bananas work great, but I don't like banana)

First blend the flax seed, oats, and sugar, until the oats are like flour. Then add everything else. The spinach will look like wayyyyyyyy too much spinach---like, practically filling the blender. Be brave! Trust Swistle. Blend it up.

This might make enough for two adult servings in some households, but at my house it makes enough for me to share with a child.

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Elizabeth, with enthusiasm: "The best thing about pillow pets is you can use them EITHER as a pillow OR as a stuffed animal!!" Yes. Welcome to the point of this product.

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I finally read Room. I consider myself more sensitive than average to stories of child endangerment, and yet I got through it fine. I did have one section in the middle where I thought I might have a heart attack, but I reasoned that MANY of us are sensitive to child-endangerment stories, and yet MANY of us had read the book and I hadn't heard any outcry, so it must be okay. I think part of the reason it worked for me is that it was told from the child's point of view rather than the mother's: I didn't have to think much about how SHE felt. And by the time it occurred to me to think of it, I'd finished that section. (I did a little skimming ahead, too, to make SURE.) The thriller part only lasted the first half of the book or so---and more like just the second quarter of it, since the first quarter is "figuring out what is going on."

I did find it thought-provoking, as pretty much everyone who read it mentioned. Lots of interesting issues to mull while doing boring cooking or cleaning or exercising. Even though I'm someone who lies awake worrying about how we'd all get out in the case of a fire, I didn't find that this book gave me fresh material to worry about. Instead, I found it reassuring/interesting: it said, basically, "Look, here is how someone took a terrible situation and made it livable." And then you get to wonder if you would have made the same making-it-livable decisions. (Still, I guess it does make my heart pound afresh if I think about it too intently.)

A complaint: from time to time I felt like it veered into "And a little child shall teach us" territory. The child is supposed to be less than a month past his 5th birthday, and yet his thought processes seem unusually sophisticated/observant, and he makes sermon-quality remarks about how other people waste things, and fail to appreciate things, and consider themselves so stressed and busy. Yes, thank you for that lesson-for-us-all, Author-speaking-through-child. This was fortunately only a SMALL and OCCASIONAL issue.

Kid Breakfasts; School Supplies

2011-08-11T08:28:00.006-04:00

Popular kid breakfasts at our house:

spoonful of peanut butter, cup of milk
half a peanut butter sandwich, cup of milk
dry cereal (a "compromise" variety such as Cinnamon Life, Honey Nut Cheerios, Frosted Mini-Wheats), cup of milk (or in Edward's case, orange juice, since it helps to absorb the iron in the cereal)
banana, cup of milk
cinnamon toast, cup of milk
muffin, cup of milk
bowl of yogurt, cup of orange juice
two hard-boiled egg whites with salt, cup of chocolate milk (this is only William so I'm not sure it counts as "popular"---but on the other hand it's what he eats most mornings so it's popular with HIM)

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My last trip to Target didn't have much in the way of fun clearance (the clothing has been marked down at a snail's pace recently, and when I did buy a few clearance kid t-shirts I noticed after washing them that they're now cotton-poly instead of cotton, so that was a non-score), but I did bring home some things that make me feel happy and satisfied every time I walk past them:

This year I remembered ahead of time that on the first day of school the children will be coming home with piles of forms that need to be filled out with information that is the same as last year's and the same as each other's (could this process not be even SLIGHTLY computerized?), AND a request from each teacher for antibacterial wipes and facial tissues. Then I feel all panicky and frantic, as if the teacher will think that my week-long delay in sending in the requested items reflects badly on me as a parent. Target had both items on nice sales, so I got enough for each child to bring in a container of each and still have one of each left over.

I also got Elizabeth's lunch box for first grade; she chose the owl one. (It inspired this week's Milk and Cookies post on lunch boxes.) I wonder how many of our children are going to school with that cute owl lunch box? My mother is finding it fun to see the owl craze of the 1970s back in such full force.

Poor Start; Good Nurse; Erasable Pens

2011-08-10T08:45:00.003-04:00

This morning when I woke up I was confident it was a weekend day, and in fact I thought, "I wonder why Paul is getting ready to take a shower already? Oh, well, it doesn't matter, I will just continue sleeping luxuriously, since none of the kids are up yet." And then it emerged that he was in fact done with his shower rather than preparing for it, which meant it was my turn, and anyway that was not a very good start to the day.

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Yesterday the hospital called to assign us Elizabeth's tonsillectomy surgery time for Monday (we need to be there at 6:30 a.m.), and then I ate Nutella right out of the container for awhile. But I did feel better after the call, because it was one of those nurses who is firm and confident and yet caring and understanding, and she had a comfortingly gravelly voice. It made me feel like this whole thing was totally routine and fine and everything was under control---and yet also like she was fully aware that the routineness/fineness from the hospital's point of view didn't mean that it wasn't weird/non-fine for the parents who don't see this every day. Really, she was very good at her job. Nurses make so much difference at times like this.

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We got Rob's school supply list in the mail, and it says he needs erasable pens. Do you have a brand you like? The last time I used erasable pens (back in school, I think), the technology had advanced only to the point of adding an eraser to the top, but not yet to the point of having the eraser WORK.

So, We Have Reached the Futile Purse-Rummaging Stage of Life

2011-08-08T09:50:00.005-04:00

Last weekend I was at the liquor store buying some wine to bring with me to my brother and sister-in-law's house. Annnnnnd I reached into my Big Bulky Purse, only to remember I'd already switched my credit card to my Small Cute purse. Very embarrassing. Fortunately I live relatively close, so I zoomed home, got my Small Cute purse, and zoomed back to pay for the wine.

Mid-week, I stopped at the bank. We were urgently in need of cash: the last time I'd stopped, the machine was out of cash; the time before, I was sixth in line and I waited more than five minutes and the line didn't move at all, and we had frozens in the car so I had to give up. I was relieved to remember to stop again, and then I discovered I didn't have my checkbook (which has my ATM card in it), so I had to just leave. When I got home, I found I'd absentmindedly put the checkbook away with my calculator after balancing, instead of putting it back in my purse.

This morning, I went to the grocery store, and discovered at checkout my wallet wasn't in my purse. Which I felt pretty stupid telling the cashier, because I was holding a wallet as I said it---but it was my Assorted Stuff wallet (member cards, department store credit cards, coupons) rather than my Absolute Essentials wallet (driver's license, CREDIT CARD). And my grocery store doesn't take checks (I DID have my checkbook this time) without an application process, which I have never done because I never pay with a check. And I kept rummaging with increasing desperation through my uncooperative Giant Purse, because the wallet COULD NOT be gone, and yet it continued to be gone. So I pulled out my bank card, which has a Visa symbol on it, and I've never used it to pay for anything so I hope that hasn't screwed up everything in the world. It said "debit" on it, but she said it wouldn't go through except as a credit. OH WHAT HAVE I DONE?? (My wallet, luckily, was on the floor of the coat closet.)

I don't know if I'm hoping you'll tell me you do the same thing all the time, or if I'm hoping you'll encourage me to check in to a nice quiet assisted-living facility.

Gift Ideas for Late-Pregnancy Treats

2011-08-05T07:05:00.010-04:00

Katie writes:

I am 36 weeks pregnant with my 2nd son (and therefore destined to be outnumbered forever as we may have one more child, but aren’t sure), and getting to the UGH IS THIS OVER?/WAHHH IT’S ALREADY ALMOST OVER! point, and thought about finding a small way to treat myself to perk me up for the last few weeks. The problem is…with WHAT? I tried wonderful coffee, didn’t do it. I would try chocolate, but it gives me the worst heartburn. I even made a fabulous dinner tonight, complete with from scratch apricot clafouti for dessert…no dice. Clearly food is not working.

I don’t want to spend a lot of money (because newborn clothes…squee!), but would like to do something.

Help!

When food treats don't work, we are indeed in trouble. Have you tried ice cream? That was one of my favorites. Ice cream bars are good, too, or Italian ices.

Cashews, almonds, etc.? I love the Emerald Nuts cinnamon almonds.

I also liked getting nice scented shower gels, and nice oils for soothing the tum skin. Maybe a nice beauty bar soap (I like Dove, or Oil of Olay, or Caress). There are about twenty kinds of each brand, so it's fun to choose: "Hmmm, Summer Revitalization, or Winter Protection? Citrus-Lemongrass Fresh, or Soothing Coconut Vanilla? Vitamin Therapy, or Antioxidant Infusion? Clarifying Glow or Extra Moisturizing?"

My favorite scent at Bath & Body Works is lavender-vanilla: it's marketed as sleep/relax aromatherapy, and I find it very soothing/comforting. They have a candle you can burn, and I like their lotion and body wash too.

A face moisturizer upgrade. One of those jars that's half the size of the regular kind you use, but also twice the price.

Or one of those nice face mask things to use in the shower. I like the Oil of Olay warming cleanser.

If manicures and pedicures appeal to you, now is the perfect moment.

I would recommend a haircut/trim, but I did that in my final weeks and there was a problem or misunderstanding and in any case I ended up with layered hair that had to be styled to look good, and was not long enough to put into a ponytail. Were there tears? OH YES, and also self/hairdresser-recriminations and wishing to go back and change reality. But if there is no problem/misunderstanding, it's nice to get the Needing-a-Haircut Meter set back to zero.

Comfy socks and slippers will be nice now on swollen feeties, and also nice to have in the hospital.

A flowering plant, if you don't mind having one more thing to take care of. Our grocery store has cute ones in the $4-8 range. One for the bathroom where you can see it as you pee every 10 minutes. One near wherever you sit most often, so you see it whenever you glance up.

Books! Especially absorbing ones that will help pass the time.

DVDs! Especially absorbing ones that will help pass the time. And if you get started on a good series, you can continue watching it during night feedings.

Magazines! It can be fun to get a few you don't normally buy.

Tea! Although, if coffee didn't work, tea might not either. But there are so many fun kinds to try.

Things for the hair: deep-conditioning treatments, leave-in treatments, a new pack of ponytail holders, a new barrette.

A new picture for the wall, near where you'll see it while feeding the baby.

Another thing I found happy in the last few weeks was stocking up for AFTER the baby. Buy a bottle of wine, if you like wine, or beer if you like beer, and set it aside. A box of your favorite candy/chocolates, for when the heartburn is gone. Things that are easy to eat while you're feeding the baby, or for times when you feel like you don't have time to even pee: a box of good crackers; trail mixes; pumpkin seeds; Nutella; the kind of granola bars marketed to grown-ups (I like the look of the Planters ones but haven't tried them yet). An expensive unscented hand lotion, for when you don't want to get lavender-vanilla all over the baby. A pretty new water bottle. A pretty new coffee mug. A DVD series you won't let yourself watch until night feedings. Some magazines or light novels for when your brain is too wobbly from low-sleep and high-distraction to enjoy its usual fare. A pretty notebook and pen for the feeding station: I always found I thought of something important the minute I was trapped under a baby. Deciding on and buying these things, and then going and looking at them and petting them, can be very pleasing.

More ideas for Katie?