The Anachronistic Mom Blog has Moved!

Hi there: With all due respect to Google, I started using Typepad and I just can't go back. So you can see what I'm up to over at the Anachronistic Blog, or you can also check out my postings at the Silicon Valley Mom's blog. Thanks for visiting! -K

A little something on virgin births

I love Obsidian Wings. Here's a recent posting of theirs all about reptilian virgin births. A little something to carry into family discussions in the next two days...

So how about a Gore/Clinton race?

Here's a delicious article from Mick LaSalle (of the SF Chron) talking about the case (historical and otherwise) for why Gore might end up running for president after all.

Bitch.com? Hoo boy, some mommies should be out gardening!

Howdy. I have now moved beyond those wonderful toddler years of gardening and making bread, and am back into the computer industry. But I have a great idea for mommies who need to ramp back into the world. Bitch.com. Check it out.

How do you use those 2.0 apps, anyway?

You know, I'm a busy mom. I am doing some consulting work right now, and I'm right in the middle of trying to swim my way through the jello that is the current web 2.0 world. I hate shopping for tennis shoes now, because there are too many choices. Consider how I must feel about software, or even these new (!!) improved (!!) 2.0 services that I keep hearing about. Some of the products float in my periphery and I have always wondered what they were. I mean, I kind of know, but I've never really used the product. Other products suffer from "2.0 insufferability," which is to say that they have really zonked-out names (zapgidget, wranko, lomar... stuff like that), and when you go to their site, they are nicely put together, with the requisite matching color scheme, maybe a tag cloud or two, but I have no freaking idea what they do. One of the highly irritating things about 2.0 is that they have gone the route of the washing tag. You know, the tag inside of your coat or your shirt that tells you how to wash it? Well... several years ago some morons decided that they would go "GLOBAL SYMBOLS" on us all, so they adopted these really irratating symbols, and nobody knows what they mean! Same thing here at web 2.0. Apparently having a button called "why the hell we exist" or even "our philosophy" is considered outre in the 2.0 set. Imagine. Software so cool that, if you have to ask about it, you're just not cool enough to use it. Cross-posted from my blog titled "But Does it Work." Bye! I'm off to see if I can get damn stumble off of my Mozilla browser, where it apparently glommed itself on without asking, and to install sphere, which didn't install although it should have!

How about that election?

OK, I'm happy. I'm still a little nervous, but there's hope. As far as I can tell, I have no idea if the Democrats control the Senate yet, but in my humble opinion, making Dick Cheney stand up and vote on every single tie is a wonderful way to pierce that Darth Vader-cool smooth exterior that's been presented to the world these past few years. Hello everyone. Sorry for not posting very often. I've been posting things over at Silicon Valley Moms Blog. Also, I started a new working blog called But Does it Work?

Why Mommy is a Democrat

I was clicking on some political news sites today, eyes half-shaded as I waited, cringing a bit, for them to load, and I was surprised with a belly laugh. Check this book out! "Why Mommy is a Democrat" sounds like a total hoot.

The complete works of Charles Darwin are now online

This stuff is so cool. Look what they're putting online now! The complete works of Charles Darwin

strange idea of geek fun

Hello everyone. I'm here, honest. Just not ... here. Part of being a mom. You can read some of my more recent postings over at the silicon valley mom's blog, (under Kate) but the rest are stored up and will probably come out one of these days. Here's a post from boingboing about wierd geek fun that made me laugh out loud. For those of you who have never actually worked in tandem with lab-living denizens, this might sound odd, but it really reminded me of "lab fun" in my younger days.

Methamphetamine

About a month ago, I helped a girlfriend whose brother is a meth addict. She was looking for information on a new treatment. I used to do medical research as my public service, so I figured I'd help out. I was amazed to see how much methamphetamine use there was. Sure, I'd heard little mentions of it, but when I started doing Google searches, I saw all of this stuff in (what I thought of as) verdant little hamlets in Tennessee, Ohio, Wisconsin, and so forth. I might be wrong about the hamlet thing, but studies are showing that our midwest and our "country" areas are being rocked horizontal by the meth stuff. Here's an interesting article that tells you about "meth" and shows you the affects of it on a user (who has since died, btw.) Courtesy of digg.

Boyfriend Arm Pillow, anyone?

I just love the stuff that the Japanese come up with. Hilarious. Here's the latest. A pillow for people who like to lie on their boyfriend's chest to sleep - but lack the boyfriend.

Kindergarten Readiness -- OH Yeah!

Aaargh! Oh, hello there. I was just reading some articles about Kindergarten readiness when I lost it a little. Let me catch my breath. Perhaps one of those nice homeopathic calmness pills, some of my imported Russian tea (in one of those lovely paper-white china cups) while I sit at my imported-wood breakfast table and ... ah, there we are. Where IS my new age music? Or perhaps just a glass of wine. Good morning everyone! I was just reading an article written by the National Association for the Education of Young Children that mentions how, in order to attend Kindergarten, your child should have good basic skills. He or she should be able to resolve conflicts, should know some letters of the alphabet, and be able to sit, among other things. Buttons too. It's a nice article. In particular, I liked this quote: "Kindergarten is a time for children to expand their love of learning, their general knowledge, their ability to get along with others, and their interest in reaching out to the world. While kindergarten marks an important transition from preschool to the primary grades, it is important that children still get to be children -- getting kindergarteners ready for elementary school does not mean substituting academics for play time, forcing children to master first grade "skills," or relying on standardized tests to assess children’s success." Unfortunately, the article also sounds like it was written on a different planet, based on my silicon valley experience. (OK, OK, not just the silicon valley. No need to be geographical here. I guess this applies to many areas populated by type-A suburban-raised-overachieving-parents-who-are-out-of -control -and-and-egged-on-by-wacked-out-pseudo-achievement-oriented-school administrators.) My understanding of the particular brand of achievement-based Kindergarten readiness practiced in this area is that, in order to keep up with the aggressive pressures of local kindergartens, Silicon Valley Kindergarten-ready children (especially those pesky, irritating, constantly-moving boy children, who should probably be drugged anyway) must be able to: * Know all of the letters of the alphabet, including their sounds. * Be able to write them all. * Both cases. * Be able to do rudimentary reading. * Sit quietly during all of the circle times. * Line up like little darlings. * Be able to act interested when the wall of their kindergarten is filled with scintillating letter combinations, like "ng." * Be able to add and probably subtract. Maybe a square root if they want to impress anybody. * Be ready and willing to be tossed into an language immersion program. * If they're in a language immersion program, be prepared to take the alternate school's language offerings, say, after school or during recess. * Be pliant and pleasant if their parents enroll them in yet a third language program, since, after all, the age of 5 is one of the best ages for shoving language knowledge into little brains (like foi gras). * Wait their turn calmly. * Quiescently participate in their soccer, baseball, theatre, fencing, chess, gymnastics, basketball, dance, ice skating, and swimming classes. Oh yes, and piano and tennis. * Start their day at 7 AM with before-school time (so mommy and daddy can work), go to school for 6 hours, and then go into a 3-hour after-school program (so that mommy and daddy can work). Contrast that with the American Acadamy of Pediatrics (AAP) Developmental Milestones by the End of 5 Years. Wow. (Although, for the cost of those designer clothes and lessons, this is kind of an unimpressing list, don't you think? Where is the French? The Tai Chi? Saute skills? HOW WILL MY CHILD GET INTO PRINCETON IF HE ONLY HAS THESE SKILLS AT FIVE????? Oh. Sorry. Homeopathic calmness pills. Breathe.) And of course, the kid needs to be ready for the stresses of ordinary life at five. Like what? Indiana University education professor Mary McMullen summarizes "new child schedules" pretty well when she says that (many) "youngsters are forced to deal with multiple transitions throughout the day, which can be stressful for 5- and 6-year-olds. Many of these children go from some type of early morning child care to kindergarten, then to special art, music or physical education classes, then after-school child care, and then home. Many are then shuttled off to sports events or other extracurricular activities. Some even have the added stress of multiple living arrangements because of divorced parents." Gosh, put like that, it sounds mildly insane, doesn't it? But that's life for our kids. What an exciting petri dish for young psyches! Mix that up with lots of television, the new video games (can you say unnervingly realistic gore?) and ... golly, what are we brewing for future generations? But for now, let's think about Kindergarten for a few minutes, since many of our kids are heading into it. Does anybody else out there think that it's time to get a bit militant and take it back? Maybe, like, along with childhood? Here's a great article by Linda Starr from Education Weekly talking about some of the insane things that Kindergartens are aspiring and have aspired to teach by the end of the year. Goals, if you will. And no, it' s not "raising your hand and waiting your turn." I'll pull a few quotes out but I'd urge you to read the article. Starr is a kindergarten teacher who totally rocks and her words should echo in your ears as you look at your own kid's class. One of my favorite mentions is that "The Kindergarten Content Summary for Lombard (Illinois) Elementary School District 44 says that kindergarten students will learn to "identify story elements: plot, setting, characters." The AAP says that five-year-olds should "understand that stories have a beginning, middle, and end."" Do you think that this is just some under-educated middle manager parsing wrong? Or will the kids be working on a playground-sized Hero's Journey model while playing with their poseable Jung dolls? Another example from Ms. Starr's article is: "The Cotati-Rohneet Park Unified School District in Rohnert Park, California, Kindergarten Curriculum requires kindergarten students (by the end of the year) to "count with one-to-one correspondence to 30" and "comprehend relationships between numbers to 30." The AAP says that average five-year-olds are developmentally able to "count up to 10 objects."" Um, yeah. Well, I'm still working on the number relationship thing. I hope my five year old can figure it out. Starr says "In trying to maximize our children's progress, we are ignoring the importance of their developmental limitations -- and we may be jeopardizing their future as well. We need to take a closer look, not simply at the age at which children enter kindergarten or at the experience they bring with them, but also at the developmental stage at which they enter; and then we need to develop a curriculum that meets those needs." She says a lot more, too. And we should all read it and take heed. Finally, she quotes David Elkind, a professor of child development at Tufts University (and a great author ) "To impose a strict structure on children in kindergarten totally violates what we know about early childhood development," Even worse, Elkind notes, "children feel stupid when they are asked to do something that they are developmentally unable to do." I'm done. I won't say more. Well, one thing. Please, as our children start Kindergarten and school this year, remember that it's OK to play in Kindergarten. Playing in Kindergarten, experiencing the world in a broad way while they're still young, and having fun in school gives your child a far wider base from which to live and achieve than trying to be academic before their time. And also, it might just be possible that the biggest goals in Kindergarten should be socialization and learning to like school and learning. Now if you'll excuse me, I need to go back to reading Homer onto a tape player so that my child can absorb it subliminally while he sleeps... First published on the Silicon Valley Moms Blog

Vurtego - just what every 50 year old needs

There's been a big discussion on the ex-NeXT list about the vurtego site (OK, a tiny discussion, but hey, a blip on that list is as amusing as a deluge from another list. Heck, the last discussion was on the IT techniques and approaches used by porn sites!) The site pisses the NeXT aesthetics people off. It's hard to navigate, it's a poser design, etc. etc. On the other hand, they're trying to prosetylize an extreme sport (says another person). Personally, though, I just find it hilarious (I also wonder if this will kill me if I try it.... I'm not getting any younger, you know?) Read the article (nicely hidden behind the Chihuahua Bites Policeman sign on the home page). It was written in the Arizona Republic newspaper, talking about how a certain fifty year old man is using - you guessed it - a Vurtego to combat the thinning of his bones! Kind of explains the $350 price tag, doesn't it? Is this the future of pre-geriatric aids, btw? Canes, sold to blaring Aerosmith?

Books that matter for entrepreneurs

This week Business Week Business Week asked entrepreneurs which books were most influential in helping them build their companies. This list list includes book suggestions and commentary from Carol Bartz, Harvey Mackay, and Larry Spear. - thanks to Marylaine Block for this. It's from Ex Libris: an E-Zine for Librarians and Other Information Junkies.

I've got the McMansion Blues

We live in the beauteous and restful neighborhood of Lindenwood, in Atherton, California. Today was another lovely summer day. We were awakened at 8 AM by a parade of dump trucks, a bulldozer, and a roller - approximately forty feet from our bedroom window. It’s almost 11, and the parade hasn’t wavered. Four years of these noises. Ah, the birthing pangs of another McMansion. My husband, a gentle soul, said this morning that our welcome gift to our new neighbors (in the flag lot behind our home) should be a stack of Marshall amps and an electric guitar. Given to our six year old. My personal preference is recreational jackhammering. I wouldn’t mind so much, but the neighbor dropped by our home a week and a half ago. “The house is done!” she said. “We’ll be moving in this week!” Great. Nice to hear. The original due date for the project was in February, but July is fine. Today at 8 AM, I got up in my bathrobe and walked to the back of our property. I climbed onto a tree trunk to look and groaned. There is no driveway in the house behind us. We have figured out that the parade of dump trucks probably belongs to the new swimming pool, and … there is no way that this project will be done before October. Really poor expectation setting there. Now I can’t blame the nice new neighbors. After all, they bought this lot for an exorbitant amount, and then didn’t touch it at all for four years. Lovely, quiet years - on the back side of the house. They are very nice and we’re looking forward to having new neighbors. The house is beautiful – a veritable mansion – and I shall be tempted to genuflect as I walk into it. But I am so very tired of the noise thing. When we bought this house I was 8 months pregnant. There was a quiet, wooded lot in the front of the house, across the street. When our son turned three months old, they broke dirt on that lot and kept building for our first three years. Napping during the jackhammering phase was a big challenge. Eight months after the front house was finished, the rear neighbor started. We are praying that the side neighbors stay healthy and happy. Despite the irritations of McMansion construction, I guess you could say that the benefits outweigh the pain. Sort of. I mean, such entertaining design choices. For example, the new house down the street. Despite being on a full acre, they have cleverly designed it so that you can see right into the neighbor’s yards from every upstairs window! Like many in the silicon valley, we do recreational house tours on Sundays. It’s been amazing to see how large and gothic window frames are getting, and to learn more about modern suburban living styles. Feels a little like "building materials of kings past," if you pay attention to all of the marble and stone. Apparently the latest trend is to buy a full acre lot, build a house that protects you from being overwhelmed by the yard (concrete, after all, is so much more civilized than bushes), and then build a full garage-cum-basement underneath the house (because, with such a large house, you don't have space for a garage.) My favorite example is in our neighborhood. It's a large home. The beautiful concrete/tile drive area in front allows the owners to drive into their property, make a full circle, turn and drive into the underground parking garage, and happily park fifty cars! This, indeed, is progress. The biggest driveway on their street. Certainly a masterful indicator. Took years to build! I have always wondered if the designer suffered from botanophobia. And what is located in the new, underground layer of these McMansions? The last one I looked at had a large exercise room (empty), a large movie room, a big hallway, a few other miscellaneous rooms and a laundry room. My first thought about the space was that it seemed like the perfect place to deflower the daughter of the house when nobody was looking, but that's probably just mom paranoia - forget I mentioned it, ok? We had thought to stay home today and enjoy the back yard and summer. Now I think I’ll go somewhere peaceful. Like Costco. Maybe they sell Marshall amps. This posting originally appeared on the Silicon Valley Moms Blog.

The top 100 games of the 21st century

Like many silicon valley couples, my husband and I communicate via email. We have two offices in our home. Mine is called the "toy office" and I share it with our son, and is is called the "fire hazard" and he shares it with approximately fifty billion wierd technical books, CD's, games, and so forth. Did I mention games? Check it out. Here's a list of the top 100 games of the 21st century from Next Generation, ranked wholly on unit sales. Maybe I can get my husband to visit my blog with this one.

50 Albums that Changed Music

I don't have much to say about this, other than I enjoyed it. Check it out. They looked for 50 albums that really changed the direction of things. This is a fun list. This was originally from: Neat New Stuff I Found This Week http://marylaine.com/neatnew.html

A whole new wave in transportable tech: Pimpstar Rims

Have you seen the Pimpstar Rims video? Check it out. And you can change what your "rims" flash from a software program WHILE YOUR DRIVE! Soon, this will be t-shirts, my friends. Or shoes. Oh my.

Happy Bday USA - Our first Blast Off

Today, NASA put a tent up right outside the Moffet Air Base so that NASA employees and the public could watch the space shuttle launch. A friend who works at NASA told us about it. We got up today and wondered what to do. Hmmn. At 10 AM was a parade in Redwood City, 11:30 was the kid's parade in Menlo Park where you could ride your bike with the other kids, , and at ... lemme see ... 12:30 or so was the launch. This is what we did. We had breakfast and hung out at home. At noon, my husband got into the shower. I did not harm him. I snarled a bit, and mentioned, using my family's patented "waspy clenched jaw" approach, that the shuttle was blasting off in THIRTY DAMN MINUTES AND HE BETTER HURRY. He did. Shower finished at 12:15. My son and I were dressed, and we finally got dad out of there at about 12:20. I personally have lost years of my life because I married someone with this particular style of living life. Shall we say, on the edge? We drove out and get onto the freeway. Yes, it's a freeway drive. Got there at exactly 12:30. Did I mention that the shuttle blastoff was at 12:38? But we didn't know that, actually. I think our interaction was: "Doesn't the shuttle blast off at 12:30? Honey, it's a blast-off. Those happen on TIME. We need to be there!" [insert chart of wife's blood pressure rising here] Response: "Nope, it's not 12:30. It's some other number." Brilliant, huh? Aargh. The next forty years should be a real learning and growing experience. But I digress. We walked in, and ... it was perfect. It was a lovely tent. There were about 150 people there, maybe more. There was a curtained-off area that was full, where a real, live astronaut was talking with people, surrounded by three large screens. For the rest of us, there were about five more screens, all over the place. There was a really neato cool 10-foot long model of the space shuttle, which we pointed out to my squirmy son. There was a totally nifty real "insides area" of the space station, including the vaunted frog egg experiment which a profoundly didactic woman managed to explain to us at amazingly great length, considering the fact that we only had 7.5 minutes to blast off. My son interrupted her to tell her his version of reality, but I picked him up to go and look at mission control and the launch on TV. So different from when I was a kid, but so similar. I remember watching this stuff on little tiny TV sets and now here it is on a big, six-foot screen. It's not funky little module now, either. It's a sleek, beautiful little airplaney-looking thing, that looks a lot like one of the Star Wars robots, if you consider the finish. I looked at my son. He seemed a bit nonplussed. Aren't little boys supposed to get stars in their eyes and try to salute or something when they are exposed to things like this? Important things? Cool things? Positive things that the whole country is proud of (rare though they are in today's nasty climate?) Still, he fidgeted. Until suddenly he stopped and looked around him. "Twelve, Eleven, Ten ..." The whole building had begun to count down with the mission control man. This was little boy territory; why were the adults doing it? I pointed toward the screen, and we watched. It was a wonderful experience, being in a room with all of those people who were fans of our country and of what we'd made and what we were doing. And mommy's a bit of a softy. "Three, Two, One, and we have blast off." He watched while the giant rockets left the earth, taking the beautiful little shuttle with them. And he listened while the entire crowd broke into loud, enthusiastic applause. We live in the Silicon Valley, surrounded by "thing-makers." The space shuttle is one of the coolest, highest-profile engineering projects around, and we thank the entire team for making it work. Wonderful to see such a great project in action. Thank you for the tent, NASA. It was way cool. And happy birthday, America. May that shuttle of ours come down safely, and may our country traverse this difficult time and come out strong, and fair, good, and safe.

You've all been waiting for this: The Gifted and Talented Adults Blog

Remember when you were in school and you got labeled? Kind of comforting, wasn't it? Like, you're exceptionally good in THIS, and you get a little gold star on your forehead and you really don't have to worry about track because you can (enter your "star" quality here ______________) Or did I just have a wierd school experience? At any rate, I just found the Gifted and Talented Adult Blog! I swear to you that I thought it was a dating service, but (!) it's not! I personally find it highly entertaining (for five minutes), because it seems to describe what's wrong with a series of gifted and talented people (and types.) I know these people! Parts of it even sound like my dating diary from a few decades ago. "Extremely bright, but seems to belong locked in a closet somewhere." "Very bright, seems to be addicted to everything, including the new one: breath mints." "Will undoubtedly become a multimillionaire which is good; he'll be able to afford a LOT of therapy." I'm not sure if it's the Silicon Valley, or just bright people, but the diagnosis thing is just too easy. Naaa. I'm probably just over it. Like I said earlier, this stuff is probably best left to twenty-something dating women (I refer you to a classic from my twenties: If you can't live without me, why aren't you dead yet?) But it's always good to have a tool that provides social lubrication and entertainment. Can you find yourself in here? How about your business partner? cheers!

Recipe: Grilled onions with blue cheese

We get the San Francisco Chronicle, and I read it every day. Assiduously. Mostly to check Ann Landers and of course, the comics. We get the NY Times on weekends and I tend to read THAT paper for content. [meow] At any rate, the Chron has an absolutely stunning food section. Seriously. Did you know that they have two cookbooks? Here's the first one. A VERY good cookbook. On Wednesday (Unless they changed "food article day" and I missed it) I looked at the paper and something snapped. It was this recipe, which I made, and can report that it was wonderful! Here you go. It's not often that I read about something over breakfast and make it for dinner! Blue Cheese Onions 4 large red or white onions, sliced into 1-inch thick slices and skewered together, edge to edge, so they look like a row of large flat disks. Brush both sides with oil and put salt and pepper on them. Put them on a grill and cover loosely with foil. Cook them on low, turning occasionally, until cooked. about 30 minutes. The rest of the ingredients are: some balsamic vinegar (and a small brush) 3/4 cup panko bread crumbs 4-5 ounces crumbled blue cheese That's it. Brown the panko in a skillet on the stove, just to toast it. Mix the blue cheese in and put this on top of the onions. When the onions are almost done, brush them with balsamic vinegar, then top each slice with the blue cheese mix and press down firmly. Re-cover with foil and allow the cheese to melt. They are utterly awesome. I have another recipe where you hollow out small onions then fill them with 1 tbsp or more of balsamic and some butter, cover them, and bake for ... Oh, I don't know, maybe an hour? Until they are melting. Very nice. Plus a single, balsamic-glazed baked onion looks lovely on a plate. Just make sure to cook them a LOT.

He's learning well!

I'm sending my son to the German American school where the poor dear is rolling and bobbing in German immersion this past two weeks. I asked him how it sounded to him and he said "blab blab blab blab blab." Not with attitude, just reporting. My German is coming back, too. It's in my brain now, and I find myself trying to parse sentences, thinking "aaargh. This is the WORST grammar!" It's baaaack!!! I speak Danish, which is pretty darn simple. (Well, not the political science or technology parts of it, but you can avoid those.) I found myself wondering what wurde meant the other day. Is it, like, the past participle of "will," used by the first person? Oh my. Ah, well, it's just another voice in the background of my mind, except instead of mulling over interpersonal relationships or being screwed by garden stores (excuse me), this voice is saying things (in German) like "I need to practice so that I can brush up on my German ... um, how do you say brush up in the German vernacular?" No wonder I like learning other languages. Much more pleasant (if you have to obsess.) I really like the children and parents at the school. I haven't found a single woman who looks as though she's in Junior League! Nice (for me). Not scary. They look normal and act normal. And the children are nice, too. They told me not to put any sweets into my son's lunch, which is fine with me, since we're not a real "sweets" family. However, I found a box of, like, dragon fruit gummy thingies that I bought at Costco (so I have 50 of them), and put one into his lunch yesterday as a treat. It's the only sweet processed thing that I let him eat. His other lunch treats are: a home-packaged small baggie of potato chips, applesauce in a tube, and yogurt in a tube. Wooo. I have looked for years, but can't find anything else that I'll feed my kid in all of the fun packaged stuff, so that's it. So get this: I went to pick him up in aftercare and they were making pancakes! (Pfannkuchen to you). They gave one to my son and sprinkled it with chocolate powder. He ate it up. On the way to the car, he said ruminatively "they won't let me eat the fruit gummis, but they feed me chocolate powder? That doesn't make sense. There's a lot of sugar in the chocolate." I agreed with him, and stifled an internal laugh. Yup, I think he'll be juuuuust fine in life, thank you very much!

Great male writer/awesomely nasty amazon wish list

Just a note about a wonderful writer, Jim Harrison. I love this guy. One of my favorite writers is Alice Adams, even though she's a bit dated, I suppose. Lots of San Francisco and Marin County in the seventies and eighties with deep roots-female writing. Harrison feels like her counterpoint for depth. As female as Adams is, Harrison is masculine. Like Hemingway, but without that icky fifties cultural role stuff. If you haven't read him, I'd suggest Legends of the Fall, which contains a stunning novella called "Revenge." "Revenge" kicks butt. Here's a description of a movie that was made out of it, which apparently Tarantino adored. See? Masculine. Um, or something. "(The story of) an ex-Navy pilot squaring off against a wealthy Mexican and his goons, who left him for dead and tortured his mistress." The review goes on to describe, from what I can tell, the entire movie industry in about 4500 words, but I'd highly recommend the book. Speaking of which, check out this book list. I love it. Listen to what she says about Paradise Lost: "Milton is a pompous jerk, and his writing is irksome. Even worse, his theology sucks." Incidentally have you noticed that, with the advent of online writing, with the links and all, the old ways of using quotes feels increasingly outdated? I just took the quotes OUT of the book title and decided to italicize it. Nah. I'll just link it. And of course, if you put quotes around something you link to, it looks positively lousy. OK, back to the reviewer. She sounds like a real book lover. I am so sick of palliative thinkers. Give me someone with a meaty opinion. Well, unless they're some medicated wacko railing on the local "I hate Americans" right-wing radio channel. Those folks I can do without. Besides, I asked for an opinion, not a recital of the latest "Rapture" messages. Have you read the reviews on Amazon's listmania? They are hilarious. Here's one, about The Metamorphosis: "This book is amazing despite the main character being a giant beetle." Cool.

a beautiful gift

I am a fifth-generation Californian. And I have never seen nor heard of weather like this year's. Today, however, on the 28th of June, for heaven's sake, it began to rain in the middle of the day. It was awesome. I bicycle my son to school when possible. I live in Atherton and his school is in the Menlo Park/Palo Alto area, so I was biking through the Menlo Oaks neighborhood, which is the nicest neighborhood in Menlo Park. Little drops began to twinkle down on me. "Did you feel that?" I called to a man walking down the road. "Yup," he yelled. "Wonderful!" As I bicycled, I held my arm up, palm flat, in the time-honored "it's raining" way. A truck coming up from behind me beeped a soft beep and the driver gave me the thumbs-up sign. And the next four cars were driven by people with huge smiles on their faces. This was a gentle summer shower. We just flat-out don't get those here. It felt like balm, like a gift. And even more like a gift were the shared grins, thumbs-up, and smiles with my fellow Americans. How long has it been since THAT happened, folks? We share far too few smiles, waves, and grins with our neighbors. It was great to have an excuse for them today.

I love askapatient.com

Last year, to continue the "gardening" theme, I, um, exhibited poor judgment. It was a hot day and I was alone with my son, being enthusiastic about outdoor life. At some point, I decided that I needed to climb up on top of the pool house and, with a hand saw, try to trim the oak tree. Not a huge problem. This particular branch, however, was about a foot above my head, and was about six inches in diameter. So there I was (at this point, I start sounding a bit like Arlo Guthrie...), jumping up into the air and at the same time pushing as hard as I could because, heck, sawing UP is a lot harder than sawing DOWN, when I got a crushing headache. A real doozy, as we said in the mountains where I grew up (this is AFTER I grew up on a farm in Minnesota). So, um, I climbed down from the roof as fast as I could, luckily not breaking a limb, walked inside, and put my son in front of a video. This in itself, illustrates that I should have gone to the hospital, incidentally, since I'm not a bit fan of the evil death box (TV to you normal folks.) Then I called my husband, told him that I'd done something, and went to bed. Unusual behavior for a mom of a 5 year old. We don't typically go to bed, leaving our children alone in the house. Yikes. Luckily it was a mighty compelling show and nothing got burned down. At any rate, I ended up with one heck of a migraine. For three weeks. The only thing that worked was to take four ibuprufen's and a couple of tylenols. Every five hours. For three weeks. It was an interesting time. I went to see three doctors (the last was a neurologist, who gave me a MRI - yuck.). Each doctor loaded me up on painkillers. When I would mention these painkillers to people, I would be met with the bizarre response "oooooh, DARVON (or whatever) how cool." This puzzles me. My personal painkiller of choice is ibuprufen because it doesn't make me stupid. I've never really gotten into the stoner mentality, and the concept of codeine as something "nice" is just flat-out wierd in my book. Like, who are these people, anyway? At any rate (I'm almost here). The BEST WEBSITE for me during this time was a little website called www.askapatient.com. Especially since nothing worked. None of the migraine meds that I was given did a THING for this headache - BUT when I tried them, I'd be floored by pain for six hours, while I waited for the drug to get out of my system (at which point I would take some ibuprufen.) www.askapatient.com let me go in and read reviews of meds (like something or other with codeine) BEFORE I took them. Awesome stuff. The site was started by a doctor and I applaud her. The problem? Ah, yes. After the MRI, my neurologist told me that I'd apparently torn the dura covering of my brain. Only a little tiny bit. Kind of like what a weight lifter does during one of those jerk-pulls (or whatever they're called) Nice, huh? Some women turn their legs from wearing high heels. I tear my freaking dura from trying to pull he-man stunts on the top of the pool house. At any rate, it went away after three weeks, but I'm on a strict health program now. Agatha Christie novels. Yup. And finally, at the ripe age of 45, I'm starting to like chocolate!

Gardening versus Body Mutiliation

Well Hello everyone, and how are you today! Ever since I first read William Gibson,I've been waiting for people to start mutilating themselves. In my posting called Could Someone Please Hack Yahoo Avatars I mention morphing shark teeth onto avatars - an idea directly descended from Gibson. That said, let's talk gardens. My house has a garden. It's my first garden, and boy is it different from the gardens we had growing up, which were redolent of sweat, unpleasantness, and mom yelling at you. I have learned to garden, learned to landscape, learned to do my own sprinkler-fixing (instead of hiring 20-somethings on cellphones to rip me off and fail to think, incidentally), and learned to design. Incidentally, I am not artistic, although eventually, given enough years, I have been known to choose a nice color or two for my walls. If you're not artistic, you can either work on fixing up your house (aka "designing"), or you can work on the garden. Gardens are cooler. You work with nature. Or God, depending on whether you are a Darwin fan or not. So here's my theory. I think that the people who are working on the body modification stuff really are just demonstrating what a dearth of gardens does to young people. Shouldn't these folks be outside, making enormous crop circles and convincing Bill and Fred that it was aliens? (AHEM: note: This blog was written in response to a recent article on body modification which I have apparently DELETED (idiotically). Luckily I could remember one person from the article - Lizard Man - but I'm doing you all a favor by NOT providing a direct link. If you want to see the bizarre stuff that people are doing to themselves, feel free to scroll down in wikipedia and check out the "people who do this" links, but this is a warning - it's pretty off-putting." Should be interesting, however, to see what falls into the "norm" category next, though, since we've moved into the "fourteen holes in the ears" and other strange piercing stuff.... Of course ALL of this stuff falls neatly into the "really make your parents crazy" category, but gosh - shouldn't you be able to do that without plastic surgery?)

Tufte: Powerpoint is Evil. Awesome stuff

Am I the only one that hasn't read this? I just stumbled onto Tufte's hilarious essay called "Power Corrupts. Powerpoint Corrupts Absolutely" and had to laugh out loud. I mentioned it to my husband and he said (of course) "Oh yes, I remember that." Well, I was out in the back, trying to tape oatmeal containers together to make dual rocket blasters for a few years, and didn't have time to read Wired much, let alone remember anything, so forgive me for mentioning this, but I loved the article. Ironically enough, we went on a school tour to a private Menlo Park school last year (which shall remain nameless). This school promptly made me itch. Like... was it bug bites? Hackles? A slight rash from ... Ah, who can say. But the place drove me nuts. In the middle of the tour, the HR manager (or whatever she was) talked about how wonderful it was that the third graders were giving PowerPoint presentations. Ack! We couldn't get out of there soon enough. So nice to know that Tufte agrees.

Chats with mom: On wife-beaters, menstuff, and the vocabulary of love and anger

My mother is never a boring conversationalist. She's been an educator for thirty years, and I remember her earliest jobs: teaching in the jail and juvenile detention center. Back in about 1975, she actually had a classroom at the jail. She'd furnished it in antiques and an oriental rug, if you can believe it (she collects things.) Today when I was speaking with her, thanking her for being my mother she told me something which I found kind of interesting. Wife-beaters, she said, have no vocabulary for gradiations of irritation. Isn't that interesting? She said the people who beat their wives will go from normal to white-hot anger, with nothing in between. They have no words for the subtleties of emotion in between. Naming something, she maintains, is necessary to understanding it. I was intrigued by this and tried to Google for it only to discover that "wife beaters" are apparently a slang term for some hip-hop thing that Keven ... um, Federline? (is that how you spell it?) does something with. Sigh. Since it was clear that the first 500 responses would include hip-hop info, I kept searching. I finally started looking at Anger Management and found some interesting sites. In particular, there's a site out there called Menstuff. You would think (if you were a Northern Californian) that they just sold, um... gel for chest hair and drums to use on the beach, but apparently they're much broader. Check 'em out. Here's their intro page. Menstuff was started in Berkeley in 1985. They have some very interesting perspectives on things.

Sputnik versus the DARPA Grand Challenge

You know, back in the fifties, Sputnik motivated an entire generation of strapping young men to go into rocket science and technology. Here's a description from NASA archives: "The inner turmoil that Hagen felt on "Sputnik Night," as 4-5 October has come to be called, reverberated through the American public in the days that followed. Two generations after the event, words do not easily convey the American reaction to the Soviet satellite. The only appropriate characterization that begins to capture the mood on 5 October involves the use of the word hysteria. A collective mental turmoil and soul-searching followed, as American society thrashed around for the answers to Hagen's questions. Almost immediately, two phrases entered the American lexicon to define time, "pre-Sputnik" and "post-Sputnik." The other phrase that soon replaced earlier definitions of time was "Space Age." With the launch of Sputnik 1, the Space Age had been born and the world would be different ever after. " If you put the hysteria aside though, there was a pure rush - a touch - of power. The power of technology, "to boldly go where no..." oops, sorry. My husband watched the DARPA Grand Challenge for a while with my son tonight. "His eyes were huge," he said. He didn't understand all of these engineers, all of these robotics experts, all of these men driving these wierd robots into the desert so that they exploded. Ahem. Can we just have a minute of silence while we think about what the next generation will develop into? OK, I admit that I was raised (during my seminal pre-teen years) to the tune of the National Lampoon, so haughty, left-wing pseudo-intellectual gutter humor pervades my psyche. Hey, what can I say. But while Sputnik seemed to be a thin-lipped bloodless Drive to Conquer, the DARPA Grand Challenge seems to be modeled a bit on Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. Behind the wheel of a huge red convertible, with the tires filled up 40% too much, careening around freeway exits in big swoopy circles... cackling. Does anybody other than me notice the inherent whimsey in the DARPA Grand Challenge? My favorite, of course, was the first one. How far did everyone get? Like 50 feet out? What a hoot. At any rate, this is what our kids are seeing about technology today. Now tekkies have always had fun. (My favorite uncle adored Edmund Scientific.) Nobody's disputing that. I guess that it's just really neat to get a widespread audience being able to see the fun. And what new technology can do. Me, I'm really curious about how this stuff is processed by your ordinary technology-loving five year old. What's it going to come out as? The mind boggles.

My fingers are crossed: Rosa Brooks on "Battered Congress Syndrome"

I tend to be fairly political, although I just really cannot track things in our country right now without foaming at the mouth, so I try to not get too detail-oriented. Rosa Brooks' article gives you details, but also a whole new swing on things. Hey, have you seen those approval numbers? Let's all vote for Sanity, folks! I love the recent quote by a Republican saying "He's the dumbest president we've ever had." However, that's a bit pat. The really evil, corrosive stuff isn't from HIM! It's from the dark force. Groan. There I go.

Tips of the day: bullying class and free ebooks!

I love the Berkeley Parents Network list! I learn so much! Thank you to Ginger Ogle for setting the whole thing up so long ago - it's now got around 10,000 users, and the advice given is erudite, educated, with multi-culti values, good life perspective, and so forth. Today I discovered two things. First thing is something called kidpower, which is a program to send your kid through if they're being bullied. I hear that it works a lot better than sending a can of mace, for example (ahem, can you tell my child hasn't reached this yet? I'm still cracking jokes!) The other thing is this awesome site called Manybooks.net. They have 13,600 free ebooks that you can use for your PDA or ipod. Is that cool or what?

So are we turning our kids into large lab rats?

You should read neurobiologist Susan Greenfield's comments on the effect of modern technology on brain development from her recent presentation to the House of Lords. Here's an excerpt: "Does this mean young people are acquiring or will need different skills? Memory, for example, may no longer be as essential as it was for those of us who had to learn reams of Latin grammar, but with everything just a click away, perhaps we are at risk of losing our imagination, that mysterious and special cognitive gift that until now has always made the book so much better than the film. I am not proposing that we become IT Luddites, but rather that we could be stumbling into a powerful technology, the impact of which we understand poorly at the moment." I really like the fact that she wants to try to figure out what the huge lifestyle changes (from media) are doing to our kids. Here's a Guardian article on same. When you think about it, this generation of children is being experimented on: with media; with more chemicals in their bodies and environment than ever before; with new scares about our food supply (tuna fish only once a week !); and in verdant silicon valley homes, with crushing levels of competitiveness and scheduled time - as early as possible. Have I mentioned crushing economic pressures and both parents working? Ach! My husband (he's the intelligent one in the family) has insisted that we teach media criticism to our son from about age 2. That's one step in the right direction. Recently I read a posting from a perceptive and dedicated teacher, Lorna Dils, in a curriculum unit that she proposes for 4th grade and up at the Yale-New Haven Teachers Institute. She calls it The Mystery of the Passive Students, and she writes: "I am concerned about my students. It seems that even though they are identified as Talented and Gifted (T.A.G.), they are increasingly passive in their thinking. They are used to easily comprehending all of the reading that they do in their other classes and there is no doubt about it: they do comprehend well. What they do not do well is apply, analyze, synthesize, or evaluate the information that they read. They also do not retain information for long periods of time because of the superficiality of their reading. I am afraid that my students think of the learning process in the same way they think of watching television. They are used to being passive consumers of television and it seems that, when looking for information in texts, they would like to “‘switch the dials” as they do the channels on their television sets, and have the information they want magically appear before them. They do not realize that searching for information and reading is a very active process, requiring both mental and physical energy. My students are also resistant to thinking at higher levels: these thinking processes require mental energy. They are too used to being passive in their learning; they are consumers rather than producers." Sure, you can buy organics, and you can get the best nanny possible. But how do you combat the inability to think and the little problem of perceiving reality as something you can "change the channels on" as it impacts how your kid will think and will navigate in the world? Novel idea: How about thinking hard about what's important and what your priorities should be. How about putting that stuff in the forefront of your brain and your life, and checking to see if how you live life conforms to your personal ideals and life goals for your kids? But what can you do? You can honor the earth, our world, and reality. You can turn off the TV set and the computer (this will take some discipline) and you can go outside and teach your kid how to play a wierd game of frisbee golf. Or hunt for bugs. You can regularly schedule fun into your desk calendar, and you can work to be spontaneous with your child. You can try to fix things that break in your home - instead of throwing them away or just calling someone - and you can sit around and make up stories together. And you can think of what you want an American child - your American child to embody.** So what are some epithets that I'd be happy to have applied to my kid? As a first pass? Well, in the olden days, Americans were always called "brash" by the British (just as the British culture's power was waning, incidentally), so let's keep that one. (Google brash american for a nod to today's brash Americans.) Or perhaps I should just use "irrepressible in a sometimes mildly irritating fashion?" Ah, Americans! Moving on: empathetic, resourceful, respectful of different cultures, able to entertain themselves by creating a game or toy out of a piece of wood and a rope or rubber band, resilient, will rise to a challenge, will defend what is right, will protect society, and the world, and will educate themselves, and not follow causes blindly. Doesn't sound bad, does it? For a start. Do you see anywhere in the abovementioned list, BTW, learn to game the system so that they can get the most AP units and go to an Ivy league school? Oh dear. I fear that I'm not getting with the program. My son is 5. This means that by high school, according to a local private school we toured (tuition cost: $29K if I remember correctly) he'll be doing 6-plus hours of homework a day! Mommy will have to develop one heck of a gin habit to sit by and smile while that goes on. **To foreign readers: hello! Feed free to list your own country and what you'd like to see your child embody.

Is it good practice to teach creativity at 30?

Here is a professional site on creativity. This one uses storytelling and games to teach groups of people to be more creative. Gosh. Like preschool, what? Oh. Wait a minute. Shouldn't preschoolers be learning how to write now? Did we goof this up somewhere? Here's a concept: why don't we just raise our children to be creative from the start, rather than fitting them into little boxes in a fear-based society, and then trying to instruct them on "higher concepts" like spontaneity when they're 30? Remember the Japanese? Everybody was talking about them taking over the world in the eighties. They had a rigid schooling system. Every smidgen of uniqueness was quashed ASAP, as part of the schooling system. Great. Eventually, when it became obvious that the entire country was lacking in innovative skills, what did they do? They imported American experts on innovation and creativity to come in and consult! And what did those experts say? Raise your kids in a less rigid environment! (Amazing what people get paid for, isn't it?) Fast forward fifteen, twenty years. Aaaarrrggh! China is going to take over the world! Or ... is it fundamentalists? Hard to remember. What should we do? I know, let's make our three and four year olds learn to read! That way, they'll score highly on the No Child Left Behind tests and the teachers won't lose their jobs and the kids won't get traumatized by teachers leaving and schools being closed and ... oh dear. this is giving me a headache. Incidentally, here is the government's No Child Left Behind website. I really like the Maoist color scheme... Question: has the current regime developed some sort of novel new salute yet? Or do we keep the old one?

Interesting test on how well students think

I'm looking for something else (story of my life) and ran into this description of a test called the Collegiate Learning Assessment test. Another link. Check it out. They give students a real-world, ambiguous situation, clippings, a problem, etc. etc. and have them solve the problem. The test measures how well students think. What an original idea! Hey! Let's teach to it!

Speaking of modern feminism

Here's a book review that had me snickering into my imported tea. It's a beautifully-written review of a book called "Mommy Wars" by a writer named Sandra Tsing Loh, who names her review "rhymes with Rich." My favorite excerpt (I think) is this (a response to Steiner's husband moving the family from NY to Minnesota for lots of stock options.) "Steiner's female-empowering argument is that her only choice, as a mother, was to return to full-time work at a plum Washington Post advertising job in order to gain the economic leverage needed to have a say in household decisions. It is a leverage that Steiner's own depressed, rum-and-Coke-swilling, stay-at-home -- if brilliant, Radcliffe-educated -- mother never had, since Steiner's cheerful lawyer father was the one who worked. ." Read it and roar. Undoubtedly much better than the book, which sounds like whiny pap.

Bipolar Disorder and Creativity

Hiya. I was actually looking through a professional site on creativity when I found an intriguing site that talks about bipolar disorder and creativity. I'm tucking it in here, right next to the recipes, and it might find its way into the Anachronisticmom.com website's medical section one of these days.

Kindergarten Readiness

Ack! Sputter. Clang! Crash! Oh, hello there. I was just reading an article about Kindergarten readiness and it was reminding me of where I lived and what it was like. Let me just have one of these nice homeopathic calmness pills, some of my imported Russian tea (in my lovely paper-white china cup) while sitting at my imported-wood breakfast table and ... ah, there we are. Well good morning everyone! Have you seen the San Jose Mercury today? There is a lovely article about whether or not children are ready for Kindergarten. I just read it and was struck by something: Hey! That sounds normal! In the article, they talk about how, in order to attend Kindergarten, your child should be able to resolve conflicts, know the letters of the alphabet, and be able to sit, among other things. Buttons too. Wow. That's a difference. Forgive me, but I was under the impression that, in order to "keep up" with the "aggressive pressures" of local kindergartens, children (especially those pesky, irritating, constantly-moving boy children) had to be able to:

Know all of the letters of the alphabet, including their sounds.

Be able to write them all.

Be able to do rudimentary reading.

Sit quietly during all of the circle times.

Line up like little darlings.

Be quiet.

Be able to act interested when the wall of your kindergarten is filled with scintillating letter combinations, like ng.

Be able to add and probably subtract.

Be ready and willing to be tossed into an language immersion program.

If they're in a language immersion program, be prepared to take the alternate school's language offerings, say, after school or during recess.

Be pliant and pleasant if their parents enrolled them in yet a third language program, since, after all, the age of 5 is one of the best ages for shoving language knowledge into little brains (think foi gras).

Sit quietly.

Wait their turn calmly.

Start their day at 7 AM with before-school time (so mommy and daddy can work), go to school for 6 hours, and then go into a 3-hour after-school program (so that mommy and daddy can work). Here are the results of the joint assessment of kindergarten readiness for San Mateo and Santa Clara counties. After reading about what you need I think I'll drop the "reading drill" for today and we'll just go to the park!

Wierd Comfort Food

Would that be a great title for a cookbook, or what? Heck, they published The White Trash Cookbook, didn't they? I don't own it, incidentally. I figured that I could just go out if I wanted that type of food. However I did purchase The WASP Cookbook (what can I say?) And then there's my absolute favorite cookbook: You've Had Worse Things in your Mouth, by Billi Gordon. Billi's cookbook is hilarious, although hard to find now. She divides food categories uniquely: Seduction, Destitution, Motivation, and Revenge. Her peanut butter and wasabe sandwich, for example, is custom-designed for the picnic where you haul your best girlfriend's panties (found under the bed) out and confront your boyfriend. You know? And her recipe for chocolate pudding containing chocolate laxative is a really great way of broadening your culinary view of things. Looking for the perfect graduation gift? Want your daughter to dump her scummy live-in? Give her the culinary tools for success. But I digress. I actually began this today wanting to write about wierd comfort food. The strange concoctions that we, as adults, tend to eat alone in our kitchen, hunched over the bowl or plate while reading shallow magazines or genre fiction. So... what's yours? Does wierd comfort food have rules? Sure! It has to be something that you eat at home. Entire chain restaurant menus (e.g. Ye Olde Pancake House) don't count. It has to be a specific food combination that you or someone in your family uses for nutrition and comfort. My husband, for example, puts cottage cheese on pasta. Oops, excuse me. He just corrected me. He puts cottage cheese on egg noodles because apparently they taste "totally different." I find that odd. If we have no cottage cheese, he will take plain penne pasta and put catsup on it. Now I find that cringingly bizarre. When I was growing up, my mother would often make me comfort food of some type or another. One favorite was soft-boiled eggs, chopped up small with some butter on top and homemade bread made into toast. Pretty dull, huh? I remember eating and thinking I was just like Christopher Robin. Stuff like this is why I'm such a freaking Pollyanna today. I suppose that macaroni and cheese might have been another family comfort food, although I don't remember it as such. And it was real macaroni and cheese. First you overcook the pasta (remember the WASP reference up top?) Then you make a homemade white sauce and put dried mustard powder, some white pepper, a dash of worcestershire sauce, and a lot of grated cheddar cheese into it. Stir it up into the pasta and bake! Put bread crumbs on top. More butter. Lots of butter. When my mother was getting her teaching credential, she sent us over to some real, honest-to-goodness white trash types for babysitting. It was amazing. I was twelve and I read probably 200 True Detective magazines (and all of their Reader's Digest Condensed Books) while there. Every time we were there, they would feed us this extremely strange food. It was ... macaroni and cheese from a box! The Kraft stuff. And, the real shocker - no vegetables! This family was amazing. They were like the poster children for healthy home cooking. They all weighed about 300 lbs, the mom wore a flowered housedress, and the dad routinely took little Bubba out back for a good whipping. Yikes. I haven't read a True Detective magazine (or purchased or eaten Kraft macaroni and cheese) since. And what's with that stuff, anyway? It takes just as long to make the real stuff as it does the wierd glow-in-the-dark orange stuff! But I suspect that it's the siren lure of comfort food. The real "wierd comfort food," though, and the stuff I'm most interested in, is the sometimes odd combinations that you developed as a child and still (somewhat furtively) try today. When you're a kid, you're just developing taste buds and a sense of, um, personal style. The results can be entertaining. Yesterday, I made a can of Campbells tomato soup. I put it on the table, and then got out the saltine crackers. Methodically, I crumpled about 10 of them onto the top of the soup. Then, I ate it. My son looked at me somewhat oddly and I tried to get him to taste it. He did, and then looked at me more oddly. "No thanks mom" he said, emphatically. Ah, well, he'll figure out his own comfort food. I also enjoyed homemade dill pickles dipped in milk for a few years. Might I add, though, that I was raised in a health food-conscious home in the middle of the country, and we had limited options? Like tea with honey in it if we wanted sweets? Frankly, I look forward to hearing what all of you suburban ex-kids used to eat as comfort food. I'll bet you can come up with some toe-curling oddities. Come on, I dare you. Share! BTW, as penance for the (shark noise please) Amazon link inclusions, here's a good booklover's link, just to even things out a bit.

Psst! Hey! Wanna buy a high-tech t-shirt?

Today I cleaned out the garage. Nothing new in my life. Actually, I've been cleaning out garages filled with my husband's bizarre magnetized tech-trash, for about thirteen years. As part of cleaning out the garbage, I moved an extremely large box of high-tech t-shirts from the garage to the gardening shed. Fun fun fun. And then I came in to see a Valleyschwag link from my mate himself. How appropriate. But let's think about it. For $14.95, as they say, you can get a whole box of Valley Schwag, without having to pay the $3000 rent! Wheee! Gosh, where would we put it. Today I was looking at a lovely shirt. It said "The World of Supercomputing" on it. Remember Supercomputing? The company right at the front was ... Ardent Computers. So... show of hands here. Who can remember Ardent? Gosh, I'm getting old!

Another ode to the Geek faire

My husband just sent me this lovely article by Brad Stone about the Geekapalooza. I missed seeing "Woz" playing segway polo, but I did see him getting repeatedly dunked in the EFF "dunk tank." As we walked away I talked to my son. "Remember when we were at the Discovery museum on Friday?" He nodded. "Well, honey, it's on "Woz" way ... and that was Woz." He looked somewhat bemused, but it's his first meeting with someone who's had a street named after him, so I'll cut him some slack.

The Maker Faire - modern Americana

We were due to have an Earth Day party on Sunday but we cancelled - thought it would rain although we barely squeaked by without it (it's been an odd year for weather here in CA). Instead, we went to the Maker Fair, which was a total geekfest. It was put on by the people who do Make Magazine, which is a magazine for people who ... make things. And heeere is the Make Blog, which today seems to feature a knitted motorcycle!! The Maker Faire seems to embody Silicon Valley and America to me. You know the Wierd Roadside Attractions that punctuate the obscure tourist roads of America? Shoe trees, large coffee pots, large twine balls,and giant cow hamburger stands? Well, the Make Faire is those same exact people - fifty years later. But now the tools are a LOT better than the occasional decorated concrete bunker in South Dakota. Honest. The people who make stuff in the Make Magazine articles are fascinating. They make really cool stuff. They're obsessed, they're creative, and ... let's be honest here: it's a lot more fun to visit them in a faire than to be married to many of 'em, in my opinion. Sometimes, I think that my husband's vocation/avocation (inventing technologies and creating companies) (also known as severely marketing-based entrepreneurialism - ahem) is kind of obnoxious. I mean, why can't he just decide to go and make wine in Umbria, for heaven's sake? (Can you tell I miss him when he's gone?) This making of companies is a real timesink. Then I meet people who spend literally years of their time assembling, say, Babbage's Difference Engine out of legos and Meccano. Can we talk about this? Show of hands from wives reading this please. Would you severely harm your husband if this was his hobby? Gosh, I wonder if there's a "hobbyist quencher" series of items cooked up by partners of Make exhibitors. Hobbyist zapper? I can see it now. "Honey, could you please take out the garbage." Three days later. "ZZZZZAAAAAP!!!" Gosh, I'll have to work on that. Makes some gaming and the odd planning of new products seem positively mainstream. BTW, the new Lego Mindstorms were shown at the show. They look very nice, although for the 8-plus range. Lego Mindstorms are programmable robots (and the soundtrack for that link will give you a headache within 12 seconds.) Coming up: A discussion about why there are lots and lots of games for the 4 to 7 range about all sorts of things, but ABSOLUTELY NO JUNIOR SIMULATORS. Is this moronic or what? Showing my geek roots, I remain...

What on earth is wrong with being a feminist?

For years now, like the murmur of tiny little voices, I have heard references to young women recoiling in horror if the "f" word was mentioned. "Oh no, I'm not a "feminist" or anything like that" has apparently long been a popular refrain with the younger set. I'll be honest here. I don't have the highest opinion of many of my fellow creatures, and young, college-age girls whose opinions or trends are reported in the newspapers, unfortunately, don't strike me as being ... well ... anything to care about in the least. (Although Britney and Paris really are fascinating life models. Honest.) But I have read the reports. And I have wondered. What on earth is wrong with being a feminist? I came to the silicon valley around 1980. And because I did that, I got a glimpse, a whiff, of what life had been like for the sisters (yes, sisters) who entered the workforce before me. You know what? Those women went through hell to pave the way for the rest of us. And being a feminist MIGHT conceivably be considered as a really good way of giving them the nod, of thanking them. Here's an article about young women in Saudi Arabia who are just starting to think of women's rights. Women's rights. Doesn't it sound almost archaic now? And apparently the only people to mention feminism nowadays are the right-wing harridans looking for something to be against. (I heard Dr. Laura berating them the other day.) Um... the right wing's message is what? Feminists hate men? Give me a break. I haven't met a feminist in about 28 years who claims to hate men. Who claims to hate men? Girls in their twenties, that's who usually claim to hate men, for heaven's sake. I'd like to spend a few minutes talking about what feminism has done for us all. In 1980, I was doing technical illustration in my first job out of college. In those days, the workers in the technical areas came straight out of the military. I remember deciding to "hang out" with the guys in my department one day. That was fine with them. They let me come along - to the strip joint down the street, where they ate sandwiches, watched the strippers, and some of them got their checks cashed at the bar. Not comfortable. I remember an early job interview in the eighties. The guy looked at me (dressed in full business suit, pumps, probably even with one of those nasty little bows at my neck), and said "have you ever fixed your car?" Um, no. Didn't get that job. It was fine to have things like pinups on the walls of some offices (this depended on the company, of course - the silicon valley was much more rollicking back then). And I happen to know that the stripper thing wasn't an isolated incident at all. It was fairly routine for managers to take engineers out to strip joints and so forth. Guy's club. "Huuuyuuuh" (insert some guy noise) It wasn't that women were hated. It wasn't that women were disliked. Heck, everybody likes certain body parts, right? It was that women's roles were: schoolgirl, hot babe, slut, mommy, principal, grandma, wizened old (probably sex-starved) unmarried woman, and so forth. Professional women were mostly secretaries. And they were good at getting coffee. There were some other women, but being a woman was practically a blue-collar occupation in the olden days. And the women who broke through those barriers were really tough. I laud them. Nowadays, and I want you all to really listen to this: Nowadays, you can be a professional woman without putting on a suit of armor, and you can be more yourself than some puffed up "professional woman." Sure, you have to be professional, but you are allowed to own more feminine attributes - they're not seen as harbingers of emotional breakdown. Because some of the women who are now still larger than life and in their sixties worked for years, often wearing the *worst* clothes, to establish "female cred," the workforce finally "got it." Ohhhhhhh. Huh. I guess that it *doesn't* matter if you have boobs. You *can* use your brain for more than typing, huh? Do any of the young, feminism-rescinders out there realize that you could, in the "olden" days, have a MA from MIT in computer design and if you ever DID get a job, you would be expected to just type for your department? Forever? Until you met and married some nice man and stayed home to ... turn into an alcoholic or something? Several years ago, I bought a copy of "Free to Be You and Me" for my kid. "It's classic," I thought. I listened to it and it blew me away. So much of it was about how it was "OK if a mommy wants to be a lineman." Over and over again. Telling kids that it was OK if women worked in jobs that were traditional guy jobs. I found myself thinking "Big Duh. It's not rocket science that a woman can be a policeman." But it WAS back then, folks. It was back then. It's still tough on the younger women coming in, but as I drive down the street I see young women policemen, young women Cal-Trans workers, young women in construction gear. Is that cool or what? Do any of the "oooh, ick" non-feminists realize that years ago they just flat-out weren't allowed to have certain types of jobs? And, of course, that as a woman, you were paid a pittance. Money and power. Money and power. I'm out of time. Gosh. No time to mention that culturally in the fifties and sixties, it was pretty acceptable to walk away from your "downer" wife and kids without paying child support (at least in the eyes of the law.) I believe that it was in the seventies that the child support laws were established, which helped many of us who grew up during that time. And how about the fact that because of feminism, men are much more involved now in raising their children. You see, in the rigid role-bound culture of the fifties, Dad's role was "with the guys." In the 2000's, it's OK for Dad's role to be with his family, and as a family face what needs to be done financially. Stridency is a natural stage when a group of people are fighting for a new social status. And yes, feminists were strident. Guess what, our "sisters" were also strident when they demanded the vote! (Thank you for that.) Anybody who wants to do something differently in a society is strident. Get over it. Adrienne Rich ,example poem, once referred to feminism, or "women's liberation" as she preferred to call it, as "potentially the ultimate democratizing force": "It is fundamentally anti-hierarchical, and that involves justice on so many levels because of the way women interpenetrate everywhere. And the places we don’t interpenetrate--the higher levels of power--are bent on retaining power, retaining hierarchy, and the exclusion of many kinds of peoples." Too bad that the right-wing nasties have been able to put their evil-smelling spray on terms like "civil liberties" and "feminism," isn't it?

On Religion and 5 Year Olds, Rental Cats, and Osiris

I have been hosting a homeschooled girl on Friday mornings (for about 3.5 hours ! ) to do art and play with my son. Her parents are extremely conservative Catholics, and the mom is pretty secure in it, since we’re as close to pagans as it gets in our conservative, respectable neighborhood. At any rate, I think it’s sheer earnestness of parenting (and a rejection of the strange “mainstream” values that we see in this area) but I seem to have befriended lots of people from very different cultures. Our friends include an Egyptian friend who was made to go to British schools and a German convent school while growing up. A Singaporean friend who is a very passionate, artistic woman, who went to a British international baccalaureate degree-typed school (which she characterized as “harsh), who is very disciplined and driven to raise her children without pejorative strictures. A very nice wife of the local Russian Orthodox priest, who was homeschooling, but has now found a Russian Orthodox church 45 minutes away, at which she volunteers so that her children can be taught there. And our neighbor, who is Russian Islamic, married to a Persian, who homeschools, but is now sending her daughter (sometimes) to the same preschool where my son attends. It’s a nice area. We like all of these people and are learning a lot from them. My son, of course, has received, instead of religious instruction while growing up, a good grounding in mythology and comparative cultures and religions. He can tell you about Scylla. Likes to play, as he used to call it, “feeseus and the minotaur,” has Ganeshes in the garden and a Buddha in the walkway, and so forth. The afterlife? Every time I think about the afterlife, I think of George Carlin’s views on religion. The result, of course, is that the my son's big knowledge about afterlife is that Cerberus lives there. Oh yes. And what he learned at “Lion King: the Musical.” Last week (this is why I’m telling all this), I was rolling on the ground. He was in the back playing with his friend whom we’ll call Rosalind. As I came back, they were arguing. Strongly. “Mommy,” said my son. Rosalind says that there is only one God. I say that there are many!!!!” “Oh dear,” I thought. “This is starting pretty darn early” I managed to diffuse it by talking about context (last week’s lecture whilst locked in the carseat, BTW.) “That’s because you are talking about the Gods that different cultures have believed through the years. Rosalind is talking about her personal belief..” Thank goodness that seemed to do it. Should be interesting when he decided to hammer out his own personal belief, though. I'm looking forward to it. Last year, he told me that our family worshipped Athena. Rosalind, that same visit, informed us very seriously, that “dragons are much closer to demons than to heaven.” I snuffed that one out, telling her straightfaced that “some dragons are extremely good and do good for the world.” The second interaction that made me laugh was today. They were playing with the cat and having one of those marvelous five-year old conversations. So adult, but so ... five. Rosalind, it seems, would love a cat but doesn’t have one. “You could get a rental cat,” said my son. Five year old conversations rock. - Kate BTW, from our archives. Good Egyptian myths What happens after death in Egypt And a new find: The Heathen Handbook

I love the valley

I do. I just flat-out love the silicon valley. Sometimes I forget, like when I'm surrounded by minimally friendly, overly groomed mommies whose kids give mine the "Menlo Park Blank Stare" instead of a friendly "hi" at the park, but since I now go to Palo Alto parks, we don't encounter that any more. Last night, I went to an architecture SIG group meeting to hear our friend Tom Conrad discuss the new architecture of Pandora. It was grand. It was especially grand because I got to hear the first hour's worth of questions, in which everyone asked all sorts of non-architecture questions, and then I went shopping and came back. Perfect for my level of non-technical expertise. The architecture SIG reminded me the clean and pure part of the valley. Smart, classic geeks, who are interested in things, who have passions about things that they're interested in, talking about those interests. The head of the SIG told me that during the last space launch, they had someone from NASA come to the group to talk about the architecture of how they got stuff in space to work. (Um, nontechnical description) It's been a decade since I had the honor and pure, uncomplicated pleasure of working in an engineering department, and frankly, I miss it. I moved from there into marketing bunny territory (well, that's what the marketing departments were called at NeXT) , and I miss it. For over a decade, I felt like an honorary guy. It was typically me and about 20 hardware engineers and boy was it great. Like the time that someone mentioned blowing things up as a child and it turned out that (oddly enough) 22 members of the department were total pyromaniacs when they were younger. (Who knew?) It turned out to be good training for me to eventually become a boy-mom. I'm on the lovely Nexodus email list, which was started with the first major exodus from NeXT (get it?). That was back in the days, of course, when people held "NeXTorcisms" when you left the company, and when we were still proud at having created buzzword bingo at one of the vaunted Santa Cruz offsites. At any rate, someone just posted an old game from NeXT days. I remember this game! AcChen. Heard about it? While I was looking at the game, I checked out the rest of the site and was intrigued by the lego collection page. This, my friends, is what the silicon valley is about. Smart people having fun, being good at stuff. Oh yes, and that new thing - becoming wildly successful. You know, for years and years, though, the valley was here and doing extremely well without the expectation that you'd end up as rich as Croesus. I remember years ago, having someone tell me about what motivates engineers. I think that it's making really cool stuff, being part of an awesome team, and making money. The person telling me this (a manager), told me that if you offer two of the three, you'll get the engineer. Nowadays, when my friends say things like "We make 250K a year and we're just barely getting by" (and they're serious), it takes more money to live in the valley. Actually, it takes insane amounts of money to live in the valley. But deep underneath the exorbitant costs of renting or buying a home, and the $1.00- plus a pound prices for things like cabbage which rip-off places like Whole Foods charge... Deep underneath, in the subterranean rivers of the soul of the silicon valley, fun, creativity, and a real sense of respect and community still thrive. Long may it live. [first written 12/05]

Boy Totems Snaps are IN!

OK, please excuse the lousy cropping and layout, but here they are: some snaps of how my child's brain works. And mine, if you realize that I actually tracked these down and photographed them! Boy Totems.

School Notes

We have decided where to send my son to school. We'll be sending him to the German Immersion program at the German American school. This is not the German government-sponsored program in Mountain View. This is the more relaxed, more culturally inclusive program at the Menlo Park German American School campus. We are very happy about our choice. It's pretty funny - a dark horse choice. We looked and looked and I can tell you stories about some of the private schools that we looked at - but I'll probably have to screen the names or risk ... I dunno. What's the middle-class version of retribution? Shunning? At any rate, I have one thing to say about our entire school search. OK. More than one. Let's start with the obvious racism thing. There are so many people in the silicon valley - Northern silicon valley (Palo Alto, Menlo Park, Atherton) who want their children to learn Spanish. Honest. And no, it's not just so that they can talk with their babysitters . Spanish is a very cool language. It's beautiful. It has wonderful children's songs. The Spanish, Mexican, and Central and South American cultures are rich. We live in an extremely wealthy area. Wealthy people are forever looking to see what their money can buy their children, in terms of better schooling. One of the best things to buy your kid is learning another language early. Of course it's best if the family is interested, and if the language comes with some understanding of the world and the culture that the language comes from, n'est pas? There are several international schools around. They teach French and Chinese. (And of course, the occasional German one.) In San Francisco there is a Russian school. There are no private spanish immersion schools. Interesting, hmmn? One school in Palo Alto (Escondido) offers a spanish immersion program. If you live in Palo Alto (I do not), you can enter your child in the lottery and if they win, they can be in the immersion program. Otherwise, you can go to one school in Mountain View, or Adelante school in Redwood City. Does anybody out there have any idea about the amount of interest that a spanish immersion private school would have? I'll bet it would be high. I have spoken with several teachers from South America who tell me that the standards for being a teacher in South America are higher, and the teaching more rigorous, than here in California. Is there awareness of this? Nope. I have not had time to do an incisive reportorial job on this, but have a few poorly-based comments to sling around anyway. A friend of mine tells me that she is considering pulling her child out of one of the public school spanish programs because he is bored to tears. She tells me that there is very little math or science in the program (compared to the private schools), and that as far as she can tell, there aren't even many good textbooks for teaching this stuff in spanish for California students. Interestingly enough, there seems to be a real understanding of what "chinese" culture means for education (pretty strict), and what "french" culture means for education (pretty strict- although I paraphrase :-)). But there doesn't seem to be an understanding of what spanish-based culture means for education. Is this because spanish is spoken by so many countries? Or is this because most of the people in this area don't talk with spanish-speaking people as peers, and they don't really even think of the spanish-speaking cultures as something that could GIVE? Beats me. It's a darn shame that this wealthy, spanish-redolant area cannot start a wonderful private spanish-immersion school. Amazing. I keep wondering if people are afraid that if they send their kids to one, the kids will turn out to be poor immigrants? The German culture for teaching children is a wonderful one, and the German approach at the German school is (uniquely enough, for the silicon valley at this point in time), not fear-based. Instead, it is inquiry-based. Well-structured, but focused on devoping intellect, awareness, good thinking, social context, and the ability to look at things and ask the right questions. The German school teaches to the International Baccalaureate degree, which we like for world view. We had thought to send our child to the Waldorf school, but it wasn't the right fit. The German International school seems to incorporate a lot of what we liked about the Waldorf education without a smidgen of anthroposophy. Since we're allergic to organized religion, that's nice.

readerville?

Now that I have cleared the decks and have absolutely no time in life, I have found the most seductive website! I am still a voracious reader, and this site is all about reading Readerville

Mom without a Mom's Club

Yahoo! When I was younger, I could never imagine what those suburban women were talking about when they listed "volunteer work" in their (social) resumes. Huh? I was raised by hippies in the mountains. About the only volunteer work that I (or anyone I knew in the seventies, for that matter) did was attend the occasional protest. Now that I'm a real, honest-to-God forty-five year old suburban mom in a silicon valley suburb, I can testify to the whole "nonprofit/volunteer" thing. Been there, experienced it. Odd. Yes, I've always known that some people in the world like to be "pink ladies" and such. I've actually known some of them -- oh yeah, even as a child. Hmmn. Forgot about them. I guess that sort of thing goes into the "valued very little because it's just women and they don't get paid" bucket. And I mean that in the nicest possible way. I have never really liked people all that much, and being pleasant is such a severe psychological strain, that I would never greet people at a hospital. Give me a keyboard and a database. Tell me what's wrong. I'll get you a nice, comforting information structure thank you very much :-) Well, I've been in a women's club (just turned nonprofit) for two years, and just jumped ship. Given the amount of attendant wierd female-politics and such, I looked at the 21 huge things on my to-do list, looked at the new (real world) projects in my lap, and cut the cord. The interesting thing is, as far as I can tell, that if you DO get into a volunteer experience and you're competent, then more and more and more work just ... comes your way. Yeah. And if you're obsessive and tie your self-worth to that overachieving feeling, well... my goodness, you can dig yourself one huge hole! Especially if the powers that be find you too ... intense. The great news is that I am no longer getting two hundred messages a day about mom's club issues. Ick ick ick! The even better news is that I can work on, um, new things (said obliquely.) I recently spoke with someone who is doing a startup. He's done a fair share of nonprofit work, and his comment was that for-profits are great. "They're very clear," he said. "When people aren't getting paid," he said "they get wierd." From now on, I think I stick to boards and leave the worker bee stuff to the next generation, but I raise a toast to all of the hard-working nonprofit people out there. In the meantime, check out this url. Have you heard of microisv? Yeah. I knew you had. Time to get back to work. I like "clear."

Notes on Camp

I love the New York Times. Today it led me to a reading of Susan Sontag's "Notes on Camp" which I'd never read.

Oh, my totemistic life

I live with a preliterate. There are totems and meaningful arrangements of things all over the place. Sometimes I expect to find a little, feathered clump with a small hatchet next to it. Say, under the dining room table. We did this on purpose, of course. We have raised my 5.5 year old child on stories (mom and dad tell them - Simon now helps), and we have given him wierd-ass toys. Oh yes, and we haven't let the commercial nasties take up residence inside of his mind. We don't lock him up in the closet or anything. I just let him watch "dragon tales" the other day for the first time. It corresponds with a video game I got him for Christmas (darn it). He loves it and unfortunately knows the song already. He loves Jimmy Neutron and Toy Story. But his brain is not dominated by them. Today I went into the kitchen to see two children's chairs. One was upended on the other to provide a table. On the table was a little manniken next to a small paintbrush. On the table, next to them, was a wooden model of Apollo 11, on its side so that the door could open. Neatly arranged underneath it was a card ("magic 2" as it turns out. Who knew?). Neatly aligned with the spaceship were about 8 crayons, stacked so they looked like a pathway. Lord knows what the whole thing represented, although I will report that when the creator showed up, he began flying the manniken around on the paintbrush. Obvious, n'est pas? Yesterday, I heard "h'-aaaaaah!" repeated about 15 times coming from Simon's bedroom. I walked in to see Simon, holding one of his knights (we bought him knights in Paris - that started all sorts of things!). The knight yelled the battle cry and attacked the round glass orb that we gave Simon for Christmas. Why did we give our son a round glass orb? Well, it's cool, of course. It has bubbles in it and looks magical. At any rate, the knight was attacking the round orb and pushing it across the carpet. At the end of the carpet, the orb rolled onto the hardwood floor and the knight did a jubilant dance. Then they started over. We have played with as much "garbage" as we have new stuff. I have a hard time throwing away old toys because (I hate to admit this) but ... I have always *liked* those cars with the barbie dolls and toys glued all over them. They look like great fun! Perhaps when Simon's a bit older, we can buy a golf cart or something and give it a real "decorating job." In the meantime, I watch him and wish that we had a professional photographer living in the guest room for a few weeks. The arrangements that I find all over my house -- and their attendant totemistic powers and meaning -- are really, amazingly neat. I'll start taking photos, but in my mind's eye I see them up on the wall in an art gallery. If you think about it, and if you think about the more textural modern artists, what they seem to be able to do is to study and understand every aspect, every rule of art itself. Then, like Joyce, they throw away the rules and reach way down deep in themselves for an essence, a feeling. Perhaps it's what was going through their heads at 5, before they could read? The amazing connections to things, the magic attached to almost every item. The story? At any rate, I have seen arrangements like my son does, but they've been done by professionals. What a lovely thing to watch!

Judaic Frustrations...

OK, so I'm not Jewish. And I cannot convert because I happen to not believe in God and also find organized religion to be one of the most shameful and evil things in the world. But hey. Besides that, I think that Judaism is cool and have since I read Exodus at 12, living in the California mountains, where I had never seen or heard of a jew. At that exalted, 12 year old moment, I clutched the paperback to my breast and sighed "I wish I was Jewish." So here I am 32 years later, mad as a hornet, and not just because I've spent a day and a half searching for a hammer that I put down somewhere while hanging something. No. I'm mad because nobody will tell me what the damn letters on the damn dreidel look like. I'm hopping mad. I have just spent about 1/2 hour on the internet, looking for instructions. You know, if you type in "instructions for draidel game" you get a bunch of wackos? Then, if you realize that it might be a good idea to spell it right, you get some lovely sites. Really nice, helpful ones. Like askmoses.com. I kid you not. It's a great idea though. You can ask questions about Judaism and other people can answer them. Very nice. They do give the instructions for playing the game, btw. Yes, yes, and the letters are an abbreviation for "a great ... ummm. what is it again?...miracle happened there" (I think.) Great. So then if one of the letters comes up you get half of the pot (OK), and if Gimel (choose your spelling, btw) comes up, you get everything. Lovely. Nice. Very helpful. Which squidget is the Gimel, please? No answer. Nobody will tell me. I ask the one *real* Jew in the house, my husband, who was raised by socialists in the Bronx. He's got no idea. For this I made latkes last night? Sheesh. No help at all. I keep looking on the internet. ehow.com has some nice instructions. Lovely. What do the damn letters look like? Hooray! I found them! Here is a definition of the Chanukah letters! OK. Now all I have to do is find my &*()(*&) screwdriver, so I can put the AA batteries into the electrical dreidel launcher so that my kid and husband can buy dueling dreidels. Luckily, I do know where the geld is. And, of course, the chardonnay. Is that mentioned anywhere?

What's all this fuss about the Google Print Initiative?

Troy Williams, a very respected academic librarian, is tracking the Google Print Initiative. He offers a very clear overview of the situation in his blog.

Thank you Stanford, for bringing back The Strand

This is utterly cool. On Jan 27, 2006, Stanford will begin to re-release a collection of Sherlock Holmes stories and novels – free of charge and as they originally appeared in The Strand Magazine. This year, subscribers will receive weekly selections from Arthur Conan Doyle’s early Holmes stories, as well as the early novel, The Hound of the Baskervilles. Is that great, or what? I've adored Sherlock Holmes since I was nine. That was the year I spent reading every Sherlock Holmes mystery and playing with my chemistry set! (Not a lot of pink where I grew up.) :-) You can enroll yourself or your friends by going to the website, http://sherlockholmes.stanford.edu Make sure you sign up before Jan 10 - that's when it starts. For more info, you can email them at sherlockholmes@stanford.edu.

No Load Music - I'm in heaven

A friend of ours, Tom Conrad, is CTO of an awesome company called Pandora. They just came out with a free service and if you spend any time at the computer, you’ll have a blast with it. www.pandora.com is connected up with the Music Genome project and will “match” artists or songs for you. Do you have an artist whose work you like? Would you love to find more music like it but, unfortunately, since you’re no longer 14 and have a life, you have no time for it? Tired of ads on the radio and not impressed with the creeping elevator-musicness of the digital channels??? Go to Pandora, sign up, and then create a station. Pandora will match music to your station for you. You cannot dictate the music or hear songs again (their licensing precludes it) but it’s pretty darn fun. My favorites are Pat Metheny, Jason Mraz, Fairport Convention (no kidding. I hadn’t listened to their music for about 12 years, but the stuff Pandora matches to it are very cool), and I also like the Arlo Guthrie channel too! At any rate, you can create a station and then Pandora will just throw other music at you for as long as you wish. I’ve also used it for finding out how bands sound. Jason Mraz was mentioned in the Chronicle. The kids were lining up for him. So I typed him in – hey, I like it! Very exciting. I’m no longer stuck listening to old XTC and Pink Floyd albums. I can be … modern! J Probably the coolest thing about this service is that it plays the one or two songs off an album that you really like – and you don’t have to stack up CD’s in your closet. Freedom! Now if they would only do this with clothing… Here's a nice post about Pandora from

www.transmit.net

and another one from Dave Hornick's ventureblog. I wish these guys great good luck and am impatiently waiting for the jazz section to sort itself out.

Could Someone Please Hack Yahoo Avatars?

Bear with me on this one, folks. I have to get this off of my chest. I am not of the Instant Messaging herd. I'm a stay at home mom, so there's no need to Instant Message my way through interminable meetings. And if I tried to Instant Message my way through life with my five year old, he'd turn into an axe murderer. However, I Instant Message a bit when I'm doing internet volunteer work with my friend Wendy. Yesterday, I was using Yahoo's Instant Message function. I noticed the new avatar program. At least I think it's new. Cute. I don't bite with most of the internet "Look! It's the Coke(TM) logo. Let's play" stuff (did I mention that too much computer time for mom turns junior into an axe murderer?), but I gave it a try. What an awesome idea. I went in and created someone. Gosh. Did I want goo goo eyes, big baby eyes, ordinary sloe eyes, eyes that look like an asian after 10 drinks, or just ... wierd eyes. Ahem. This is it? So I chose the ordinary sloe eyes. Little ones. Then I moved on to hair. And my heart sank. It's bunny land. Ick. It was then that I realized that this avatar function was for young folks, teens and twenties. Yup. It's the year 2005 and Yahoo has created a Cosmo-look for the masses. Hear my cry: I want an avatar for people who are married with kids, feeling kind of schlumpy, mildly bitchy, and just flat-out *difficult.* I want an avatar so that I can explore my psychotic side while talking with people. I want an avatar so that my perimenopausal girlfriends and I can convey our ever-more-complex moods to one another - instantly, dude. How about someone who is, like 240 pounds. There have to be at least six different 240-lb interesting body types, you know? Male, female, heck, what about a transvestite look? 280 pound transvestite, black, blonde, tattooed ... you know. And with better clothes. Uniforms are always fun. Nurses, meter readers, postal clerks... Maybe just a pair of biking shorts? I mean, let's think about it. An avatar should be fun. An avatar should be cool! But most of all, an avatar should be alternative. Now that I have had a child and my brain cells are toast, I have started watching some TiVo TV at the end of the day, and I have to tell you that the advertisements on TV are a hoot. Very different from how they used to be. Seems like they're letting the 22 year olds have a blast. But Yahoo has apparently put in the Utah contingent to create avatars. Don't believe me? Check out the outfits or, better yet, the "backgrounds." Excuse me? Folks, these are valium-taking, slit your wrists backgrounds. Dressed in perfect little matching outfits, holding a rake with leaves, in front of a nice suburban house. Ick. These avatars look like Martha Stewart with a razor cut. I cannot imagine someone trying to look like that as an avatar unless they're a child molester. Here's what I want. Shark teeth. Wouldn't that be cool? They have the technology to morph it right onto human facial characteristics, and it would be your only chance to sharkily leer at people. Or you could use it if you were, say, Instant Messaging someone to collect on an unpaid debt. Or negotiating a marriage settlement! And why stop there. William Gibson, here we come! Or how about this one. Dumpy. Yes. Not chicklet-like. Like 150 lbs at five foot two. And for clothes... how about a pink fluffy bathrobe and slippers? And how about another option -- the same clothes, but really dirty? I'm thinking that,instead of the chic razor cut they offer something disheveled, with a one large curler in, the rest falling out look. And carrying.... Hmmn. Not a perfect rake but perhaps a beer? Come on Yahoo. Loosen up. Or release the API and let people create their own avatars. I just don't believe that it's 2005, the hip hop folks rule the fashion scene (?) and Yahoo's got a bunch of cake-carrying, turkey-hugging, leaf-raking bunny razor cut clones for the kids to play with.

Article on childlessness by choice - the "anti mom" speaks

Here's an article that was posted to my wonderful "vintage moms" web group by an Australian friend of mine. She, like all of us on the group, busted her butt to have a child and only succeeded in her late thirties and forties. She's an awesome mom and very happy. Here's the article Not much to say about the article, other than the fact that it makes me laugh, with a wry twist to my mouth. It's written by a competent, happy woman in her late forties who is a successful writer with no children (they would mess up her flat.) She has friends who also don't want children. I find this article hilarious because it's written by a Brit, who essays into topics like ... um, her friends are more concerned with good quality of life than in being good, and that people want to have a nice life experience now, as opposed to being buffeted by life. Yeah. Right. Well, as someone who was raised in the Foothills of the Northern California mountains during the late seventies, I have one phrase. "Culture of Selfishness, dude!" Come on over! Join us in lovely California! Heck, that's what most of our mystique is about! Are you going to yoga? Want to come over next week? We're having a dinner party and Jon's going to unveil this awesome Montipulciano that he and Gerda hand-carried back from their Villa trip to Italy. Do you like the new power room walls? We had the guy hand rub in this wonderful special paste that I matched to my favorite purse made by Prada in 1998 - such a wonderful patina - and the color! Oh yes, that orchid matches it perfectly. I'm sorry. It's very serious stuff, I know. The brits aren't making babies, and, gosh darn it, all of those people from Niger and China are making up the difference. (Read the article if this puzzles you.) However, we did go through this in California with the boomers, and a lot of them didn't have babies, and now they're about 60 and nobody's really listening to them any more. Instead, the children of the people who DID have babies have discovered that you can be narcissistic AND have children! That you can take yoga classes through pregnancy, and that you can have just as much fun shopping for your children (and matching clothing for you) as you did just shopping for yourself! So the self-focused semi-existential angst from a group of aging "don't want kids" types sounds exactly like people I know. Sort of. Hmmn. Except, now that I think about it, the people I'm thinking of here in California *did* have children, and just chose to give them up in divorces and such so that they (the people, not the children) could 'heal.' Yeah. Forgot about that twist. At any rate, the article made me chuckle. For one thing, I'm a mom. I just am *so* not interested in people's self-analysis of why they didn't have kids. Since I managed to *have* one, (I would have adopted if I couldn't,), I learned the secret. It's not about me any more. How refreshing!

on vocabulary, boys, the gardenia fairy, and pride...

This morning I woke up to my five year old boy on top of me, pretending to be the Gardenia Fairy, having flown to my side on a rocket. Yup. He demanded that I be a fairy also,and when we'd filled the entire bedroom with flowers, I created a hole in the middle of the ceiling, so that sun could shine in. He looked up and said "I'm creating gardenias that are floating above the hole. They are gleaming in the sun." Five. The other day he came up with the word "mischievous," and he's come up with some other doozies as well. I'm *very* proud of him. The funny thing is that I'm a bit surprised by it. Why? I blush to say it. Because he's a boy and I have learned that boys aren't "as verbal" as girls. Pretty dumb of me. After all, *I* love words (can you tell?) and I've been here the whole time. If he has trouble sleeping at night, I read him poetry and occasionally I hear a plaintive "mommy, I really want some poetry tonight." We play with words and we certainly talk a lot . It should be very interesting to see what this little one turns into. He was at the park the other day and picked up a squirtgun that was (in poor taste) left at the park. He played "gun" with it a bit, but was basically using it as a drill, to repair the rocket he was working on. It's nice to be proud of your kids. Funny how often it happens, isn't it?

Bind me - please!

Wow. The ultimate in "me" time. A service called blogbinders.com that will bind your blog! check it out.

Clueless Producers of Children's Media 101

I adore my kid. He's awesome. We've kept him media free for the most part, and he doesn't really know what a commercial is. Until today, when I let him watch the damn video at the back of the Gymboree store (that place makes me itch), he had no idea that other children didn't adore brocolli, either. So I had a return from his birthday. I won't go into why. It was a lovely gift. Not the right thing. At any rate, we went in to return it and my son fell in love with these butterfly wings that you strap on. I asked him if he wanted to try one on. He hid behind me and muttered that he'd do it at home. Since we play fairies at home, I just figured that he was shy. I bought him a beautiful one. It's gold with delicate pink netting, a golden bow, and jewels all over it. It looks lovely, but I digress. While he was waiting for me to try to find other things, he went back and sat with the children watching the video. I looked at it; it looked fine. Five minutes later, I see a skit where a man is saying that brocolli "is great for you, really good for you" and an entire table full of kids is making faces and a kid is saying "what if you hate how...." I yanked my kid out of there so fast that I think he missed it. I told him that I needed him RIGHT AWAY and chattered like mad while he left. In the meantime, I could have slapped someone. What is WITH these people? I realize that whenever a child does something bad or not nice, there are fifteen "creative" types around to write a little book or skit about it, but ... DUH. Folks, if it goes to little kids, you just end up TEACHING THE KID THE BAD THING. My kid loves brocolli. Thank GOODNESS I got him away from the damn video before he learned the ugly, sordid truth: every other kid out there, especially the cool ones, wouldn't touch it with a ten foot pole, In FACT, all those children eat is WHITE food, with the occasional foray into the bizarre boxed macaroni and cheese stuff, which I find utterly wierd. At any rate, I finally got him away from "corporate pre-cut cuteness incarnate" store itself and into the mall proper, and what does he do? Put on his fairy wings and have a wonderful, absolutely stunning time of it. Interesting thing. My child is a very pretty child. He's running around in wings. While walking through the Stanford Shopping Center, we got not ONE smile from a parent. Wierd. In downtown Palo Alto, we would have gotten all sorts of smiles. Now granted, he does need a haircut and has big curls, and he was wearing a purple t-shirt, so he looked about as "hippie" as he ever does (rare), but it was distinctly odd. I mentioned it to my husband and he said "he has certainly gotten smiles from the kids!" So my child got to pretend to be the gardenia fairy today. The gardenia fairy has a special part in today's story, which is about a mean king who doesn't like green things so he paved the kingdom and put the flower-loving princess in a tower. One day, the gardenia fairy appears. SINCE the gardenia fairy has such power, he waves his wand and "poof!" bushes begin to grow! And then "poof" flowers on the bushes! And then the most lovely smells came wafting through the village, and the people come out of their houses to see the beautiful princess waving to them from her window, and the area filled with flowers, and they said to themselves, "this has gone on long enough." So they went and got an enormous tree and used it as a battering ram to break the tower's door down, and then they carried the princess to the king and said "you are no longer king! The princess is replacing you!" And as the king's punishment, he was made to be the gardener forever...

"God Bless" - "Gotta Blast"

My husband requested that I put this into my blog. He finds it very amusing. So here goes. My son hasn't watched very many movies. I think Toy Story (minus the sadistic neighbor) is it. Oh. Jungle Book, but he didn't really like it, since he'd already seen the musical (which he adored.). At any rate, my husband let him see "Jimmy Neutron," as I've mentioned. "The kid with the huge brain." It turned him rocket crazy overnight. Nice, since the Harry Potter obsession was wearing thin (and no, he's never seen the movie. He was introduced to THAT at the Damn Apple Store, watching the game.). But, as usual, I digress. About two weeks ago, my son, in the middle of the day, took to saying "God Bless." I let it go once, and that was enough for me. "We don't say that," I said the next time. He didn't really even pause, just continued on. But it happened again. "Honey, I said, we don't say "God Bless."" I would have gone into reasons, but he didn't see interested. Why not a simple "have a nice day?" I thought. I never really made all that much out of it and neither did he, but one day while talking with my husband in the car, Simon said it again. "Who on earth is saying "God Bless" to our kid? I asked. My husband looked at me and started laughing. "Is that what you've been talking about?" he said? "He's saying "Gotta blast!" Ahem.

Does Baby Waby Want Prada or Juicy Couture?

So we hung out at the mall until we were ready to leave. It was fun. It felt as though we were in Toronto or something and were spending the day shopping. (Can you tell that I spend a lot less time at the mall than I once did?) Then, of course, I remembered that I had to get him a new pair of shoes at Nordstrom. So we go in. He is, of course, fed up to the eyeballs with being at the mall, and high-energy. I put some shoes on him and tell him to "test them," and he disappears for a while. So I settle down and watch the mom next to me, who is on the floor with her very cute, very well-dressed (probably oilily stuff? Layered cotton dressy stuff. Very cute.)_2 year old. There are six boxes of shoes on the floor. Nothing looked untoward. Then I heard screaming and started to pay attention. After soothing the screaming, the mom started again: "Julia, I really need to know which shoes you want." The kid turned her head away, but the mother continued. Clearly this was important. Do you like the purple, the blue with orange (mommy's favorite color), the pink with yellow flowers, or the suede?" What on earth was this woman doing? I will cut this down. Over the course of 15 minutes, mommy solicited little Julia's opinion more and more. Finally, Julia pointed to some shoes and put them on. She liked them. Great. So then mommy says "what other shoes do you like? We're going to get two pair." I looked at the mom. She looked normal. Honest. She wasn't poufed, hair-wise, wasn't wearing glue-on fingernails, and her eyebrows hadn't been, say, shaved and then drawn on with a pencil. She looked normal. Jeans and a t-shirt, even. No wierd Jimmy Choo action. Finally, I thought I'd stir the pot a bit. "Wow," I said. "It must be a lot different with a girl. My son is five, and I still don't ask him what he wants to wear." The mother, obviously a very nice lady, smiled at me. "I try to only give her a few choices. She chooses all her own clothes." Let me just say this. This child is going to grow up to be a freaking high-maintenance spoiled brat beast. Honest. This kid is TWO YEARS OLD. You should ask the darn kid what color she likes, pick two, let her choose one, and then get the heck out. Why on EARTH would you bring this level of fashion BS into a kid's life when they're 2, for God's sake? I mean, let's talk about this rationally. When I turned twelve and started my period, I cried for a year. Oh my goodness. The CLOUDS, the CLOUDS were so dark that they just made my little heart go pitter pat. Someone looked at me wrong. Children were hungry in Biafra. Piggy died. You name it, I was a puddle of emotion. Ick. Things have stabilized a bit since and obviously, I've become significantly less empathetic, but the point here is that I was an out-of-control hormonal mess. I'm sure that boys do stuff also, but my mother told me once (she's full of these immensely charming bits of information) that boys are "easier" because girls "pull away sooner" to become their own people. OK. Let's say that mom's right. So? How is this kid going to start to assert herself as a person and as an individual if her entire life has been dealing with moronic fashion decisions since she was two? Or is this just a setup so that she and mom can be best friends, which as we all know (have you read the books I have) is *not* a recipe for best parenting. And what happens when she really wants to differentiate herself or assert herself at, say, 12, when intensity reigns supreme? I'll tell you. Rodeo freaking Drive, that's what. Gucci, Pucci, whatever the designers are, this kid will be "expressing" herself to death with them. After all, it's practically her birthright, right? Oh YEAH. And let me tell you, the finest guys just adore high-maintenance little fashion bunnies. Ahem. Not. I mean, I guess they do, if you like guys from, say Houston. Yikes. What are these people setting into motion? Martha Stewart three, even though the DNA's a bit tweaked? Here's MY feeling about what you do. Get your kids as dirty as possible and let them run around and enjoy things. Today my kid picked up a spider at a store and two little girls began screaming hysterically. Who on EARTH teaches this stuff to children. Ick ick ick. We have spiders all over the place at our house. They're cool. They're pretty. Some bite. We don't pick them up with our hands and we check to see if they're in holes we make in the walls before we put our hands into them (black widows like to live in walls, btw). Sheesh. Even if you don't like something, is there a reason to limit your kid's life by teaching your child that it's AWFUL? The best little girls that I know are the ones who have NOT been taught to involve themselves in ... come ON ... totemic relationships to brand name fashion. My goodness. That woman should have bought her kid some shoes. Two pair, three pair, who cares? And gotten her out of the damn mall department store to go and run around and be happy somewhere. I put my kid's neat new wings right next to this kid and she was too unhappy choosing between the freaking suede and the lemon yellow with lime green spanish espadrilles to even notice a neat toy. Sheesh. Immersing your child in HOURS worth of choosing stuff (and then more stuff) and guiding how they differentiate is just freaking too wierd. Especially if the kid is TWO YEARS OLD. Believe me, your girl child is going to eventually care about fashion. A lot. When they do, you can support that. Or not. Or perhaps you can guide that, so your kid doesn't glue their hair down with glossy black polish, black out their teeth, and insert computer chips into their temples, or whatever wierd-ass fashion trend is happening next. BTW, there was a vastly uptight woman sitting next to me. Her kid, a smiley little girl of 12, was trying on some adorable shoes. Shoes nowadays are so cute! They were orange and red and yellow, I think. The kid put them on and I said "what cool shoes!" Then I sat down. The mother sat, lips pursed. The kid says "you don't like them, do you" "Nope," said mom. "They don't go with anything." "But mom," says the kid, "your shoes are ugly too." They both looked at the mom's sensible shoe. "Yes," says the mom. But they're "navy." THIS is how it's supposed to be. The 12 year old is asserting herself, or working to learn how to do it. Mom doesn't like it but she's not forbidding it. She's working to let the kid make her own fashion mistakes. And it's happening at TWELVE. Not freaking TWO. Oh my goodness.

Assimilation 101 - the sports thing

Despite mommy - who suffers from (is exalted by? who can say) an "I am a martian" syndrome, my son is starting suburban ice skating and soccer lessons. This is *so cool!* Part of me wants to just lock him in his room with a painting set and some books for the next 5 years or so, only taking him out for ethnic restaurant visits and trips to enlightening places, but another part of me is happy that he'll go out and get to be athletic. I was thinking about today and realized that athletics might actually be, like, a part of his life. Odd. Incidentally, this whole "stages of life" thing is pretty funny, especially in the silicon valley. For example, many of us who didn't wear coke-bottle lenses and have our calculators in holsters nonetheless experienced a feeling of being "out of step" with life. I think it's called young adulthood, but I'm not sure. At any rate, we went from normal childhood activities to unhealthy fixations about literature, research, existentialism, computers, work, and listening to (often antisocial) music. Ah, our twenties were such fun. And if you live in the silicon valley, you can keep it up. You can go to Science Fiction and Hackers Group parties, where you can show up wearing a large cardboard sun cut to wear your head (if you'd like), and nobody will blink. You can literally spend years responding to every social statement made to you by saying "Burning Man was the best thing that happened to me all year," and nobody will think twice about it. I know that American culture is said to keep us young and acquisitive for years, but the valley beats out everywhere. You can keep that pure, post-pubescent awkwardness thing, mix it up with some overachiever-incredibly-focused on work energy and a lot of "but about 80% of me is still four" humor and love of fun, and you can *bank* on that as your personality - for twenty years if you'd like! Fill your entire apartment with Legos. It's OK. Of course the "we're different, we're odd, we're pretty alienated" stuff palls when you have children. It doesn't go away, mind you, but it's not exactly the type of message that you want little Dylan and Kaiseke picking up. So you smile, and then you take them to preschool. And here's the weird thing. In preschool (as was recently pointed out to me by a psychiatric professional, who found it odd), children are expected to do *everything* well. Ever think about that? ONLY in preschool. If you're an adult, nobody expects you to be across the board normal/good at things. No way. But nowadays, kids are scanned up the wazoo, almost from birth, to make sure that they're *OK.* The fear of ADHD and Autism and Aspberger's hangs like a big, black bat, upside down in the corner, and everyone tiptoes around, facilitating eye contact with their kids and talking brightly. But I digress. In our family, the kid's the social one. He adores people. He is open-countenanced, pleasant, innately happy, and ... (Oh dear heavens) probably athletic. He *is* athletic, too. My husband and I are not familiar with this concept, although if I dredge back to my childhood, I can remember that other children were athletic, and that doing athletics was pretty fun. Well, in between bone-wrenching sessions of self-consciousness, but who's counting? I took my son to go ice skating with our neighbor the other day and "free skate" was finished - they only had lessons. Bright me. I said "Can he try a lesson?" figuring that he'd hate it, we'd be done, and we would have done our obligatory "join the neighbor skate time." However, it turned out to be just lovely. There were four boys, all the same size, in the "tot class," and they were just adorable. They all skated with little tiny steps, arms out, and they had THREE instructors. Is that cool or what? Two of the instructors were guys. Big, manly ex-champ guys, or so I was told, which seems really cool for little boys. The instructors drew a big squiggle across the ice and the kids skated across it. My kid shocked me. He did very well, didn't cry or fail to listen, and ... wow! He's five! He was out there for 40 minutes, and life was good. At the end of the lesson, it was very cute. They have a garbage bag full of 4-inch big pieces of plastic, which they strewed all over the ice. The kids had to skate over, bend down, pick them up, and go over to make a "basket." They all did pretty well, and I can see him doing hockey - *very* easily. IMHO he'd adore it. Hockey for little kids is cool. The teacher also took a couple of the boys for "fast rides" by skating along, holding them. The lesson was **so** much more fun than skating with mommy. So now he takes skating lessons. And we go in for his first soccer class tomorrow! Yikes! That's an accident too. My friend said that her daughter missed her first soccer class last week and I thought "hey, they're the same age!" So I asked my friend where she got the lessons. And then I called and asked if I could go, too. My son was sitting in the car tonight and out of the blue said "I'm sure it will be very fun" in a decisive tone. This kid gives me such a kick. I had to smile.

mouse hockey

I have a bitter relationship with my housekeepers. Tonight, I saw evidence that the money spent on housekeepers should probably just go to makeup or one of those inner-thigh-cum-abs machines from home shopping network, when we lifted the couch. If you hire a housekeeper, your couch shouldn't have dust bunnies and junk under it. Period. Mine does. Why did we lift the couch? Because Prozac the cat had been sitting there, watching underneath it for a half hour, and I deduced that there must either be a mouse, or the biggest bad-ass spider in the world under there. And either way, it was coming out. "Honey, come here," I said. "Pick up the couch." He tugged on it. I snarled. "UP." He lifted it, and a cute little mouse scampered to the far end of the area. "It's going," I said and turned around. "I'll get a shovel." I have to explain something here. I am essentially a country girl. Woman if you grew up near the seventies, but the phrase has staying power. As a country girl, I don't think that you'd catch me living in the country without a shotgun and a few shovels. Some nice digging ones, and a nice flat one I can use to kill critters. You know? Recently, to the incredibly catty delight of some friends of mine on the local mother's club email list, a woman from Atherton posted hysterical notes to all 2,000 members. "Help!" she said. "I live in Atherton and there is a dead squirrel outside! Where can I hire someone for this?" The entire list was gratified to receive an additional posting, later that afternoon, saying "the nanny showed up and put it into a garbage bag." Yup. At any rate, we're not that type of household over here. But even as I thought of getting a shovel, I realized it wouldn't work. "Are you going to whack it?" said my husband, interestedly. (He's that type of domestic presence.) But I couldn't. If you're outside and it's dead, you just pick the thing up with a shovel (while distracting your toddler by pointing behind them and saying "look at the pretty bird!"). But if it's alive, even if you do pick it up with a shovel, you run the chance of just wrecking the hardwood floors. Not to mention, of course, you're essentially giving a hysterical little beast a high dive from which to burrow into a white couch. Or whatever. Ugh. And I just didn't want to whack it. Ugh. Mouse ... well, I won't go there. So I went outside and looked around. Finally settled for a broom. It took three rooms and several moved chairs, books, and an umbrella stand but we were finally ready. My husband batted him gently out from behind the umbrella stand and I broomed him across the floor. He got loose and ran across my toes. Ugh. But I got him. Frankly, I've never played hockey, but brooming a live mouse across a hardwood floor, around the oriental carpets, and out the back door was a rush. I felt like I'd scored a goal! Ten minutes later, Prozac came in and stared plaintively at the couch. Where *was* that mouse?

good book - EXPENSIVE book

I am so bummed to see that one of the best children's books that I've run into costs about $65. Darn. Here's the review that I wrote about it for Amazon. Right up until where I saw that, if I posted this, Amazon owned it, at which point I yanked it and figured I'd put it here instead! Although I am anything but a fantasy genre fan, I am a huge fan of John Crowley's wonderful fantasy novel Little, Big. What Little, Big does for adult fantasy, Trouble for Trumpets does for the pre-literate set. Period. We are lucky enough to have stumbled over this book in a library sale for (don't shoot me) $1.50, because I certainly wouldn't have paid $60 for it, but I will say this: my child is the son of an inventor and a very creative writer, and his brain is ... complex. He loves Rube Goldberg inventions and fantasy and Harry Potter and flower fairies and rockets and ... all sorts of stuff. This is like the wonderful Richard Scarrey books put into five dimensions, instead of one. It's like Huckle on a mind-bending drug. Got it? Someone wrote that this book was one of the defining books of their childhood and I can believe it. I will also say this: If you are taking your child on a trip around the world and they can only have three books with them, make one of them be this book. Do not buy this book if you are just a consumption-heavy yuppie trying to golden-plate your first-born's "baby library." Buy it as an elixir of creativity, for regular dosings and immersions. You know those science-fiction genre books where the author creates an entire world, a universe, a language, a new species of housepets? The types of books written by people who have a window into ... if not insanity, then at least a form of creative possession, the kind that sparks others? Well, this is a book like that, shown in pictures. It's way cool.

boy pocket inventory #1

It's happening. All of that stuff I used to read (starting from "Huck Finn") about boys and their pockets is happening right now. Today I am guilty of not doing laundry for a little while. (So? Want to make something of it? The Japanese have created underpants that can be worn for SEVEN DAYS!) OK. Digression. They have also created Good Luck Underwear. And did you know that there's now disposable underwear for travelers? Truly, popgadgets is an interesting blog. They have a newsletter and I just might subscribe. It's NOT all underwear, BTW. You know, philosophically (culturally?) speaking, if you type things like "japanese underwear for seven days" or "Japanese underwear for multiple days" into Google, you get some *very* interesting products. Power underwear for businessmen? OK, OK, enough digression. I told my son that I would only type out what was in his pockets and then we'd go back to playing "robot" in the kitchen, so I have to hurry. - eight "Cariboo" cards, apparently lifted from preschool (sigh) - two rocks: one red and rough, one white and smooth - one bottle cap (totally retro!). Says Bawls Guarana on it? Huh? OK, perhaps not so retro. What happened to Coca Cola? - one seashell - one piece of twistable golden crayon (a terrible investment for a five year old, BTW. He twisted them all out, broke them off at the base, and has carried them around for weeks. Back to old crayons. - a piece of plastic pirate's gold - Some wierd postmodern looking 2.5 inch by 3 inch plastic card with punchouts for... parts of an airplane? - two twisty tops - a small subway map of the Paris subway Does this sound familiar, all you post boys out there? Ah, Boy phenomena. - Kate

crafty traveler website

Just found this - it's a website than encourages people to write about their travel experiences. I like it as a model and wish them luck. www.craftytraveler.com

More on the neighborhood - neighbor fun

Our second "neighbor meeting" happened when my son was about two and a half months old. I'd like to just talk about general lifestyle issues before talking about this meeting. When we bought the house, we hired a painter to repaint the entire house. I went to the paint store to choose paint but I was 8 months pregnant and couldn't stand, so I chose Navaho White. For the entire house. This means that we lived in something approximating a 45-year old mental hospital for the first three years. We actually live down the street a few miles from where "One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest" was conceived, so it was kind of thematic. But oh my goodness. Navaho White is a scourge upon humanity. I finally gave it up and painted the house some nice colors, although not before going through the "massive rip-off with tacky color consultants 101" exercise. I still have three gallons of really ugly paint *and* the nicely-printed and framed "color presentation" from this consultant sitting around somewhere. The nice thing is that all of the colors complimented one another (wheee!) The bad thing is that they were, um, well I'm sorry, but the unpolitically correct term "butt ugly" springs into my mind. OK, let's move on from visions of suburban housewives in straitjackets (but with perfect blonde pageboys, oh my!), and talk about our second visit. The second visit, was actually the first visit we had. I'm sorry to say that it kind of scared us. We weren't very groomed (to put it nicely), and had had very little sleep. Ah. Also, when the painter came, we'd blithely told him to just remove all of the lights and we'd replace them, but it was the year 2000 and nobody was around to hire, so we had just gone to Home Depot and bought a bunch of those freestanding lights, which were scattered around a cavernous house, littered with boxes. We looked a little like a dorm room At any rate, the doorbell rang and we looked through the cut-glass front door (white), installed by the previous owner, a little old lady who loved orange and yellow. It was a family, arranged in perfect order in front of our door. I opened the door, suspiciously clutching my child. "Um Hello?" I said. I hate to admit it, but I am not a fan of the Watchtower and dislike the Christian custom of recruiting by ringing on doorbells. "Hello!" said the woman, her smile faltering a bit as she looked at us. "Welcome to the neighborhood." "Ah," I said. There was no way I could let these people into my house. They looked like they should be playing tennis and my home would scare them. Her husband stood right beside her, nicely, and two sullen children stared at me. "Um, thank you!" I said, in a sub-par social fashion. The children stared. "We saw you moving in," said the woman. (I was wondering. "Do they live here? Were they selling things down the street that day?") "I'm Marcie and this is Jim. Here are Billy and Suzy (fake names)" "Hi," I said weakly, and we introduced ourselves, standing in our doorway like unfriendly folk. “Um, we just moved in,” I said. “The house is a mess. I’m so very sorry…” "Oh, that’s fine. We just wanted to say hello. What church do you belong to?" said the woman, smiling nicely. And all of my alarms went off. Oh my goodness. “None,” I said. The nice conversation lasted for two more minutes and then they left. They haven’t really spoken with us since, although we get an occasional hello from them.

My neighborhood

I live in the silicon valley, in a lovely neighborhood where the minimum plot size is 1 acre, and the houses cost (use special voice please) "billuns and billuns of dollars." Well, okay, they don't cost that much. But when I was a child, living in the California foothills durin the seventies, I remember driving through the local "big town" (an armpit, sorry to say), and hearing my mother say "these houses cost 100,000 dollars!" Wow. They seemed so big to me. And a hundred thousand dollars! It seemed like so much money! Of course now, thirty-three years later, values are different. A garage costs a half million dollars, right? But my inner voice still will occasionally think "a hundred thousand dollars!" The people right behind us (VC types) are building a monstrous extravaganza of a house, which is the new trend in houses in our neighborhood. Years ago, when Microsoft was trying to recruit my husband, we got a house tour of the Seattle area and heard houses like this referred to as McMansions. Yup. Like, 7,000 square feet for a family of four. Of course all of these houses are on one-acre plots, so they look pretty ridiculous, but still -- they mean success! It's not really happening for us here. For one thing, the people who used to populate the neighborhood (excuse me for generalizing when I call them "old rich white guys") are really not very friendly. In the first two years of living here, THREE of our neighbors spoke with us. The first family is a woman whom, I'm sorry to say I refer to with the unabashedly non-politically correct nickname of "menopausal neighbor," living across the street who showed up on our doorstep one day, embarrassed husband in tow. We answered the door disheveled (we moved at 8 months pregnant and my son was 2 months), and chose not to invite them in. Good choice, since she probably would have tried to set fire to the wood paneling. "Do you have a cat named Dumpster?" she asked (Hey, what can I say. He was raised in the city. We considered piercings.) "Um, yes," we answered blearily. "What did he do?" "We have a bird sanctuary in back of our house," she snarled. "And he is killing the birds!" If you're up all night nursing, you don't have razor quick intellect. I thought for a few minutes and was incredibly tempted to say "why are you feeding them on the ground?" but decided against it. And she had a point. Dumpster was a great bird lover. Instead I said "um, is there something that I should do about that?" "Keep him on your property!" she spat. We nodded soberly, closing the door while we clutched the baby. Hey! Welcome to the neighborhood! Incidentally, did I mention that the damn real estate doubled in price the year before we bought and that our house was a total fixer upper with flocked dining room wall coverings? ) So. Pay millions of dollars for an acre (and be told that you have to, what? Put an electrode on your cat's collar so that he doesn't harm the neighbor's bird sanctuary?) We actually found ourselves on the town website, anxiously looking up the "rules," to see what they were and what would happen to us if we didn't follow them. Hoo boy. I was raised on a farm, lived as a child in the California mountains (hippieland, as I called it), and have spent a lot of time living in Palo Alto, and on Portrero Hill in San Francisco, where it's a shock to meet a heterosexual. But the wierdest place I have ever lived in my life is the upper middle class suburbs. Incidentally, our cat disappeared three months later, after we received a threatening letter from her. Nice, huh?

have you seen the "how to destroy the earth" website?

OK, apropos of nothing... well, unless you take liking to think into consideration, a background in science information, and, um, a totally sick sense of humor?... here you go. Sam's archive has a full section called how to destroy the earth. Odd.

Amy's personal encyclopedia

I was driving along the other day and heard this lovely interview about Amy, who has written a highly eccentric personal encyclopedia. I humbly offer it up as an alternative to the strange "scrapbooking" trend, which scares me. Billions of mothers out scarfing up the latest in scallop-edged cutters, background doilies, and whatever bizarre thing goes in a scrapbook. Ugh. Sounds like a clinic for obsessive compulsive behavior. Just sign me: poster child for hate mail from nice suburban moms

Eide Neurolearning blog - I am *such* a fan!

I just stumbled onto this blog while updating some education links on my website and ... it's very interesting stuff! Right now, we're moving forward on so many different fronts when it comes to brain research, brain development, and learning. While many parents are working on how we get little Billy to not throw his peas and how *do* you get them to be polite and have good values, a lot of other parents are working on how they get their Asperger's/Autistic kids to make eye contact, and how they get their dyslexic kids to work on reading when their brains don't work that way. Tons of other kids are just flat-out getting drugged -- even though new studies have shown a terrifying increase in suicides which has been pinned onto use of antidepressant and even ADHD drugs. Wierd stuff. In my opinion, it's up to parents to keep an eye on the new research -- and this is a great way. The Eide's write down all of the new stuff that they read and discover about how the brain works. They stick it on their blog, and then they have some handy dandy summaries of, say autism archives, gifted archives, dyslexia archives, sensory processing archives, and attention archives. I took a look at one of their postings and was utterly entranced to hear the theory that some ADHD brains are really motivated by money, so hooking children like this up with entrepreneurial mentors might be great for them. It just seems to me that this is such a wonderful way to think. Out of the box in many ways. Loved it.

creepy chemical news

Remember last year when all of those left-wing, clean-living people had themselves tested for chemicals and were horrified and dismayed by the results? Well frankly, this new "test yourself" phenomenon is an amazing moneymaking opportunity. Heck, if the price (and accessibility) got down a bit lower, I'd love to know what godawful stuff was in my body. It's more useful, too, than the "Get an MRI Instead of a Cruise" marketing campaign aimed at paranoid boomers. A few years ago when I had a mammogram, they thought that one of my breasts seemed a little crunchy or something (sorry, forgot the term -- must be palliative amnesia), they signed me up for an MRI on it. YUCK. I had to lie inside of this metal tube for about 45 minutes and the only way I got through it was by pretending that my son was nursing and almost asleep and I couldn't move. Yes, yes, sure I'm neurotic (what's it to you?). But I'm also, it turns out, fairly claustrophobic. Joy and rapture. New wierd mental problems as I age. I guess it's good that the senses go first. Or was it looks? Hmmn. Can't seem to remember (probably an indicator). At any rate, it was terrible. I left and burst into tears for about 1/2 hour. From that point on, they gave me some little pill to take when i went in. Some wierd thing that apparently ... oh, who knows. But no more crying. Instead, I chatted at the poor MRI operators. Kind of like a cheap drunk. Where was I? Ah. So they took an MRI. Found a very small ... something or another. I believe that the doctor really *did* characterize it as "wierd." They told me that it might be cancerous. They couldn't tell unless they operated and took it out. And ... did I want them to do that? Or did I just want to wait until it grew larger and they could see what it was. Huh? Were they freaking insane? Yes, yes. Take it out, for heaven's sake! As part of this, it was explained to me that the MRI gets EVERYTHING, no matter how small, and that our bodies have literally hundreds of things which *might, some day* end up being harmful floating around. It's pretty much impossible to figure out what might be harmful or just ... wierd ... for the most part. You could get a lot of scars that way, you know? So here's an article that will provide the same frisson of distaste and fear, but you can just throw away your wall to wall carpet and stop eating fish oil when you're finished. *Much* more sense of control, you know? This is from my local mom's list, by the way: "Here is a a fascinating and disturbing article about an investigation of chemical pollutants in our bodies. The authors tested a typical Bay Area family for a whole host of chemical pollutants and the results stunned event scientists. This family seems to live as chemical-free a life as they can, yet their 20-month-old son has extraordinarily high PBDE levels. The article is part of a three part series which also includes a "body burden" quiz and a discussion of what you can do to limit your exposure. Here's the link: http://www.insidebayarea.com/bodyburden/ The article about the bay area family is entitled "What's In You""

The classics and your kid

OK, so people think I'm wierd because my kid doesn't know who the ninja turtles are, but loves to play "Orion, the mighty warrior." Tough. Virtually all of the good kid's stuff today is profoundly derivative -- of what? CLASSICS. Heck, every good writer steals from the classics! So might as well start learning them early. I just found a wonderful site with a man who tells classical stories. I found this from the wellschooledmind website, which is homeschoolers teaching their children the classics. Another really cool thing that my son and I just found, during our Baba Yaga extravaganza last week (and seriously, if you don't know who Baba Yaga is, I really don't want to know), is this group's set of Baba Yaga musicals! I have no idea who these folks are, but they are seriously creative and I laud them. Awesome stuff. Oh my goodness, they even sell Baba Yaga hand puppets! Is that neat or what? I 've been very bummed that I haven't been able to find puppets and such for greek myths -- this is a great start!

carseat suffering

I cannot remember for the life of me where the Catholics say that you go when you die. I certainly should remember, since a dear Catholic friend walked up to my grandmother and told her that my grandfather was there when he died (always such a help, comments like that.) At any rate, I just went on the internet to try to find the place... hmmn, you die, you go there and wait. Ah, forget about it. Brain's gone. [Ed. Note: HA!!! Purgatory. Who could forget THAT? Gosh, I guess I am just really not in tune with sin, etc.] At any rate, I'm there with my Britex husky, which seems to be the linebacker of five point harness carseats. Yup. We're in our own private version of "No Exit," sitting in a faceless hotel room, trying to hide our own selves from one another. Or something like that. So you buy this thing and it comes in its 4.5 foot high box (fun for climbing in, btw) and you open it and there is NO DOCUMENTATION. Yup. Nada. There are instructions on the side, but they refer to things like tethers and clasps (which my 2000 car doesn't seem to have, although I have to admit it WAS night when I was thrusting my arms underneath the seats muttering imprecations to myself. Hmmph. So then you're supposed to wrap the seatbelt through it. Doesn't work. Around it? Wouldn't click. Ugh. OK, if you go to this link it will tell you where you can find an expert in your area to help with a carseat! I never understood this "need an expert" thing, but this carseat is, um, special. (sigh)

American doctors and eczema in babies

This is from my extremely smart and well-read friend Claire: "Now the latest cream/drug for excema, Elidel, is under attack by the FDA which wants to add a "black box" warning about the increased risk of cancer. This drug was marketed as "safe to use on the eyelids of babys for two years". So if you are using Elidel it might be prudent to stop using it until the truth comes out!" And heeeeeere's MY comment: You know, this type of thing makes me so mad that I could ... spit. When my child had really awful eczema, the doctor just kept giving us all sorts of creams and telling us that they were fine (he was under a year at the time.) We had our doubts, in part to listening to "info goddess" Claire. When the pharmacist looked at our prescription, looked at the baby, and then came out from behind the counter to advise us not to use the cream below the navel because "it can harm developing testes" that was enough for us. Even though our "oh, so relaxed and casual" doctor intimated that we were overdoing it by severely limiting my child's diet (wheat, eggs, dairy, tomatoes, nuts, chocolate, and pineapple), when we took that stuff out, the ECZEMA STOPPED. Not like it was all that rough, either, you know? But that's just NOT the protocol for doctors to tell Americans. I find that utterly bizarre. Folks? If your kid has a rash, you can try limiting food yourself! As a matter of fact, ONLY you can do that. Tests given to infants usually are not all that correct (for allergies). But if they break out when you feed them wheat, you know one thing for sure: they break out if you feed them wheat. Can be VERY helpful. Babies grow out of all sorts of stuff. Doesn't hurt a thing to avoid certain foods for the first few years. >

Absolutely wonderful scary CD's

Do you know about Baba Yaga? No? Then, my friend, you are *not* well-versed in fairy tales or multicultural stories! Baba Yaga is renowned! She is the infamous Russan folk tale witch who lives in a house on chicken legs, that turns around and around. She flies through air in a mortar and pestle and ... eats children (ahem. might want to gloss over that aspect of it.) I just found a really neat bunch of CD's by an exceptionally talented troupe who sing their way through a series of Baba Yaga stories, including Firebird. Really cool.

searching blogs

This is an excerpt from the Infomaniac blog: .... a new column on slate, Today's Blogs, which links to topics that blogs are talking about every day. There are lots of ways to monitor blogs, including Memeorandum, and blog montior/search engines like Technorati, Feedster, Daypop, and more. Slate's feature will make it easier. Wednesday, February 23, 2005

on noords and such

This is the age where you really have to be careful about things. For example, I was raised by a mother doing the "hippie" thing who routinely swore up a storm. I grew UP swearing. Part of my childhood, as it were. Well, it's not part of my kid's childhood, nor was it part of my husband's. Which is fine. Much better, actually. And I don't swear in front of my child. As a matter of fact, at 4.5, the only "bad" word he really knows and tries to use is "stupid," which, since he's not allowed to say it, he abbreviates to "stoop." However, and this one caught me by surprise, I SPELL. My husband and I spell to ourselves, and I spell-curse if I'm upset. Ahem. The other day, my lovely child said to me "mother, would you please get off of the A... P ... P... V.... E.... telephone?" Hoooo boy. From that day on, I realized that I can NOT swear-spell using real words. So... I guess if I'm really upset I'll have to spell "darn" or something. Simon has a friend named Noor, by the way. Several days ago I used the term "nerd" in the car. About three minutes later, a little question drifted forward from the carseat: "Mommy, what's a nooord?" I began to give a typical description, but was stopped by my husband with a "of course we won't give any negative association to people who are good at math and science, right?" Sigh. This PC business is tough. I figure that we'll give it a few more years and then let him onto the fact that his parents both have a really sick and probably antisocial sense of humor. ha!

George Carlin on religion and Theseus slaying the meteor

We thought we'd watch a movie with simon tonight. Decided on the new Parent Trap because it's pretty cute. It started and we realized that he has no idea what divorce is. Doesn't matter, he was near tears when one group booby-trapped the others cabin (5 minutes into the moview.) He tearfully asked that we turn it off, then spent five minutes saying "why did they do that?" We went to a really neat Commedia dell'Arte puppet show today, although the second show was so NOT for children that it was kind of funny. It was a standard "heaven" piece. Puppets were shown coming up a ladder, ringing a bell, and the golden gate was opened by an angel. Ahem. Then we realized that he knows nothing of God. (DIFFERENT Gods, yes, but not that many people feel that there is only one God, etc. etc.) Also, he's never heard of angels. And I found myself whispering "um, some people think that there's a nice place up in the sky and the puppet in wings is supposed to be good.") Has anyone out there seen George Carlin's piece on who God is? So I'm sitting there in this puppet show, trying to contextualize a stylized angel on the fly, and this is floating through my mind: "Religion has actually convinced people that there's an invisible man living in the sky who watches everything you do, every minute of every day. And the invisible man has a special list of ten things he does not want you to do. And if you do any of these ten things, he has a special place, full of fire and smoke and burning and torture and anguish, where he will send you to live and suffer and burn and choke and scream and cry forever and ever 'til the end of time! But He loves you. He loves you, and He needs money! He always needs money! He's all-powerful, all-perfect, all-knowing, and all-wise, somehow just can't handle money!" That routine has definitely colored any approach I may have to discussing God with my son. We've been busy playing Orion the mighty hunter and Theseus slaying the minotaur all morning, incidentally (although I loved it when Simon referred to it as the "meteor.") We'll get to the other eventually. We started with gods and goddesses from other cultures and we're working on the relationship between humans and gods, as well as why Orion and others live in the sky, as do, of course, the dead kings from the Lion King. (A Christian parable if ever I've seen one, and he adores it, so the framework is all set. These parables can really sneak up on you.) Incidentally, if you'd like to look at an extremely intriguing artist, check out Sea Monkey Sea Mask and Puppet Show. I'd love to see their work. Anybody want to bring them to the bay area?

Have you ever heard of Rainbow Family of Living Light?

I like this organization. Mostly because, right up at the top of their home page they make it very clear that nobody speaks for them and nobody ever will. Excellent attitude in this spinmeister time.

what do you believe is true even though you cannot prove it?

This was just sent to me by a very smart guy and I thought I'd put it up here for those of you who haven't heard of it yet. http://www.edge.org/q2005/q05_print.html Online magazine Edge asked 120 "science-minded thinkers" the following question: "What do you believe is true even though you cannot prove it?"

Are you a board game geek?

I'm not really sure what the board game geek.com site is about. Could it really be a site propagated by people who are geeks and crazy about board games? Wow. It's been a long time since I was young enough and childless enough to do this sort of thing.... What fun!

The knitting paddle

This is a neat way for someone who cannot hold knitting needles to knit. Personally I would really screw this up, but I loved the animation.

first ballets

I just stumbled onto this link, which has a comprehensive list of, and description of, potential first ballets. It's really neat!

more waldorf stuff: stories with strong female characters

This link suggests waldorf-style books with strong female characters. I liked the list!

does early intellectual endeavor breed materialists?

"Children that we train intellectually before the age of four or five take something really terrible into later life: we bring them up to be materialists. The more you raise a child intellectually before the age of four or five, the more you create a materialist in later life. The brain develops so that the spirit lives within its form, but inwardly people have an intuition that everything is only material, because the brain has been taken over by intellectualism at such an early age." -Rudolf Steiner

Martha Stewart is lucky

Martha Stewart is a lucky woman. Think of finding success beyond your wildest dreams. You’re driven, you work hard, you focus focus focus. Then, out of the blue, you make a mistake and the worst thing in the world happens. You are pilloried (although it’s a minor thing). You are defended. And – worst of all – you go to prison. Publically. People in the next town make a t-shirt about it. It’s the worst thing that you could think of happening in the world. The worst. It happens, and you survive. I just read an article saying that Martha has slowed down and spent some time on herself. She’s lost ten pounds and is apparently working through some life stuff. Plucked from a high-pressure existance to think about life, to slow down, to apologize. What an interesting situation. And she’s surviving. She will survive. She will undoubtedly thrive. And probably as a much more interesting, faceted person, with much more of an ability to think about herself, others, and life, than ever before. Lucky Martha. This makes for a much more interesting life for her.

Air safety link

This is pretty interesting. Ever wonder about fatalities and such? No? Ah, well, check THIS site out! http://www.airsafe.com/index.html

wayback machine

From my friend David: As if you don't surf enough already, here's something to keep you occupied for hours, unless of course you don't long for the past. http://web.archive.org/ From the site: "The Internet Archive Wayback Machine puts the history of the World Wide Web at your fingertips. The Archive contains over 100 terabytes and 10 billion web pages archived from 1996 to the present. "To start using the Wayback Machine to surf the web as it was, just type a URL (a web site address) into the box above, click the Take Me Back button, and start exploring the past." Here's who's behind the effort: http://www.archive.org/about/index.html

teaching religion to your kid

From the time that our child was very young, we've spoken of "in our culture we..." and "in other cultures they..." We've done it in a way that respects other cultures, and we've done quite a bit of it with regards to gods and goddesses, mythologies, and so forth. My suggestion would be to start with Jung and the archetypes, and also to start with the heroic stories of the classic greek and roman myths, and discuss what Hera or Diana meant to people who prayed to her, and how people related to the gods then and to god now. We're trying hard to let Simon understand the cultural framework for beliefs - of many different kinds. A great book, even if you want to avoid tomes and so forth is the Joseph Campbell Companion which is just absolutely lovely. It's got wonderful insights to spirituality and its role in many different cultures, as well as insights to being a person, and to culture itself.

The Human Race Machine

Artist Nancy Burson has created a machine, called the Human Race Machine, which takes a photograph and shows the person in each different race. This is from an interesting article in Scientific American from December 2003, discussing how few genetic differences we all have from one another. One of the very interesting things from the article is the assertion that: "the mutations that result in sickle cell disease and some cases of cystic fibrosis result from genetic chanages that appear to have risen in frequency because they were protective against diseases prevalent in Africa and Europe, respectively. If you have one copy of the sickle cell polymorphism, you show some resistance to malaria,; those with one copy of the cystic fibrosis trait may be less prone to the dehydration resulting from cholera." See? this is what happens when you clean out the bathroom cabinets! (going very SLOWLY, I might add.)

Ruby Payne and the hidden rules of class

This is a bit abstract, but I'm tossing it out because some might find it of interest. My mother is an educator and works a lot with children of poverty and Waldorf education. She often throws up extremely interesting information that she runs into. Here is an article by Ruby Payne on hidden class rules. I like how Ruby Payne thinks. She's a solution-focused, very observant person with a lot of experience who is not limited or filtered in how she views things. And her observations about the differences in class are fascinating. Frankly, I'd love to see someone extrapolate them into the hidden rules of the upper middle and upper classes, if only for amusement's sake.

huh? corp

http://www.huhcorp.com/ Just lovely writing. Good job. Pulled this off of the http://www.memepool.com/ blog. Funny. I'm cleaning out my In box from 2001 (sigh) since I have now reached the magic 16,000 number of in messages, and I apparently liked this blog back then!

neat things to do: take a class in glass blowing

It turns out that there's a place in my area where you can take a class in glass blowing. I'll bet that your area has a place like this as well. http://www.bagi.org/

20 facts about voting in America today

Compiled by Alicia, aka Angry Girl. the list

Just found: www.buyblue.org and choosetheblue.org

I just found about these from my FAVORITE librarian in the world: rose. Rose runs this kick-butt site called News We Can Use. She emails out lovely newsletters and recently became upset enough by politics that she started tracking political stuff. Rose posted a lovely article by Matt at the SFGate. did you know that Amazon.com supported the Republicans? Well **I** do, and from now on, our purchases from them will be going to someone else! Home Depot? Out! Costco? IN! Can you believe it? Costco supported the Democrats. How cool is that? And Yahoo supported the Republicans (58%, while Google sent 100% of their donations to the dems.) Great fun, and why NOT let this shape your buying. After all, we all buy stuff, all the time. Might as well let it help you make a political point as well. After all, you can BET that the Republican Right is. Can you say "threat of boycott," anyone? www.buyblue.org www.choosetheblue.org

anxiety and life

I love the Berkeley Parents Network. Google it to check it out. Cosmic. We have a community information group down here in the Silicon Valley, and the differences are hilarious. If you read the Berkeley Parents Network stuff, you read wonderful, multicultural, thoughtful postings from well-educated, open-minded (and mindful) parents. If you read the Silicon Valley posts, you'll learn some awesome shopping tips! In the UCB list this week is a discussion of anxiety. My favorite book that was recommended was: Worried All The Time: Overparenting in an Age of Anxiety and How to Stop It

Is four the cutest age or what?

Ah, what a year. I just sit and watch my son now and listen to his virtuoso command of the English language, his wonderful stories, and watch his bubbling energy.... Lousy writing, but what wonderful times.

have you heard of emagazine? Send 'em money!

Hey lookie here! It's an organization about stuff I'm supportive of, which is still tax deductible! Gosh, what an oversight. I'd like to introduce you to emagazine. I like what they have to say about "we're ready for the next four years but we need your help." Indeed, a clear purpose. By the way, read their current article "Endangered Species Act: On the Chopping Block?" Scary stuff.

Spiral Scouts: a pagan alternative children's organizations

My husband, raised by sensitive parents in the Bronx, once talked with me about how the B** Scouts were a paramilitary organization. Well, here's a REAL alternative. Although the sponsorship by a pagan church probably stands in the way of this organization's "mainstreaming," and although they have a really quite silly "dress outfit," this organization has some lovely goals. They are called SpiralScouts and I like them a lot. As a country kid, I was president of my local 4-H and I still have very warm feelings toward that organization. I remember being in brownies and didn't like it much (even then, I found the social interactions between females daunting), but 4-H was cool. You could do cooking or ... raise a pig. Simple. I cannot say how much I like the concept of an organization which is centered toward "minority faith" children. Frankly, given the echoing of jack-booted religious marches throughout our country, it makes a lot of sense that people who ARE minority faith, and who do NOT subscribe to the overarching "hey, we're right, whoever was the last to translate Jesus said so, and if they disagree with us, they're not real Americans so let's strip them of their civil rights and they're lucky that we don't hang them" feeling that is creeping through the dark alleyways of our country. Lousy sentence, but hey.

the coolest shopping

it's always nice to have a site that makes you smile. I looked at it for a minute and found this! Here is one of my all-time favorite catalogs. Heifer International. Did you know that you and your kids can buy someone a goat for Christmas? They call themselves "the most important gift catalog in the world" and I think they're right. VERY cool. A duck, a pig a rabbit, a goat. I'll bet your kids would love giving one of these animals. And the stories are wonderful. Or how about food from New York City? You can go through a store called NewYorkFirst online store (which specializes in NY gifts) and buy, say, the H and H bagel gift pack. Or here's a site called The Scarlet Scarab, which makes items used by people who do 18th century re-enactments! Very Cool Kid Shopping The Construction Site OK, I'm tired of transferring the links. This is from the amom website, this page.

overheard today

I adore listening to my husband and my son. They have such fun. Today I heard (from my four year old son) "Okay, you be the scientist, and I'll be the tyrannasaurus rex" "OK. Hi tyrannasaurus." "Hi. Look, here are the other dinosaurs." "Are they coming to fight?" "No, they're coming to play." "Maybe they'll make a dinosaur parade." "Yup."

Commercial Alert and their Parents' Bill of Rights

Commercial Alert is a group that we should all tune into and keep track of. In particular, check out their parents' bill of rights

And of course: apologiesaccepted.com

www.apologiesaccepted.com Just loved it. I went to school in another country, have travelled a lot, and it's always important to be able to connect with people in other countries. Unfortunately right now, for many of us, "I'm sorry that my country elected Bush" really *is* the message that we want to send, want people to understand. I think that the most touching note was from one young lady in Germany who wrote "We Germans know what it's like to have the wrong leader." Boy, that's the truth. Let's hope that America's descent into fascism and invasion will end soon. (But don't worry, the 50% will keep fighting.)

pass it on: sorryeverybody.com

Just flipped through the sorryeverybody.com website and found it pretty touching. Lots of young people. The most touching stuff was from people who are NOT Americans, reaching out to say that it's OK, they know that a lot of Americans tried, and that we can always move to Germany. Pass it on. I hear that they're doing a book.

recipes

You know, I'm hoping that I'll get to host Thanksgiving at my house by the time I'm 45. I don't get to cook again this year, but here are three of my favorite recipes... Scandinavian Red Cabbage one large red cabbage, chopped into pieces (about 1/4 inch strips). 1/2 C water 1/2 C white or apple cider vinegar 1/2 C brown sugar 1 cinnamon stick 6 cloves shred cabbage, cook in a covered pot for 2 hours. It's WONDERFUL and scandinavian. sweet potatoes with tequila and lime mash sweet potatoes. Put in some sugar, and then tequila and lime to taste. Grand. gingered cranberry sauce Make ordinary cranberry sauce (from scratch, yes... it's not rough). Add grated orange peel (about 1 tbsp) and finely chopped giner (about 3/4 tsp)

added to the media criticism section

From Anachronistic Mom's kiddie media criticism page Someone just recommended that I read Susan Linn's book Consuming Kids: The Hostile Takeover of Childhood. I don't think that I'm going to, frankly. There is so much neat information out there that I don't have time to read a book essentially telling me what I already know. If you wonder about this topic though, hey, it sounds great! Here's another one in the commercialization genre: Born to Buy: The Commercialized Child and the New Consumer Culture by Juliet Schor.

from joint and bone newsletter

I just discovered the Joint and Bone newsletter from a forwarded post. The Joint and bone newsletter is free and looks absolutely wonderful. Here's their article talking about the results of a glucosamine trial, and talking a bit about the new trend in setting up studies via the internet. IMHO the more studies the better, so kudos to the internet study folks. Glucosamine no better than placebo in knee OA Boston, MA - Glucosamine may not improve knee pain in osteoarthritis (OA) after all, according to an independent, internet-based clinical trial reported in the November 1, 2004 issue of the American Journal of Medicine [1]. The 12-week study was conducted in 205 symptomatic knee OA patients aged 45 or older who were recruited over the internet and compared 1.5-g/day glucosamine with placebo. Patients on glucosamine did no better on measures of pain, stiffness, physical function, overall questionnaire score, and analgesic use compared with those who took placebo. The primary outcome measure was the pain subscale of the Western Ontario and McMaster Universities Osteoarthritis Index (WOMAC) (Likert version). In addition, the number and type of adverse events reported was similar between the groups. "Our results suggest that although glucosamine appears to be safe, it is no more effective than placebo in treating the symptoms of knee osteoarthritis," says lead researcher Dr Timothy McAlindon (Tufts New England Medical Center, Boston, MA). The new study was not industry-funded, while many of the positive studies on glucosamine have been. "There is a real possibility of industry bias," he says. But this new study may not be the final word, McAlindon says. Results form the large-scale National Institutes of Health (NIH)-sponsored Glucosamine/Chondroitin Arthritis Intervention Trial (GAIT) are now being tallied. "Ours was an internet trial done primarily to test this approach," he tells rheumawire. "We definitely need more data, and the GAIT study will provide [this] and may give a definitive answer on whether or not glucosamine is effective in OA." First, do no harm McAlindon says: "Glucosamine is safe — in fact, it's a lot safer than pills we prescribe without a thought, like ibuprofen, so if individuals try glucosamine instead of rofecoxib [Vioxx, Merck], they may actually encounter fewer adverse effects." He adds that he doesn't discourage people from trying it. "It's a real conundrum, so many people use it and feel it helps, and supposing the conclusion of the GAIT study is that it has no efficacy, what will happen will they take the next Vioxx?" he tells rheumawire. "I wish our study had been positive." Glucosamine guru sounds off A prominent proponent of the use of glucosamine for osteoarthritis is Dr Jason Theodosakis, who works in private practice and also holds the post of assistant clinical professor at the University of Arizona College of Medicine. He is the author of the best-selling book Arthritis Cure [2] and runs a website, Dr Theo online. "A huge confounder is that this trial failed to monitor activity," Theodosakis tells rheumawire. "I have a patient who was an elite runner who ran marathons in 2:20- to 2:30-hour range, and I put him on glucosamine and chondroitin and he started to run again, but after mile 12, he would get a flare-up," he says. According to some trials, he would be a failure, but he went from 0 to 12 miles. "This makes it hard because people with OA increase activity until they feel their symptoms, and unless we start looking at that, negative studies will continue." Another caveat is that this was a 12-week trial, he says. "That is short for a full effect; it usually takes a minimum of six months. These supplements are not meant for short-term use and, certainly by clinical experience, 12 weeks is not sufficient to see an effect," he says. "We need to view supplements less like ibuprofen or acetaminophen and more like calcium for osteoporosis." "This is one of many studies, and just because there is a negative study, does not mean treatment is negative," Theodosakis says. "A large percentage of people respond many months down the road." Internet fertile ground for clinical trials The new trial was conducted solely over the internet, as reported by rheumawire [3]. The cost of conducting this trial online was estimated at $914 per participant. By contrast, a traditional trial costs $1925 per participant. Savings came from doing away with the need for clinical space, nursing services, and travel reimbursement for the participants. Data entry too saved both time and money in this trial. Participants reported their responses in scheduled online sessions every 2 weeks, and these responses went directly into the database. As soon as the last response was recorded, the database was locked. McAlindon et al are now using the internet to test the approach of case-control risk-factor studies in lupus, OA, and gout. Recruitment will take place through the Google search engine. Denise Mann Sources McAlindon T, Formica M, LaValley M, Lehmer M, Kabbara K. Effectiveness of glucosamine for symptoms of knee osteoarthritis: results from an internet-based randomized double-blind controlled trial. Am J Med 2004 Nov 1; 117(9):643-9. Theodosakis J, Adderley B, Fox B. The Arthritis Cure. New York, NY: St Martin's Press, 1997. McAlindon T, Formica M, Kabbara K, LaValley M, Lehmer M. Conducting clinical trials over the Internet: feasibility study. BMJ 2003 Aug 30; 327(7413):484-7.

campaign for a commercial-free childhood

Just found out about an interesting organization called Campaign for a Commercial-Free Childhood. I like their focus! BTW, they accept NO corporate funding so drop them a dime if you like their stuff. --> If you pass this comment along to others -- periodically but not repeatedly -- please explain that Commentaries are a premium sent to Sustainer Donors of Z/ZNet and that to learn more folks can consult ZNet at http://www.zmag.org --> Sustainer Forums Login: https://www.zmag.org/sustainers/forums Today's commentary: http://www.zmag.org/sustainers/content/2004-11/15prashad.cfm ================================== ZNet Commentary Books for Kids November 21, 2004 By Vijay Prashad During this election season I've been making some quiet time for myself with a book. To escape from our ghoulish reality, it would have been clever to read a mystery novel or something that provides relief from this extended political Halloween season. The politicians trick us, and treat themselves. But I'm a sucker for horror stories, so I read what should be described as the No Logo of kids books, Susan Linn's Consuming Kids: The Hostile Takeover of Childhood. The book is a readable and detailed account of how corporations vie more and more aggressively for young consumers." Linn, who did the puppets on Mr. Rogers' Neighborhood, shows how "popular culture which traditionally evolves from creative self-expression that captures and informs shared experience is being smothered by commercial culture." For her, this commercial culture is "relentlessly sold to children by people who value them for their consumption, not their creativity." The general thesis is hardly a surprise. However, in the details one glimpses the depths to which the logic of capital goes in its war on children's imagination. Linn founded the Campaign for Campaign Free Childhood, to forward a political agenda (www.commercialexploitation.com ). This is a very important campaign for the imagination of our children. One piece of the fight is to fight against commercialization, but in the interim, how do we enliven the mind's eye of our children? Being a bookworm myself, I turn to reading. Linn describes the important pleasure that the child's imagination derives from that quite time spent with a book, the rustling of pages, the anticipation of what comes, and the ability to conjure the entire story in one's head. Equally, there is a visionary joy in holding a small child in one's lap, and reading stories that imagine alternate worlds as they provide a means to map our uncomfortable daily realities. But, what books can one read to our children? So many of them enter the market as commodities that traffic in gender, class and ethnic stereotypes, both in what they portray and what they refuse to see. My friend Larry Parnass, who writes the arts column in our local newspaper, gave my daughter two sets of books that introduced me to two presses that make challenging books for young kids (age two onward). San Francisco's Children's Book Press and Cambridge's Candlewick Press have produced a series of book that tackle questions of immigration, bilingualism, sexism, racism, and joy. Here is a sample from each of the presses. Juan Felipe Herrera and Honorio Robledo Tapia's Super Cilantro Girl/Le Superniña del Cilantro is by far our household's favorite book. Vibrant colors tell the story of Esme, a little girl whose U. S. citizen mother is unexpectedly detained at an INS facility on the U. S.-Mexico border. Distraught, Esme takes refuge in a bouquet of cilantro leaves from her mother's garden. Soon, the cilantro works its magic, Esme is transformed into a Superniña: she flies to the detention center, rescues her mother, hides with her in a miraculously verdant border (she makes it sin fronteras), and then takes her back home. A close second is Mayra Dole and Tonel's Drum Chavi Drum/Toca Chavi Toca, about a Cuban American girl who is not allowed to beat the big drum at a Miami festival. Her mother works in a factory, and so Chavi has to tend to an infirm aunt and keep house. With a close friend, she eventually gets to the festival, disguises herself, plays the drums, impresses the crowd, and then reveals herself as a girl. We have two books about the trials of immigration and the fears of deportation. Belle Yang's Hannah is My Name is about a young girl who migrates to San Francisco with her Taiwanese parents. Her father works off the books at a hotel, and she is with him as he ducks from the INS officials. In a series of beautiful drawings, Yang introduces us to the anticipation of Hannah and her family, who wait for their Green Card and fear deportation. With this, there is Troung Tran and Ann Phong's very fine Going Home, Coming Home/Ve Nha, Tham Que Huong, about a little Vietnamese girl who has grown up in the US. She reluctantly goes with her parents to visit her family in Vietnam, and, she gradually begins to love the land that her parent's still call home. And which she, in the end, also calls home. "Home is two different places, on the left and right sides of my heart." Jorge Argueta and Carl Angel's Xochitl and the Flowers/Xochitl, la Niña de las Flores and Lyra Edmonds and Anne Wilson's An African Princess take us into the lives of two girls, one who is El Salvadorian-American and the other African-American. Xochitl's story is about the class divides within an immigrant community, and about the lack of proper common urban green space. The story is about the how a transplanted person, Xochitl's mother, is able to come to terms with her new setting when she grows some flowers from her homeland; and it also shows us how she turns that meager garden into a source of livelihood. Lyra's mother tells her that she is a princess from Africa, but her school friends mock this story. As Xochitl's identity is wound around the garden and the community fight to control land, Lyra's identity is linked to a story of being more than subordinate. Both are powerful tales of race and history, of dispossession and the right to dignity. These books are about respect and justice, about freedom to move from place and place, and the loss that this entails as well as the gain. They are about the right to express oneself and to live integrally with one's surroundings. The values in such books open windows to frame our descriptions of those politics that impel us on the left to keep on keeping on. These are our "moral values," ones we cannot simply jettison when we begin to have "political discussions" on war and healthcare, jobs and rights. Expressive joy is a value we all must struggle to maintain, a coalition of sorts that links the old with the young. With children we seem either to surrender to commercialization or else to protect our children from what is loathsome in our world. I sympathize with the latter feeling, because I think I suffer from that patriarchal desire to protect children from what is offensive. But commercial offensives are not the same as the scandals of our society. These books, and our visits to protests, have allowed us to open our imagination to injustice from the standpoint of children. I have only given a few examples from two presses. Perhaps if there is interest we can draw up a list of such books, and if there is anyone willing to help me, we could create a website for interested people who are around children and who want to read good books to them. If you are inclined, please get in touch with me.

what's your inner dragon?

...posted from the inner dragon quiz site.... (SO much more fun than those Ladies Home Journal quizzes or the Parents magazine quizzes, or the Martha Stewart living magazine quizzes, or [shudder] the Cosmo magazine quizzes. Besides, Tiger Dragons sound like they rock. I am a A Tiger Dragon! Hey, I took the http://dragonhame.com online Inner Dragon quiz and found out I am a Tiger Dragon on the inside. In the war between good and evil, Tiger Dragons take the side of the noble and good....When it comes to the powers of Chaos vs. those of Law and Order, your inner dragon is a risk taker and answers to no one....As far as magical tendancies, a Tiger Dragon's nature does not lend itself well to the ways of Magic....During combat situations, whether by spells or by claw, your inner dragon will do whatever it takes to get the job done....'Tiger Dragons willingly live in any environment, so long as it is isolated from the influences of man. They have been known to build massive and incredibly complex structures of all shapes, kinds and purposes, though many never build anything. A Tiger Dragon is honest and forgiving with a very long patience. They are slow to anger, but, once enraged, may destroy entire civilizations before cooling down. Should one become exceedingly angry, it will tend to take revenge by completely destroying every aspect of its targets' lives, but never killing them. The Tiger Dragon's mind is its most formidable weapon. 'Tiger Dragons are armored in short, soft, but incredibly strong and resilient fur. They can come in a variety of colors and patterns, including white, black, orange, yellow, gray, and tan, with stripes covering most, little, or none of their bodies. They tend to smile frequently and laugh freely. Tiger Dragons tend to dislike violence, but when enraged can do anything. A Tiger Dragon is very selective when choosing close friends, but is intensely loyal to all it deems worthy of friendship. A Tiger Dragon leads a very quiet and unobtrusive life. A Tiger Dragon's feelings run deep and true. Tiger Dragons mate for life.'This Dragons favorite elements are: Life, Wisdom, and Love. http://Dragonhame.Com

"It is not a sign of good health to be well-adjusted to a sick society."...J. Krishnamurti (1895-1986) "Do not train a child to learn by force or harshness; but direct them to it by what amuses their minds, so that you may be better able to discover with accuracy the peculiar bent of the genius of each." Plato "I'm the sum of my past experiences...but I don't feel that they control my destiny." ~Winged Wolf

artist's websites and berkeley

wow. I was looking for some wierd thing on the internet and stumbled into ... Ah, I remember. There are some wonderful recycle places for artists in the SF Bay area. I was looking up one of them to try to find out where it is, when I saw a really neat fish that a woman had made. She mentioned an art store in Berkeley and I clicked on their link. The site is really, truly, like opening a beautiful jeweled box: It's a store in Berkeley called Castle in the Air. The artist, by the way, is a woman called Aimee Baldwin, and her artwork looks just utterly lovely. She seems to specialize in somewhat ephemeral art, too, which is kind of neat in and of itself. But if I ever have billions and billions of dollars, I'll get her to make some really neat paper stuff for my girlfriends and me and we sit and get massages!

Blogger blues

I haven't been posting in this blog much. Instead, I've been busy on a mom's club information project, have been doing a lot of hands-on raising of my child, finishing up a pass on the house (sigh), and working on my website. I have thought about posting, but to tell the truth, I'm not sure that I want to. You see, I stupidly connected this to my website, and then people met me, so now people know who "I" am, and there's really no way that I see any need to write about private issues to people with whom I wouldn't TALK about them with. Maybe it's all of the years as a professional writer? I'm used to hiding behind the words, behind the product. The blogger revolution is so ... naked? narcissistic? I don't know. I always was struck by how many American teenage males loved to go out and get really drunk or stoned. It seemed to me that this bunch of 15 to 22 year olds was one of the most emotionally repressed group around, and I always noticed them giggling, clutching one another, or behaving in otherwise drunk or stoned ways and thought "booze and drugs have given them permission to let it all hang out." Well, that's how blogging feels to me. Except that I'm now in my forties and privacy is important to us. Ironic. I even went so far as to set up a new blog. I set it up on some site, not blogger, I think, and I named it ... something. (sigh). Ah, for a brain. It's been a few weeks (month?) and I can't even remember the name of the new site, so I guess it's not compelling. I think that the issue is several-fold. First off, I am used to, and happy with someone giving me money to write. If they don't, I write journals, and they are mine. I used to write my journals in Danish, for heaven's sake, so that nobody (certainly in this country!) could read them, but they have always been mine. I don't share them, I don't publish them. If you have known me for years, this probably surprises you because I'm fairly outgoing. And I am. But there are untoward depths in the human psyche, and now that I have a relationship with my readers, well... I'll have to think about it. In case you haven't figured it out, I have decided to "write through" the issue, and we'll see what happens.

Mt. St. Helens webcam

Figured I'd put this out there in case we get more action: [from Oct. 4 - not current] Mount St. Helens Volcano in Washington state is erupting. Here is a live webcam of the volcano that is still functioning during the eruption. Very cool. Check itout.... http://www.fs.fed.us/gpnf/volcanocams/msh/

TV-B-Gone .. the perfect gift for this holiday season

I love this thing! Point it at any television and it turns it off! You could really cut a swathe through sports bars, but I can just imagine getting the cr*p beaten out of you by some thick-necked sports fans if you tried this in an obvious fashion. http://tvbegone.com/ I just started letting Simon watch an hour of Sesame Street a day and believe that I will stop after reading this article: http://home.datacomm.ch/rezamusic/tv_johnson.html We are NOT seeing better behavior from him. Enough said.

secrecy in the bush administration

Have you been feeling just a little bit too smug lately? As though the crown on your figurative head is tiring you (as leader of the free world and all?) Well, here's a way to jump into a real cesspool of worry. See what the Bush Administration is doing on the secrecy front. Woohoo! Poland we're not. Yet. But gosh, it's a slippery slope. Begone those nasty civil rights! From the Committee on Government Reform: "Rep. Henry A. Waxman has released a comprehensive examination of secrecy in the Bush Administration. The report analyzes how the Administration has implemented each of our nation’s major open government laws. It finds that there has been a consistent pattern in the Administration’s actions: laws that are designed to promote public access to information have been undermined, while laws that authorize the government to withhold information or to operate in secret have repeatedly been expanded. The cumulative result is an unprecedented assault on the principle of open government." Ugh. I think I'll crawl into bed. Sputnik was a real warning shot. Must...GET ... Rest ... of ... World. Must ... join ... secret ... power ... fraternity... of nasty ... white ... guys... taking .. over the ... world.. in the... name of ... the USA. kate

wonderful myth-book

Just got this book and I love it. It's called Incredible Journeys - Myths and Legends from Around theWorld and it's written by Philip Steele. "the stories in this book come from all over the world, from manydifferent ages. "It's awesome. Travels of a Trickster - Africa, the seven voyages ofSinbad - Indian Ocean, The Monkey and the Monk - China, The One thatGot Away - Australia, Quest for the Holy Grail - Europe, Thor'sJourney to Utgard - Scandinavia, The Dream of Macsen - Wales, theEagle and the Cactus - Mexico, Scarface Visits the Sun - NorthAmerica Those are some of the stories. The stories are just 2/3 pages long,with a picture of the part of the world that the story si from (amap picture), a picture of the story, and then a background pictureor two. Simon's four and juuuust starting to be ready for this type ofthing. I could see this book being good for up to about 7 years old?

Health topic #745: research miasma

You know, if you're in a bad enough mood, you can determine that that internet has given every computer-literate person out there a permanent "lost in the bushes" feeling when it comes to researching their health. Especially that oh-so-elusive health quandary of: how to stay healthy and fix stuff that's not exactly wrong, but you don't feel great anyway. Back in the olden days, if people didn't feel well, they just shut up about it and went about their work. Sure, sure, they were miserable for the rest of their lives (maybe), and OK, maybe they weren't the best parents, and yeah, probably they took it out on people of different races and econonomic levels, and maybe even kicked their cat. But what could you do? Now, however, on the glitteringly cobbled road pre-paved by the health conscious yuppies, I stride into middle age. And the research is crushing me. Get this: when you hit forty-something, you start something new!! (improved!!) Well, I guess it was always around but now they have a TERM for it. Heck, it's practically a marketing term, I'm hearing about it so much. I'm talking Perimenopause. What is it? Why "BEFORE"menopause, of course! That's the literal translation. Soon, of course, we will be having periprepubescent behavior, perimidlife crisis Ferrari sales, and all sorts of other things. And how long does perimenopause last? Why, ten years. Thrillsville. Gosh. Just got out of the throes for 4.5 years of infertility, and am now launching into (gulp) ten YEARS of wavering hormonal levels and (as far as I can tell) bad moods? Let me think about this. In the meantime, I guess I'm supposed to exercise and take cod liver oil, borage oil, flax oil, and some other oil which escapes me. I tried to just eat a lot of butter, but it apparently didn't work. Here, in the spirit of cooperation, are some of the cod liver oil links that are on my list to read up on, as I try to figure out just how MUCH of this stuff to take. Because of course, it's all alternative. People just whisper "ooh, flax oil" to one another in gym class,and you go and buy a bottle, but how come some bottles have dosages of 350 mg,a nd some have 900? Oh dear. So as soon as my to do list clears a bit, I'll be chasing down info on the following sites -- and I'll keep you posted. http://www.mercola.com/forms/carlsons.htm http://www.healthreaction.com/web/articles/fishoil.htm http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/health/1817974.stm http://www.healthwell.com/healthnotes/Supp/Fish_Oil.cfm http://www.westonaprice.org/vitamins/codliveroil.html http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/health/604014.stm http://www.gotogifts.co.uk/for/vitamins/description008.htm http://www.healthcatalog.com/cod_liver_oil.htm http://www.mercola.com/2001/jan/21/alzheimers_fish.htm

getting things: comments on the newsweek article on spoiled kids

Here's an article that's stirring a lot of debate: It's Newsweek's article about spoiled kids. http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/5909207/site/newsweek/ On my mom's club list, a friend writes about how she takes her kids to yard sales and does trash picking and such. Here's my response, which contains ruminations from an acquisitive mom. Not sure if I should feel awful about it, but .... hmmmn., nope, still don't feel awful. Guess I won't. - Kate My friend wrote: "Recently, we drove by a house that was having a lawn party: chairs and tables outside. Sophia looked at it and said "yard sale!" Some day I will be a great embarassment to my children!!!" what a great mom! Here are my comments: You know, I'm with you there. I come from an acquisitive family. We have stuff, we "do stuff," and we love stuff. What kind of stuff? Oh gosh. If it's in the trash and looks neat, it's for us! And I also have a Rosenthal "magic flute" teaset, which is outrageously expensive and has the lyrics to "magic flute" opera hand-written on the back. (ahem. not TOO much of this sort of thing) Not a lot of diffentiation. Strange stuff up on the wall with nice art. We're a bit "known" on our local mother's list for advertising for things like "got anything that we can tear up to make a carwash automatic scrubber with?" "got an old tire?" "Got an old steerign wheel?" I am forever meeting people who say "oh, I read your postings!" and looking at me rather oddly. Recently, I posted asking where one could find plastic sushi! (found an awesome japanese food playset, too!) This is a weakness of mine. It's great fun to acquire, and we do. I try to do it not ALL the time, but unfortunately, we've been working on our house for the past four year or so, so we always have to go to Home Depot, and also we're forever making stuff. Friends tell me that my house is like a preschool (with the crafts and stuff). Probably "my bad," since we should just play with a shovel and such, but ... did I mention that I'm also landscaping our 1 acre plus myself? Talk about addictions! HA! More perennials!!! So ... I don't know about the "acquiring" thing, whether or not it's innately bad. Undoubtedly I do too much of it. And my kid adores shopping. Not for clothing or toys -- doesn't know anything about brand-name stuff. But for groceries. His new passion. I took him to the market yesterday and let him NOT ride in the cart and I was ready to shoot myself. Ack! "Mommy, we need these bananas. They weigh [sound of crashing as my 4 year old tosses them onto the scale] ummmmmmm" "How about just one?" "No, we need them all!" "And this!" (pulling out Bok Choy) "Oh, and some carrots!" sigh. I think he's got that shopping gene. Whenever we go to Home Depot he begs for a squirt bottle. But ... I don't know. Somehow it seems OK to get them sometimes. If I don't want to, I take great joy in saying "no," (The product of an overwhelmingly personality-endowed mother, I'm still tickled that *I* get to be the mom now). And he's fine if he doesn't get things. Maybe that's it? Is your kid OK if they don't get things? If they don't, then you should work on that? And I really think that it's neat to raise your kids to be able to appreciate things from MANY sources, not just the mall, you know? It's hard, in our wealthy culture, to totally lock kids down when it comes to acquiring things. We ARE an acquisitive culture. And I, for one, am amazed at how often I have to go to the supermarket to buy food. Like 3/4 times a week! The thing that really hit me in that article was the parents who just flat-out cannot say NO to their kids. IMHO if you have problems saying no, you should practice. Do it all the time. ALL the time! I guess, in summary, I'm not sure if I should feel terrible or not. I don't, as it stands. But he gets stuff! Yesterday he got an acorn. We picked it up off the ground. He begged for a squirt bottle and didn't get it. But he did get a fudgesicle. (slow day) If he says that he wants something I am very clear: "it's his JOB to want things." And I cannot give him everything, I explain, or he will turn into a beast and not be a good member of society. sigh. I'll work on this.

And now we are four

From a posting on the UCB parent's list: "Your four year old's JOB is to test limits." Hello there, and how are YOU! I don't know about this limit testing thing. All I know is that when my son turned four, his ears fell off. Yup. Can't hear a word. Especially if mommy's saying it. But that's actually not why I'm posting. Much of life with Simon is flat-out hilarious. Well... you have to have the right type of humor, I suppose. Like this past winter, when I looked out to see my son, poolhouse door open (BTW, we've converted our poolhouse to a library, italian leather couches (not ours -- stored for a friend), rug, etc. At any rate, he stood at the doorway, aiming a hose into the room, and spraying. Aargh. Flooded the place. Wrecked the rug. Well, the rug was an old Macy's special and it's OK, but I took it outside to dry the day before the biggest three-day storm of the season and ... oh dear. So ... we have our days. Last Friday, I went to turn on my bathtub. No pressure. I freaked out. "Oh no. And we have no home warranty right now. (Yikes.)" I was convinced that the plumbing had someone just fallen through the earth or something and that it would take 6 months and 10K to get it fixed. My husband was flummoxed, and eventually called the Atherton police who told him that there was a water main break and it wouldn't be fixed before Tuesday. Usually I take a bath every night. FOUR NIGHTS later, I try to take a bath. Hmmn. No pressure still. My husband calls the emergency number for our water department, then hears a racket right outside the front door. Oops. Little Angel boy has found the MAIN WATER VALVE and turned it halfway off. For THREE DAYS. So ... let's be clear here: NO WATER PRESSURE for any of my side lawns, etc during one of the biggest heatwaves this year. Ah, well, valves are kind of fun, aren't they? - kate

poetry on google

When I was much younger, I wrote a lot of poetry. I was a firm believer that poetry should be displayed like artwork: in a studio, on a wall, and that people should walk through and just read it. (This was 25 years ago, so this stuff is old hat by now.) Well here's a new take on how to make poetry: use google's adwords!

help from the kid

I had Simon out in the bike the other day (he can still ride in the seat on the bike) and we had to go up a hill. Ugh. Last time, I had to walk the bike. This time, I tried and tried. Simon sat behind me and said "I think you can, I think you can, I think you can" the whole time. About 15 feet from the top, he put both hands on my bottom and pushed as hard as he could!I will REALLY miss riding around with him on the back. I love it. Oh, by the way. We made it! And it was lovely, coming back down!

wikis and so forth

I just put a group with a mission up on a wiki and am wondering how it will work. So far, not too well. It's hard to figure out where the public discussion arena is and gently herd talk toward that area, so that newcomers can find things. People have referred SocialText, and someone just said that SocialText was 'bare bones' and recommended Jot. Geek friends have recommended TikiWiki. I've been looking at/playing with Zwiki. Sure are a lot of products out there...

blogger.con conference

Just ran into this and wanted to save it. Celebrating the "art and science" of blogging. Would this be really good or really not good? Have to read more about it.

dealing with scared kids

This is a posting that I just sent to my mom's group in response to a mom saying that her 5/6 year old was scared to be alone just now. IMHO being scared must be brain-related. I'll bet that some growingis going on, and who on earth knows what it does to the brain. Thatsaid, everyone in the world needs to grow the skills to take care ofthemselves and calm themselves.IMHO we don't have enough rituals in our life. You might want toread a book called "The spirit catches you and you fall down." This is a book about pre-literate people (the Hmong) livingthe the USA, and the problems in communication that arise when oneof the little Hmong girls has uncontrollable seizures (seen,incidentally, as connections to God by the Hmong), and American doctors try to communicate with her family and community. It was perceived(after the fact) that the best way to have communicated howto take care of the girl would have been to have gone to the Hmong community and staged a big, atavistic parade. Interesting stuff and it's remained in my brain as an interesting perspective when dealingwith our own pre-literates. I strongly believe that many children have their own "magicalobjects" which help them through hard times. I sent a friend's boys stone bears, I think, when they lost their mother. And stone boxes to put the bears in. Some wierd thing from California's new-age stores, along with a story about it, in hopes that it would helpthem get through the loss of one of their mothers. Did it help at all? Who knows. While you can only push this stuff if you "live" it (e.g. ask a greek orthodox or catholic if they can remember the rituals of their church - very powerful stuff), many people who do not ascribe to organized religions are constructing and using their own rituals to deal with the world.I have posted before on a book called "Starbright."here's the page on my website that deals with it, storytelling, andso forth. While some fundamentalist Christian groups have lambasted this book,IMHO it is a proven fact that visualization is a way in which we can communicate with ourselves and learn to psych ourselves up, calm ourselves down, etc. Books like this are a way to teach your childto have an internal dialogue with themselves, to learn to guide where their dreams go, and so forth. IMHO not a lot different than an athlete imagining swimming really fast, for example. There is another book that I'd recommend a LOT. It's called "CircleRound", and you can use this book as you'd like. IMHO it's got a lotof "hard to swallow cockamamie touchie feely" stuff in it, but still, it gives you real examples of rituals and might help you to create your own. (Whether or not you want to do it around the characters of Cerridwen, Morda, and Gwion, for example) But it's a VERY well-rounded book and I'll bet you can get it used on Amazon.What *I* would do is start talking about American Indians. Find a really neat book about them or some type of Usborne thing about them and gradually lead it towards how they were nomadic and very brave,and how they took animals as their protectors (a specific animal)and had a secret name, and ... oh, all sorts of stuff. Then, oh*wow!* we can have an Indian naming ceremony/blessing ceremony/whatever for our new house/whatever. I like that approach because it gives the child a context. I thought that the indian stuff was totally way cool when I was about 6 - somany neat and interesting things. They made everything! At any rate, a form of spiritualism which is, to the best of my knowledge,based upon strong respect for the world and things within it is ..well, nice and boy-like, imho. The "fairy-" like aspects of some of the other stuff is very hard, imho, to focus boys on. I'm looking through "Circle Round" right now and they actually havea ritual called "No longer a baby, not yet a teen: a ritual forcoming into childhood." They talk about how they researched this,talking with a friend from Senegal who told them that, in hiscountry, they had a ritual at age 6, welcoming them as members ofthe village and imbuing them with new responsibilities. They wantedto balance education and celebration. It goes on for abotu 8pages. They constructed special necklaces for the boys and the boysloved them. But they also had a big ritual about it. Among otherthings, they drew with body paints on the kids, using symbols. Atree for the spine, speed of lightening on their legs. etc.

why can't I find plastic display sushi?

There are an amazing amount of sushi sites on the internet. Now perhaps it's odd of me to think that plastic display sushi food would be a neat thing for my child to play with, but I cannot for the life of me find it on the internet. Like, what's it called, anyway? Is there some word like "merken" which refers to plastic sushi food? Strange. At any rate, I just have to pass on this wonderful link for sushi jewelry. Yup. Oh boy. Finally found it. It's called sushi replicas and they are TWENTY FIVE DOLLARS A PIECE. My goodness. Maybe there are some on ebay. But I have to tell you that the food you see in the windows of restaurants beats the pants off of the wierd plastic food that they sell for kids to play with, so I'll keep my eyes open.

Old personal notes

BTW, ran into a woman that I know at a conference recently. I told her that I liked her hair and she said "really? I think it has too many colors." "Oh no," I said, earnestly. "People pay extra for that." She looked at me, laughed heartily, and then patted me on the shoulder and said "Kate, Kate, I always loved you." I will never be sophisticated, it seems. Another BTW, my town just took out the reflectors on the street because they were "ugly". The day that they took 'em out, a TV guy showed up in my yard, where Simon and I were looking like people they left behind in Appalachia. "What do you think about this?" he asked me. "Anybody who cares about the color of reflectors on the streets," I said "reeeeeally needs a life." I guess I was feeling frisky, because I then went on to suggest that perhaps they should put Xanax in the water, since they aren't keen on flouride here, and THEN I went on to suggest that, with these property taxes, the town should hand-paint the stoopid reflectors, perhaps a mauve with some mica, for twinkle.. (oh dear.) He put me on the news that night (thank goodness, I was out of town) and I got some emails about it (groan.) So I eventually called one up and said "ok, spill. What did I say?" He'd taken the TAME STUFF, darn it!!!

The Lion King and my three year old

Wow. I'm not sure how my husband managed to do it, but he got three tickets to the Lion King today, Sunday, at 1 pm, 14 rows back, center, on the AISLE! We took our almost-four-year old and he was wonderful. NO squirming. For three hours. Excuse me while I accept my award. The show would have been a lot better except for the family across the aisle one row back who literally gave their two 6/8 year old sons crinkly-papered snacks for 1.5 hours. I have never seen anything like it. The kids sat there and ate nonstop the entire time. It drove me absolutely, barking mad. What's with this "I can't take my EIGHT year old somewhere for an hour without feeding him" business? Sheesh. My husband claims that the people didn't know any better. Great. He also claims that the kids acted just as though they were at home watching a video. Also great. (Not.) I haven't been to a movie since 1993 because I abhor listening to people chew. [Shudder.] This brings back the old, neurotic, pre-kid me with a vengeance. Ugh. OK, back to the show. We don't watch TV and our child had never seen any type of violence, so I covered his eyes a few times, but I found the show to be all right in the area of violence. It deals with concepts of death and such (my son kept saying "why did he die?" but he's saying that a lot anyway about dying), and has a lovely approach. I cannot write more because I'm falling asleep, but I'm extremely proud of my son tonight. Oh, and The Lion King was stunningly cool. Take it from someone who needed to be crowbarred into the place -- it was neat.

I like LiveJournal

More Social Software research. Sheesh. Should have done that BEFORE I signed up to blogger, which feels like the ultimate faceless entity to me. Hate the color scheme, dislike the approach ("dashboard," indeed ) Of course I'm a little confused about actually moving a blog, but ... give me time.

Learning about social software

Okay, I have a new novel that I'm trying to write, so instead of that, I think that I'll start from scratch to research ... social software! It's really gotten to the point where it's ALMOST usable by people other than geeks at this point (I'm talking wikis, btw, not making your own bridgeplayers@yahoo.com group) Have started by looking through some of the links provided by SocialText folks. Right now, I'd suggest that anybody interested in this read through this essay by Clay Shirkey called 'A Group is its own Worst Enemy." As someone who moderates, creates, and housemothers various groups and organizations, I laud Clay's theory -- that the GROUP is what matters, even more than the rights of individuals. Clay doesn't sugggest limiting freedoms and such, he just points out some facts about dealing with social software and its situations. First off, the ability to log in doesn't have to give you the crown jewels. Successful social software often rates its users (who have easy to remember names). If you're brand new, maybe you're moderated, or perhaps you're referred to as an "anonymous coward' as they apparently do on Slashdot (ah, the geeks). Some other techniques are in attaching karma points, giving seniority, starting a group of "fireman" like wikipedia does, and so forth. And Clay suggests that if people change ID's, that their participation ranking gets cut down also. I was tickled pink to read his suggestion that there be barriers to entry. Yup. People don't value free stuff very much. Charge 'em something. Or at least provide some segmentation of capabilities. Here's his quote on the subject: "Now, this pulls against the cardinal virtue of ease of use. But ease of use is wrong. Ease of use is the wrong way to look at the situation, because you've got the Necker cube flipped in the wrong direction. The user of social software is the group, not the individual. . . The user of social software is the group, and ease of use should be for the group. If the ease of use is only calculated from the user's point of view, it will be difficult to defend the group from the "group is its own worst enemy" style attacks from within. " And finally, he talks about dealing with scale. A very nice essay. Onward. ...to.... the place where I find shirkey.com and discover who Clay Shirkey is! Teacher, pundit, etc. Excuse me while I wallow in the writings more.

changes

Simon will be four next month and the changes have been hot and heavy.  I'd say that he's had huge changes in the last two months.  Last time he had a fever, he woke up the next morning with what seemed like 20 new IQ points (but was just a big jump in verbal skills.)  That can be odd.  I don't know anybody else's child who does this, but we have always seen a correleation between fevers in our child and a hop to the next developmental level.  This last time, though, he developed the fever around 2 AM, and had the jump around 8 hours later.  Wierd!   It's very funny though, that all of the stuff that I've tried to do with him is really showing up right now. This must be the time for atavism.   When Simon was a very small child - a baby - I used to take him outside every morning and sing a good morning song to the world.  "good morning, good morning, good morning everything, good morning, good morning to you.  Good morning to the trees and flowers, how are you today?  Lots of beautiful things to see, what a great big wonderful world we're in.    Good morning to the bushes and plants    Well, I have got to be the world's most undisciplined person, because I haven't sung that song for ... oh, eight months?  Except that last week we walked outside and Simon started singing it! Neato!  So ... we're back.   Tonight I read him a book and then told him that, instead of making up a story as we do every night , I was going to read to him.  He said "will you read poetry to me?"  And I, surprised, said yes.  I read all sorts of things to him.  "The boy stood on the burning deck."  "Oh I was a child and she was a child in the kingdom by the sea.  And we loved with a love that was more than a love, I and my Annabelle Lee."  "Under the spreading chestnut tree, the village smithy stands..."   VERY CLASSIC poetry.  Awesome.  Puts him to sleep every time.   At any rate, it's pretty cool what they remember from their upbringing. 

political Note

Are you female? Check out this site.   I was visiting the Vote Run Lead website (www.voterunlead.org), and I saw information on this page that I thought you'd find interesting. Click on the link below to read it. http://www.voterunlead.org/tools/index.cfm

Morris Meyer for Congress in Texas, 6th District!

Morris is someone I know and worked with about 15 years ago at NeXT Computer. A fairly staid, nice, engineering fellow who moved to Texas and discovered that his little girl was getting terrible asthma. He researched and discovered that it's because the existing congressman, now nicknamed "smokey joe" had relaxed the clean air restrictions a lot. Smokey joe has also been running this part of Texas in a fairly nonethical and corrupt way, and Morris, who incidentally is a single father of one, is taking him on and doing a pretty good job of it. Total American story: Take on the existing powers and do a better job. Morris, by the way, is uncorruptible. Is this cool or what? Here's his site. If you know of anybody who wants to see Texas get a new Democratic congressman, please forward this on. Morris is pure silicon valley hard-working, straight-shooting engineer. His campaign is also up against entrenched Republican interests so -- come on folks. If you live in the silicon valley, ship him $50 today. Won't hurt you, will do a lot to increase the quality of life in both Texas AND Congress! Kate

got hair care problems?

I don't think that I like shopping any more. Maybe it's because I have a three year old, and his idea of a whiz-bang shopping time is Orchard Supply Hardware. Maybe it's because I'm landscaping my house and am continually going to Home Depot for some little tiny irritating sprinker part. And maybe it's because there are just too darn many clothes out there right now, and I don't have the time or inclination to figure out even what looks good any more. When we sold our last company, I figured that I'd "upgrade" my clothes. And I did. There's a nice little boutique in San Francisco that sells a lot of Finnish designer clothing (not kidding.) I bought a bunch of their stuff and hey! It's nice. But I want things that I can wear every day. I want clothing that I can get dirty. I want cotton, easy-to-launder stuff. They don't make a lot of that in great, simple, fluid, flowing lines for forty year olds. Well, unless you go to Kmart or something and get those big floral pants with elastic on the waist. And face it: polyester really doesn't work in the garden. I think it started about five years ago when I went to buy a pair of tennis shoes. I went to one of those shoe boutiques. An athletic shoe boutique. Stuff like that makes me feel old. When you walk in, and there are six hundred different tennis shoes, all with their own marketing profile, for heaven's sake, and many made for people who do a specific exercise for approximately 45 minutes a day followed by yoga or some god-awful thing.... At any rate, I found it depressing. And I never did buy the tennis shoes. Instead, I waited until the next Nordstrom shoe sale and just bought a pair on sale. The easiest selection for me is pre-selection. Also, I dislike the styles. It's ironic, because I always had a little tiny flat stomach. The minute I had a child and turned forty, showing your belly became in, and there's just no way. In the first place, I'm forty, for heaven's sake. I think I'm doing the world a favor by staying clothed at this point. And even when I was younger and more habitually disrobed, I didn't wear it to the office, for heaven's sake. But in the second place, here's one for you. I'm five foot ten. Many t-shirts have always fit me like today's styles -- and I've hated them. Not for their style, but for drafts. Drafts follow me in life. They like to swish right up a shirt that's too short, and freeze the heck out of you. So I just don't get it. But I guess today's young women don't get as cold as I do, and I must say that many are certainly less self-conscious, so ... what the heck. As long as I can find a t-shirt that goes to my hips, thank you very much. And pants. Aargh, pants. I finally gave in and bought at $175 pair of pants last winter because I was feeling fat. They are called Womyn and fit wonderfully. Bummer about the price because I'm too lazy to look for other clothes that fit and now I'm stuck. I remember going to the gap about two years ago and seriously asking the man if any of the pants would even cover my pubic hair. He looked at me and shook his head. Sigh. I think that the gap's getting better (my girlfriends are talking about an Oprah-suggested pair of jeans that make you look taller there, although they don't do anything for me), but sheesh. New styles are hard. Here's the site that started this entire ramble through fashion complaining. I find it totally hilarious. It's called MakeupAlley http://makeupalley.com/ and has message boards where women compare makeup products and haircare products and whatever else they're fervently putting on their bodies. It's actually very useful if you're looking for a new shampoo, but some of the posters scare me! Kate

Palo Alto events

Check this out: Friends of the Palo Alto library are holding a book sale on July 14. $2 a bag!

article on autistic boy who writes

This article really intrigued me, but then a reader pointed out that the boy's mother is the only one who can "interpret" his speech, and that her technique hasn't been tested. Might be totally true, just realize that there's contention.

video of dancing animals

About four years ago, we were in the yuppie kid's store in Carmel and they had the most interesting video on. It was very realistic animals in costume, dancing. As I watched, I realized that it was ballet dancers, and they were acting out the Beatrix Potter stories. No narration. The people at the store assured me that the video was out of production and I couldn't find it, but I just did -- on Amazon, of all places. Sure enough, it is the dancers of the Royal Ballet, dancing out the Tales of Beatrix Potter. You can even find it used, if you click on the "used" link at Amazon (often this will get you a new one, btw.) I would highly suggest this video as an extremely gentle, human- scale show. Although my 3 year old son liked it, there is no narration of any type, which is very different from many of the hyperstim videos. However, if you have a collection of Beatrix Potter stories, the characters are dressed and look exactly as they do in the stories (right down to the color of Jemima Puddle- Duck's shawl), and you can pull the book out and narrate (and discuss) the action yourself. It's a lovely way to expand your child's imagination, introduce them to classical music and ballet dancing, and integrate parent participation into the medium of video. cat ps: Here is another ballet video which might be of interest: Peter and the Wolf as danced by the young members of the Royal Ballet School.

Small parenting note #4,698

My son is sick. Last night he came and climbed into my bed (something he doesn't get to do very much). "Honey, why are you in my bed?" "Because I love you."

Another try for the movies

The other day I was getting sick, although I didn't know it. "I know!" I said. (Very oddly for me.) "Let's watch a movie together as a family!" So we did. We decided that, at 3.5, our son might like Shrek, and so we put it on and fast-forwarded it over the part where he yells at the villagers. We tried earnestly to explain things to him, but he just looked blank, a bit afraid, and whenever Shrek did anything, he'd jump. I finally tapped my husband, said "Ok, that's it." and my son looked relieved. Then we tried to watch "The Parent Trap," but again, it was a no go. You see, our son doesn't watch TV. He watches maybe 1 hour a week of videos. (up from about 1.5 hours a month until he was 3.75) We TiVo everything so he doesn't get the commercials, and he's pretty sheltered. We TiVo "Reading Rainbow" for him, which is a lovely show. Nonetheless, some of the shows, like the one where kids talked about how sad they were about 9/11, are just too old for him, so he doesn't see them. A few weeks ago, TiVo accidentally taped about 5 minutes of a cartoon after whatever we'd taped. It was a cartoon in which the brother and sister hated one another. Although it was meant to be funny, they were doing nasty things to one another, and then the girl yelled "I HATE you" to the boy. I turned it off quickly, but Simon said to me "why did they SAY that?" I told him that they seemed to have some problems. Sigh. Incidents like this keep us from watching more. The other night he was very relieved to not have to watch Shrek or the other video. He got to watch his favorite Busytown video instead. Simon has always loved Richard Scarrey and I bought him some videos when he was very young. He didn't watch them until he was almost 3, and they're nice little videos. Nothing terrible happens, everyone works together, they all speak respectfully to one another, and they have real relationships. Gosh. So *boring!* Simon's favorite is the grouchy many who won't let kids play in his yard. One day the kids sneak onto his pond and go skating. "Mr Grouchy," as Simon calls him, runs after them and falls into the pond, so Lowly, the worm, pulls him out with the aid of a ladder. "Mr. Grouchy" is charmed, and decides that he likes the kids and will throw a party for them. Nice stuff. I wouldn't be surprised if it was some large length of time before my son is comfortable watching people being really mean to one another, yelling at one another, and having bad things happen to them. Especially since he is not going to be allowed to watch movies that are too old for him. What I don't get is how all of these other 3 year olds watch this type of thing. Where do they all get this level of sophistication? It amazes me. And why would you do that? In my opinion, it's very important for boys especially, to be sheltered from violence and learn to love beauty. Simon loves to pick a flower and put it in a vase for "his" little table. He loves to smell perfumes and candles. A friend of mine loves to lecture me about how he'll soon be biting his toast into guns and so forth, but I don't really understand her lectures. Yeah? So what? Just because society will eventually buffet my child with violence doesn't mean that I'm going to just let it in the door early!

At the carnival - reality

You know, I never used to feel this way, but I do believe that phobias are sprouting up like nasturtiums! For example, I used to like the Ferris Wheel. Well, I don't any more. Heights are pretty scary to me. It's very scary to be in a carnival ride and to think "I voluntarily put myself into this physical position where I have no power and if anything happens I'll just be plummeted to my death." sigh. Maybe it's getting old? Maybe it's a mom thing? Regardless, it's DAD's job to ride on the rides from now on. The rictus grin that I had on for the last two hours hurt my cheeks!