grateful

Yesterday two of my brothers-in-law and my husband built a sledding run for my son that started on a piece of lawn furniture, then ran through an open split-rail-fence gate, over a little jump and into a swamp.

My mother-in-law, niece and daughter sledded that run as well.

I have the BEST in-laws EVER.

(But I still miss my family.)

Happy Thanksgiving, y'all.

snowing

snowing

snowing

snowing

snowing

snowing

We're going to sled down to my in-laws' house for dinner. Wheee!!

We are so undead

Disadvantages of your older brother completing adventure level in Plants vs. Zombies HD in two days:

• He ignores you for two days
• When it's finally your turn to play, he can't resist "helping" you by reaching over your shoulder to plant something
• It adds to your frustration every time your brains get eaten
• And – this is the worst – he spent his $10 so he can't loan it to you

Advantages:

• If you log in with his ID, you can watch the music video any time you like
• If you log in as him, you can play Quick Play, where you can drop in on all the different zombies and plants in the game
• You're not worried about "winning," so you can watch the zombies pass out from the smell of garlic over and over and over, which is SO FUNNY!

Typical day not-in-the-office

I had planned to co-present at a meeting last week but the organizer, Wry Woman, emailed me to cancel it. The daughter of one of the principal attendees had pneumonia. I knew Beautiful French Woman's daughter had been sick because I read it on Facebook; I hadn't known they'd visited the hospital. So I inquired about that, and then Wry Woman and I traded stories (by email) about emergency-room visits. She has a daughter a bit younger than mine, who I met at a party in Portland two years ago; the two look alike; and they both make everyone around them laugh while rarely laughing themselves.

So when Beautiful French Woman's daughter was well enough to return to daycare, we had our meeting. We were seven women and one man; five women and the man sat in a room together in Portland, while I and another woman called in. I shivered at my dining room table wrapped in a blanket, drinking coffee, staring into a computer screen with the phone cradled between my ear and my shoulder – and I tried to picture them, how they were gesturing and who was sitting beside whom. (I could hear two whispering but I didn't know which two.) The meeting didn't go very well. The two of us on the phone presented a solution to a problem the others have been having with the web site and I didn't think they liked it. They seemed disappointed. We had worked for weeks on this solution so their disappointment disappointed us; we wanted to argue with them, to talk them into accepting our proposal, but of course that's like trying to force someone to love the Christmas present you bought them. Afterward I emailed or called a few of them privately, and my guess was right: in solving one of their problems we inadvertently caused a different problem, relatively minor but still. Once we fix that I think they will, in fact, love their Christmas present (as it were).

So it goes. Yet another day not-in-the-office.

Sideways

I mention this stuff in comments on others' blogs, so I thought I'd clarify it here.

For the last three years I've gotten my produce from Windflower Farm, an absolutely lovely garden-farm in Alfalfa. It's a CSA. I send them a hefty check in April, and then once a week from May-October I get a bag of vegetables and herbs. I like Windflower Farm because it's continually astonishing that she can grow such a wide variety of crops in the desert and for such a long period of time; because I like to eat along with the desert's seasons; because her farm is beautiful; and – ultimately – because I like what she delivers. (Herbs! So many herbs! I dry them and use them all year. I dry them and give them as Christmas presents.)

I also like Windflower Farm's vegetables because they still look like a piece of a plant. The lettuce has roots, the carrots and radishes and turnips have tops. I have to wash the dirt off – and once a year, seems like, I get a caterpillar. I just love that; I don't know why; a caterpillar among store-bought lettuce would be horrifying, but in my CSA veggies it's somehow part of the story.

Bend has a few other CSAs now and also some small farms which allow a person to order produce on a week-by-week basis. I'm loyal to Windflower Farm, but since she's closed for the season, today I bought a 1/2lb of lettuce from Red Tail Farm, which apparently has a giant greenhouse out Tumalo way. It is fab-u-lous. It is to Safeway lettuce what a garden tomato is to a Safeway tomato.

During CSA season I get weekly eggs from Windflower Farm, too, but only 1/2 dozen. That's not enough for my family; so this year I have also been buying eggs from various nearby farms and ranches: Dancing Cow Farm, Great American Egg, and today Red Tail Farm. Fresh eggs cost nearly twice as much as store-bought eggs but the dollar figure is still low (eggs are cheap protein!) and I tell you, they look different and taste different from store-bought eggs. The yolk is a completely different color. It turns batter orange-y. Also the shells are beautiful.

What else? Oh, Windflower Farm offered a cheese share this year. Every other week I got two little bricks of Redmond's Juniper Grove Farms' goat cheese along with my vegetables. We all like their hard cheeses but the soft cheese is too stinky for anyone else, so I ate it all myself! (I probably will not do the cheese share next year. Goat cheese strikes me as a luxury good, hard to justify. (Please, feel free to change my mind!))

Great American Egg also sells truly astonishing bacon (jowl bacon! Who knew such a thing existed?) and twice now I've bought a whole chicken from them. Oh and also when I visited that farm last, they talked me into some butter which was made by a neighboring farm. It was a deeper yellow than ordinary butter and tasted just a little cheese-ish. Good stuff.

*

You know what I really like about buying directly from a farm or ranch? I like the story.

I like that I've seen the places where the food grows or is raised and met the people who work so hard there. I like that when I crack an egg, I can actually picture the hen in my mind; I remember seeing it, or one of its cousins, walking through the grass and making that lovely cooing sound. I remember watching my children chase after those hens, laughing and sort of – I don't know – pleased with the otherness of the birds.

Wordless Wednesday: Waiting

If wishes were airplanes

My son would have homework just like he does now and he'd hate it just like he does now, but I would get to say things like, "If you'd finished your trebuchet at school, you wouldn't have to work on it now!"

No grades. The teacher (and my kid himself) would know if he learned what she taught because if he didn't, he wouldn't be able to run his experiments properly. (You need fractions to work with electricity and you need electricity to turn a propeller. You can only guess at it for so long.)

The school's speed-flying team would totally kick the Norwegians' butts. [Go watch that video. Duuuuuuuuude. I would never do that – but I know people who would!]

After graduation from this school the kids can go on to college, where they may run down the rabbit hole after whatever interested them most while building that plane. Or they can just go get a job as a mechanic. In northern Canada. Where they backcountry ski on their days off. And guide their retired parents on heli-ski trips.

*

Y'all heard about the human-powered ornithopter built by University of Toronto students, right?

Beggars would ride

I want to put my son in airplane-building school.

Airplane-building school starts when kindergarten starts but children only graduate once they (or a team) have built an actual working plane: remote-controlled or flown by a human; single-seater or larger – or smaller; gas-powered or electric-powered or otherwise. Airplane-building school is part of a larger engineering academy, a sister curriculum to bridge-building, boat-building, etc. In the early years children cross-train but beginning around age 13, they specialize.

In airplane-building school, the children learn physics first. They learn by building themselves – by running their own construction experiments and seeing what happens. These are not free-form or gently guided. They are specific experiments dictated by a teacher, just like in an ordinary elementary school. The experiments all trend toward airplane building but also include materials research, the effects of wind/water/heat/cold etc. on a design, and so on. The children are encouraged to tweak the experiments (once the original is completed) and to share their results. They often work outside... As experiments grow more complex the children learn math (they inhale it, really) and they learn how to write down their calculations. By age 8 11/12 – the age my son is now – the children have already learned multiplication, division, fractions, geometry and simple algebra. So he'll have some catching up to do.

All through this time, teachers & parent volunteers read to the students. They read everything. Some of the students learn to read & write on their own but for others it's only now, when their curiosity about reading/writing is intense and they can clearly see its need, that formal instruction begins. It goes more quickly than you'd think.

They build paper airplanes. They build models. They study birds and flying insects and birds that don't fly and mammals that do. They study the history of flight, the history of people's dreams of flying. They build gliders, rotorcraft, hang gliders, parachutes, rockets. Some of them try base-jumping. This is controversial.

For their final "exam" they set out to build an airplane for a specific purpose to their own specifications, and then they build it.

That's what I wish for my son.

My daughter will go to a school for artists and storytellers. (They also learn bookkeeping. Just in case.)

Blue glow

Item 1: iPad

Item 2: Tracks in new snow at Mt. Bachelor. The sled-tracks are ours.

Thumbs up

First I'd circle the math problems with ones (1+5, 1+6) in blue pen; when my son finished those, I'd circle the twos in green pen; then the threes in yellow; and so on. Chunking the problems like that kept a sheet of 50 from overwhelming him, and the colors kept it interesting for both of us. After he finished we'd always admire the pattern the different color pens had made.

This year Blake doesn't have that kind of math homework. Sasha does. I offered to draw patterns on her worksheet, too. Ones in blue, twos in green, threes in yellow, fours in orange. Cool, she said. It's pretty!

Now, last year my daughter learned to count on her fingers. 2+2 – two fingers, one two, plus two fingers, three four – 4! This year she has learned to put the bigger number "in her head" and only count the second number on her fingers. 4+5 – five plus four fingers, six seven eight nine – nine!

That day she did her math homework in patterns, when she got to 9+9 she suddenly cried, How will I ever add two big numbers? Even if I put the biggest number in my head, I won't have enough fingers to count out the second number! So I quick flipped her paper over and explained the concept of a ones column and a tens column, showing how she could add two big numbers by splitting the big numbers apart. She grinned this gigantic grin and said, It's like a puzzle! Using her new trick she added the biggest numbers she could think of – 100+25, 300+50 – thrilled beyond words that she could get such a gigantically huge answer all by herself.

So homework does have its perks!

Autumn cedes to winter

Snowfall today: fat, wet flakes coating pine boughs and then in a gust of wind floating away to coat instead the grass or dirt or the bright yellow leaves that had only days ago fallen themselves.

Winter.

I sat awhile on the hearth, hands blackened, watching the fire and contemplating the trails beetles carve in pine logs – as mysterious as petroglyphs carved in rock – a spark remaining from long ago.

Pot o' gold

The rainbow flows in front of that lower juniper.

Except for fish

Darn you, NaBloPoMo. I am so tempted to back-date a post. But I won't. I might post multiply on one day, though, to catch up.

When my children are grown and I'm achy(er) and old(er), I would like to be an Umpqa Fish Watcher, just like the man interviewed by Oregon Field Guide. It would be a good life. I'd like to have my husband with me, though, instead of a dog.

What do you want to be when you grow up?

Spoken words

He looked like anybody, you know, like anybody else in the audience, just a guy; but he walked on stage and spoke this explosive poem into the mic. The audience sat stunned. Then he asked, laughing, What the hell was that about? and we loosened in our chairs. He talked awhile about the years he served in Iraq and what it was like to return as a Poet, capital P. He was funny and thought-provoking. He said he slept in the same bed as Dick Cheney. Not at the same time as Cheney, of course, but on the same box springs.

He said he wouldn't read his poem "The Hurt Locker" unless – he was joking – unless someone threw a shoe or something, so Anne Lamott threw a boot onto the stage and the audience – maybe 300 people packed tight into the Tower Theater, hot in their winter clothes, happy, full of anticipation, like the crowd waiting for a chair up Mt. Bachelor after a big snowfall – the audience exploded; and he said OK! I'll read it!; laughing; and he read his poem, which was not funny. We did not laugh. Silence.

"Open the hurt locker
and see what there is of knives
and teeth. Open the hurt locker and learn
how rough men come hunting for souls."



*


Brian Turner, "The Hurt Locker." He spoke last night during the (sold-out) Nature of Words lecture series.

Slung

My grape-stomping sister-in-law lives in a small house but in a big space, so she hosts parties outside. For a bash this summer her husband built a slip 'n slide — OF — DOOOOM — that rivalled the best Kahneeta has to offer, pretty much; I've never seen happier 6- to 8-year-olds; and he even enticed the adults, who laughed and screamed with the screamiest of the kids.

Last year at Hallowgiving (which I missed: thank you swine flu) my sister-in-law built a haunted grove full of witches and ghosts and zombies emerging from the dirt. This year she built a slingshot instead. A big one. A pumpkin-slinging shot. It rained all weekend but we went out anyway and hucked pumpkin after pumpkin and, after awhile, Leopard and a few of Leopard's friends.

Weeee-heeew! Leopard flew up – up – and caught the wind and hesitated, as if contemplating flying further, then fell down into the grass.

*

In the photo my son is lying prone only because he needed to use his entire body weight to launch anything. He did want to launch himself; but he couldn't figure out how to make that work.

Wordless Wednesday: Slingshot

You may speculate amongst yourselves. Post to follow.

NaBloPoMo inspires the darndest posts

I bounded down the stairs at 8:35 (having given myself exactly three minutes to dress and comb my hair) shouting, "You'd better have your shoes on so we can leave!"

"I have mine on!" my husband said, laughing.

"Well, but where are the kids?"

"Blake's reading and Sasha's playing Uno with her blanket."

"– ?"

"The blanket's winning," he added.

Pause.

"I think that's bloggable."

Trick or treating methodologies

My sister used to note which houses gave the best candy and hit them up, year after year. I, on the other hand, never remembered who gave what kind of candy. For me candy was peripheral to the Halloween experience; for me, the pleasure in trick-or-treating was walking about in the dark, in the cold, alone, late, hearing all the other kids in the neighborhood shouting and laughing like ghouls but no parents anywhere.

My son is more like my sister – except that he cares more about the quantity of candy than the quality. He remembered who gave the most candy last year, making sure to visit those houses again; and rather than savoring the night, he raced from house to house, knocking impatiently and then shouting,"Thank you!" over his shoulder as he leapt away. He also remembered that if you stay out late, after most of the other children have gone inside, exhausted homeowners will dump all their remaining candy in your bag.

My daughter likes candy but she got tired, or bored, after trick-or-treating for half an hour, so – just like last year – when her brother finally returned home she looked sadly at his loot, sighing ... and he promised to share what he had gathered.

Illustrative

I also spent some time trying to determine what my son's so mad at; and then, when I thought I had a hint of an answer, I presented his teacher some ideas for tweaking his spelling homework.

Last night I used Adobe Illustrator to place spelling words on a computer screen – scattered about like a roll of Yahtzee dice – and then he dragged-and-dropped the words into reverse alphabetical order. We created a pdf of the resulting file and emailed it to his teacher.

After I let him play with Illustrator for awhile, of course.

Looking at this list, I find it rather shocking that anyone learns to spell. Write? Wrap? Royalty? Yeah right.

m-a-c-h-i-n-e: Machine

When I was a teenager my dad went through management training which he then used on my sisters and my mom and me. It turns out management philosophies work really well with teenagers. I'm not being facetious; I'm serious. I remember all his dictates. "No flat surfaces!" he'd declare, eyeing the papers and backpacks drowning the kitchen counter. When I'd fight with one of my sisters and eventually, inevitably involve the innocent third sister, my dad would cry, "Bring in the third party!" (I hated that he exposed that one. Bringing in a third party is a great way to deflect blame.) And when my mom would yell at him, he'd stare at her for a second, then ask one of us kids, "What's she really saying?"

That last one made the biggest impression on me, perhaps because one of my sisters was always yelling at me and so I had ample opportunity to apply it. (LOL Juliane!) No, seriously, it's a useful conflict management strategy. Pausing to determine what a person is really saying keeps one from reacting defensively. It encourages dispassion. It probably drove my mom nuts.

Anyway, after I wrote that post about homework, my dad's voice echoed in my head. I began to wonder why homework makes me so angry. How can it possibly be true that my kids' homework is more painful than mine was? I remember the mind-numbing nature of fourth grade vocabulary homework quite clearly, thankyouverymuch. Also, I have to make my kids do lots of things they don't want to do, but nothing makes me gnash my teeth and wail like homework does.

So: what am I really mad about?

***

I've got two answers.

The first is the most obvious: given the structure of our evenings, the kids need to start their homework while I'm starting dinner. Enough said, eh?

But also, I've been turning homework into a larger issue. When my son fights me over spelling, for example, I think about how I communicate at work entirely by email, and I wonder how the hell he'll manage in a world like that. In other words, when he fights spelling, I see him Unemployed! in Greenland!

I need to trust both my kids more than that.

P.S. All y'all's comments on the last post were really, really helpful. My husband and I talked over everything you said, using it as a springboard to develop our own approach.

P.P.S. I'm embedding this just because I can. What a geek. (At least, I think I can. Entertonement offered it as a free clip.))