Posts (page 2)

Since May is just about here, I thought I'd send one out in April.  Here things are going fairly well.  No news on any library jobs.  Homeschooling continues to progress.  We're up to Pocahontas and Jamestown and I learned for the first time that Mary Queen of Scots and Bloody Mary are two completely different people, though related.  Bloody Mary was Elizabeth I's older half-sister.  Mary Queen of Scots was a cousin, the daughter of the King of Scotland whom Elizabeth I had killed when there was possible evidence she was after England's throne.  MQOS was the mother of James I, who succeed Elizabeth to the throne.

The weather up here made history last week  --   we got the latest snow in recorded history in the Seattle area at SEATAC on April 18th and 19th.  The benefits are that it extended the tulip season, we got to play in the snow and my procrastination in setting out our veggie garden this year was rewarded.   I planted it this weekend instead and now have to find a way to battle the slugs and save the strawberries and lettuce.  There was a cool blog that mentioned that slugs get a shock when they touch copper, so rings of pennies around plants will keep them at bay.  We certainly have enough old pennies to do the job.  If the rain holds off, I'll have the kids do it this afternoon.

One more garden-y type of thing.  Ever since I watched an ER episode about 14 years ago where Carol Hathaway helps a lady save her worms from freezing I have been really interested in worm composting.  We haven't really had a good set-up for it and I honestly haven't gotten around to it.  It has a bit of the feeling of having a pet and being responsible for another living creature, so while I thought it would be cool and loved the idea of turning waste into good soil quickly, I hadn't done it.  Fast forward to this house, where there really isn't a garbage disposal  - there is one, but its location doesn't work out, and there is a big yard with a little "compost bin."   I've been taking our food scraps and peelings and having the kids dump them in there.  Imagine my delight when I turned the pile today and found my own private colony of happy little worms, composting away!  They are doing a fabulous job, and I don't have to do a thing but keep adding food scraps.  The bin has open sides, so the finished compost spills out the bottom.  I did have to remove an opportunistic raspberry bush or two that had decided the compost pile was their home, but otherwise things are going well.

For the last several years I have been using a cool "free" program to do our federal taxes called taxact  --   fortunately we've lived in states that didn't require state income taxes to be filed, so the free federal forms worked out nicely and I tended to download it in January and had filed by February and got a refund in March.  With our move and rental of our old house and owning two houses the paperwork was a little more complicated this year so just completed everything now.  Hopefully I have postage and can mail it out today.  In Austin the local IRS office was local  --  here the mailing address is out of state. 

Homeschool this week is studying the 1500's and Reformation and Tulip Mania  --   a pretty interesting economic bubble situation where people were paying the equivalent of $40,000 for one tulip bulb, and two weeks later it was only worth $1.  I also watched the Disney film "So Dear to My Heart" with the kids this week.  It was even a bit historically relevant  --   had an animated Christopher Columbus, which we studied 3 weeks ago, and a Robert the Bruce, which we studied 6 weeks ago.  And an animated lamb, which was cute.   I'd never seen a picture of Burl Ives before.  I pictured him older.

In other news there is a very vague possibility that there might be a job opening in September that might work out for me.  Uncommital enough?   I had lunch with a friend that moved from Austin up here and works at a private school.  She introduced me around and I  met the principal and took a tour with the children, and I was introduced as the "librarian" from her old school and there was much interest on the part of the principal and asked me about my degree.  There is going to be an opening for a librarian at that school.  And if I wanted to send the kids there, it would be a 30% discount.  However, I relly don't think I want to send them there. For one thing, the math program is the same, but instead of working one year ahead, they are on grade level, so it would be a repeat for the two older kids.  The kids don't study ancient history at all, just social studies.  Possibly I could send the older two to Benjamin's school. 

In any case, while I could post a strong case of being experienced, my last paid employment wast 9 years ago and I don't have a teacher's certificate and I have no idea of the salary or the job requirements  -- and getting a teaching certificate in Washington State looks like a major pain.  If working full time barely covers private school tuition I'm really not sure it would be worth it, as I know they'll learn more homeschooling, and I'd definitely see them more if they aren't in school for 6 hours every day.

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The party went well.  We had a 50% "yes" rate on the RSVP's, making a total of 6 kids, including my 3. Not too bad a turnout for Easter weekend -- and everyone there really liked Benjamin.  I didn't want to deliberately exclude anyone, but wasn't quite in the mood to invite the entire Kindergarten class. Thanks to Oriental Trading Company we had some nice "bat" party favors, stuffed beanies, key chains and rubber bats.  We played a version of Blind Man's Bluff/Marco Polo  called Bat and Moth that used echolocation for a blind bat to find a sighted moth -- the rest of the kids got to be "trees."  I hid the rubber bats in the living room -- squeeed between pillow cushions, etc.  They were dark so they hid pretty well, unlike the eggs we hid on Sunday :)

We played with balloons, had cake with a bat freehanded by me, ice cream, fruit and pizza -- and since we were a smallish group we got the good stuff: Papa John's.  They opened presents and we watched "Stellaluna" --   much less a production than I've done in the past.  I've put on some pretty elaborate themed parties before involving paper mache and stations and treasure hunts, etc.  I liked the calmer feel this time, and the smaller number of kids, even without the "wow" factor.  But, since children barely remember parties after a year or so, much nicer to just relax.

And Stanley.  If you have ever come across the book "Flat Stanley" you will recognize him as a little boy who was smooshed flat by a blackboard, who was perfectly fine after, but flat as a sheet of paper who has several adventures.  Apparently it is a stock second-grader activity these days to send out a "Flat Stanley" doll to a penpal.  Jeannine has two, a friend from Texas, and a second-cousin we met at a family reunion who lives in Tenessee --   so within a few days we had not one, but two Flat Stanley visitors that we are to give a tour of the Seattle Area and send back a picture and a note, and the flat Stanley.  We haven't made it to the Space Needle yet, but we did stop for chowder at Ivar's Seafood Bar where both Stanleys "Kept Clam" ;)

Well, the mice are gone.  David needed to get something from the pool box, so we checked to see if the baby mice were still there.  They weren't.  Apparently mama mouse decided a box where the food was removed and her babies were knocked out of the nest wasn't that great of a home after all. 

Very glad there weren't five baby mouse corpses we were responsible for, at least.

Benjamin is having a "bat" party this Saturday.  Yes, just a bat party, not Batman or anything.  The kids got interested in them because of a book on CD I chose called "Silverwing"  by a man of the last name of Oppel.  We're on the sequel now called "Sunwing" -- and it is much darker.  In it there is a colony of Mexican free-tailed bats who live under a bridge.  I can only imagine they are refering to Austin, which hosts the largest colony of Mexican free-tailed bats in a specially constructed bridge for the purpose.  Now bats are being sent to bomb places in South America, and the northern bats who were attached to bombs that didn't explode are trying to make their way North, and the families of those bats who were sent to South America are making their way South.  I don't know quite how it will end, but the kids are hooked.

Oh, and my addiction.  I watched the latest Episode of Lost --   yes, I admit I watch, but it isn't really an addiction.  I wasn't quite ready for the dead character to have died, so I was theorizing a way for him to be alive and looking for a place to post it that didn't require registration to yet another community.  Someone at a site called yahooanswers.com happened to ask the question "Is Jin Dead"  so I found a great place to post my ideas.  I am a yahoo member already so could go ahead.  And lo and behold, I found a place where people were asking reference questions  and they really wanted to know the answer.  The vast majority are not worth responding to -- either they have a political or social agenda or were kids trying you to do their homework for them, but there were some genuine fun to research questions.  I loved working at the reference desk, and would answer people's questions for free, and I got a little involved in doing it.  They have a ratings system, like Amazon, and the asker choosing you best answer gains you points.  I got up to level 2, but had better stop or it will really drain away my time.  However, it is fun, and I'm learning.  Did you know a South African ratel  (aka honey badger) is able to suffer puff adder bites with no harm, and the Ratel is also a South African military vehicle.  Anyway, I'd better get off to bed. 

I've really meant to post here for the last couple weeks, so this will be a little longish I'm afraid, to make up for lost time.  First, I have discovered that my children all find the movie Pinocchio deeply disturbing. Rose wasn't feeling very well the other day and insisted on choosing her own this time, rather than letting me do it.  Pinocchio was duly selected and we started it, with giggles as Jimmeny was elected the "conscience"    --  now there is a word you don't find yourself writing every day.  All went swimmingly until the boy-puppet's first temptation by Honest John and his accomplice.  Jimmeny extricated said puppet from the problem, and a collective sigh of relief passed over the children  -- but when two minutes later, he got himself embroiled in another situation with the same two individuals when he should have known better, my eight year old had to leave the room and my four year old stood in front of the screen and sobbed.  My little boy, now six, was less troubled.  So we fast forwarded to the puppet show under the care of Stromboli.  Somehow the captivity and imprisonment of Pinocchio wasn't as much an issue.  It was only when, after his rescue by the blue fairy and being told that was his final chance to be good, when he fell in again with Honest John and decided to listen again to the bad advice that the sobs redoubled.  We fast-forwarded to the land of the little boys who get turned into donkeys and the crying continued, so I removed the film, briefly recounted the ending and we decided on something a little less stressful.  

For his school, my son is collecting "Box Tops for Education," and there is a classroom competition.  I had only before noticed them on cereal boxes, but no, on further research, one can find them on ziplock bags, cake mixes and even Tampax products.  Who knew?  Since we tend to by generic, I didn't find all that many in my pantry, but have lately been buying Kix and Cheerios exclusively, so we'll have a few by mid-April, when the drive is over.

We have somewhere in the range of two to seven pets!  One is "Baby," who lives in our refrigerator --  a sourdough starter.  And one is "Sluggy-Bug," a small black slug who lives in a peanut butter jar, outside.  My eldest daughter noted they aren't very exciting, and when I mentioned that we'd probably get a dog sometime  -- she said, "No, it's okay, Sluggy-Bug can climb trees with us --   a dog couldn't do that."  (They've made a little harness for the peanut butter jar and haul him up with them into the trees)  We also discovered a nest of b5 aby mice in our pool/garden box outside.  I'd left a bag of birdseed there, and the other day saw a mouse, so David  kindly offered to move the bag out and set a trap.  However, moving the bag revealed 5 baby, hairless, newborn mice -- so we didn't quite have the heart to set the traps for the mom.  Internet research proved that caring for baby mice was quite labor intensive, besides feedings, they need help on an hourly basis to "go potty."  Since all of our children are well past that stage, we weren't eager to take it on.  So we now have some baby mice on the same basis as Pharoah's daughter had Moses --   we have them, but the real mom is doing all the work.  We also removed most of the food, just left the stuff that had spilled out, so not sure if the mom will hang out there, or if they'll survive.  However, I don't plan to investigate the situation closely.  When they're grown up in a month or so, we'll sweep up the rest of the  food and set traps so they don't plan on setting up house.

We received a game for Christmas this year called "Settlers of Catan," and broke it out to play the other night.  It has a hexagonal, variable game board that snaps together like a puzzle and can have four players or teams of players.  We played it with the older two kids while Rose did something else.  Reading children make life so much easier;  the number and quality of games you can play as a  family rises dramatically.  Anyway, the game is vaguely like a mix of risk and monopoly.  Instead of money, you collect resources, wool, grain, ore, bricks, or wood, on each turn.  Each turn you can turn your resources into roads, settlements, or cities,  or a "development card" thereby increasing your chances of getting even more resources next turn.  Settlements and Cities, and some of the development cards are worth "Victory Points" --  and when a player reaches 10 of these, the game is over.  Each area of the board: pasture, woods, mines, clayfields, farms; yields a resource and has a number on it.  If you have a settlement bordering that resource, whenever anyone rolls that number, you get a resource card.  There is also a thief, so when anyone rolls a seven, they can steal a resource card from another player.  Also, when the thief is deployed, anyone who has more than 7 resource cards has to turn half of them back to the bank  --  which encourages you to build, rather than hoard resources.  Player to player trading is encouraged as well.  We've played twice as a family and it is quite addictive. 

We went skiing last weekend, and it definitely went better than last time.  We took the older two kids.  Benjamin went to full day ski school.  Well... not quite full day, as there was a car accident on the pass on the way there.  It wasn't a fatality, thank goodness,  though the rumors passed along  by the waiting line of cars thought it was.  It took a full 2 hours to be cleared away and for the road to be opened.  Several potential skiers turned their cars around and headed home.  Plus, there was almost no cell phone coverage.  Fortunately the ski school held our reservation and we got Benjamin to class around 10am.  Not having to wait for rentals meant the first run or two down went well.  Jeannine hasn't been skiing in a year, and she was a beginner on a very easy slope.  Washington's runs are a bit more challenging.  After much trial and error, and lunch and a few tears, David left to do the backside of the mountain and Jeannine and I were in line for the "Daisy" lift, the one major green slope.  We got into it at 2:45, and it was a bit crowded, so we got to the front at 2:55, leaving us 5 minutes to take the lift and get back down the slope to pick up Ben at 3 pm.  Oh, and Jeannine's runs down the mountain had been averaging 20 minutes to that point.  Nevertheless, after waiting 10 minutes in line, we decided to try it out.  And, at the top, I had an inspiration.  Jeannine's main problems were slowing down/ stopping/ and feeling out of control.  She had turning down pretty well, but didn't have the feel for where to initiate a turn.  So, I let her go first, and let her hold the end of one of my ski poles.  I suggested the fastest route down, and I provided the braking for both of us, and we made it down in a record 11 minutes. Benjamin wasn't feeling too keen on skiing after ski school, but we made him do one real run with David, and he liked it! So we stayed until 6.

I had trouble finding my keys this morning (I have one of those "find-it" locators, but managed to miss the one room when I was trying and was running out of time), so borrowed David's keys to take Benjamin to school, and decided to go vote on the way back.  There were several cars in the lot, and at all my previous voting experiences there are usually quite a few people signing in and voting.  I'm not sure if it was because this was a primary or not, or that people don't vote here, but *wow*  --  I was the only one there, except for the NINE poll workers there.  I felt like a specimen on a slide with all of them looking at me.  I elected to vote electronically, because that's what I'm used to and I didn't want to waste paper,  and I had a private electronic ballot tutor.  When I was signing inm  I checked some boxes, wrote out my name and decided on the electronic ballot, and the lady then said said "Can you read this to me?"  --   I had flashes of my US history classes when they had a reading test to exclude illiterate voters, but it was just a ten digit number  --  though I wonder what she would have said if I claimed I didn't know how to read it?

Our first house didn't have one, so I suppose any dishwasher would be better.  When you don't have a modern appliance that you've come to depend on:  microwave, disposal, dishwasher, icemaker, refrigerator, etc.  -- you have to get rather creative in doing the things you so easily accomplished when you could  merely lean on technology. Anyway, I do have a dishwasher that works.  No microwave, but I digress.  I wanted to talk about my dishwasher.  It is a marvel.  No, it isn't the latest thing, no quick washing cycle, no stainless steel front, it is not particularly quiet.  However, the marvel of this particular machine is that it was original to our house, which was built in 1979.  So, it has been successfully washing dishes for longer than I have, and it still works perfectly!   I've heard that modern dishwashers have a life expectancy of around 5 years.  What a waste  --   if you have to toss a huge appliance in the land-fill after five years, when a dishwasher built almost 20 years can still work perfectly, there is shoddy workmanship going on.  I am sure it was a luxury model when it came out --  it even has its original brochure, suggesting that you send a letter to the manufacturer of your plastic items to see if they are dishwasher safe before washing them.  Well, time to go load up  (the dishwasher, I mean)

Here it is the second month of the year and I haven't quite stopped blogging.  My birthday was last week, February 5th and it was also the evening of my daughter's spelling bee - -her very first.  We had been practicing the word lists for the last week, and though she is in second grade, we were focusing on the third grade one, which would be used to break ties, etc.  We got to the church where they were having it and saw the lists of kids.  There were about five First graders, four Third graders,  six Fourth graders. five Fifth graders --- and 10 Second graders, so the good thing is they got to do lots of rounds.  Jeannine was up at the microphone several times and got all her words right;   fourth, orange, etc.  All went well until they started in on the homophones.  We'd practiced asking for sentences, so when she got the word "writing," she asked for a sentence, but I guess her mind hadn't really processed out the two different options, so it came out as: "W, R, I, G" --   then stunned silence. She was one of two kids left on stage.  I was very proud that she didn't cry.  She remained calm and collected until two rounds later when a fourth grader made a mistake and she got a little teary and she said "I know that word!"   The sort of cool part was they allowed adults to participate at the end, so David and grandma both signed up and went a couple rounds.  I was pleased to know both the words they went out on, but won't reveal them here.  I think teaching spelling has made me a better speller.  Now I am definately going to have to run spell check before posting, just to make sure I didn't make a mistake.

As for skiing, David and I decided to go this past weekend while his mom is still available to watch the kids.  The weather was a little iffy --  two of the major ski areas were closed due to avalanche conditions and road closures.  David decided on chancing the third, we have snow chains and he made a reservation at a B&B in Bellingham, about an hour or so from Mt. Baker, which still was open.  The owner was pretty sure that Baker wouldn't open, but volunteered to wake us at 6:30 with a knock and have breakfast at 7:30 if skiing was on.  And he knocked at 6:30.   We bought skis at a ski swap this year --   got mine, skis and boots for under $40 for both, so enjoyed getting to use them -- and didn't have to wait or pay for rentals.  It took a little time to get used to the snow -- it was snowing the whole time, and we fortunately had goggles.  David's took a tumble off the skilift, so he got to spend the first 20 minutes recovering them.  I got used to my skis, and the easy run and was enjoying it.  The beginner runs are what I enjoy.  My boots were feeling a little tight and David wanted to try some other runs, blues, etc.  The visibility was getting less, my glasses and goggle combination was getting steamed up so my next set of runs weren't as fun.  David likes the *long* runs.  I like medium to small so I know the bottom will be there soon if the run isn't going well.  If you're on a long run and are not having fun, or your feet hurt, it is unpleasant to know you're nowhere near the bottom. 

We did get down and took a break for lunch.  Because it had been closes the day before the Salmon barbecue (part of a snowboarding event held on the mountain) had been moved to Sunday, so we got to enjoy it -- it was yummy, salmon roasted over a fire, mashed potatoes, gourmet cole slaw  (ever had it with apples and almonds?)  and a roll with butter and a fancy soda all for $7.  After, David was helping me get my boots rebuckled and noticed that there was an insert in the front to ajust the stiffness -- and it was set to "stiff."  Changing this to medium made the rest of the run better.  We did a run together and them split up so David could do some more long runs.  I went on my own to do a medium run, and start heading over to the main lodge, but ran into trouble as the markings showing the trails weren't very explicit and there had been a fresh layer of powder deposited since the last skiiers had passed.  Knowing I was to stay to the left, I followed one set of leftmost ski tracks, only to find myself off trail, in powder.  I could see "my" trail over to the right, so went down a little knoll, covered over in powder, which slowed my descent.  I got down the hill sure enough, but at the bottom I was in unpacked powder, 3 or 4 feet deep.  After a few steps I lost my balance in the white fluffy stuff, both skis still on, but couldn't really right myself, and I couldn't exactly tell how far I had to go to firm ground, so I removed one ski, so I could get up.  I got upright, laid out the unattached ski on top of the powder and tried to snap myself in, balancing my weight one footed on the other ski.  Unfortunately the powder made it impossible to have a firm enough base to get my ski clipped on, so I walked, most ungracefully with one ski on top, one ski boot up to the thigh in snow for about 10 more feet until I was back on the trail.  I cleaned off the ski of excess snow, and tried to clip in, but it wouldn't clip.  I stamped my boot, tried again, no luck.  I lifted the bindings, looked underneath -- took off the other ski to prove to myself that I did know how to get into my skis.  I switched the skis, tried taking on and off, contemplated and began walking up the hill to the lift, thinking I'd get a ride back down.  I had no idea how long the run was.   I started walking down.   I looked for sympathetic skiiers who might have some idea what was wrong with my ski, but only found snowboarders who had no idea how one skis.  I finally asked one what he would do if his equipment failed --  he said he'd go down, so I clipped on my one good ski, and put on the other one too on the right foot.  When I say "clipped" --  it is on, but if I were to have lifted my foot or wiggled, I'd lose the ski.  I started down the hill in the biggest snowplow ever executed and got to the bottom -- as the boarder had said, it wasn't too far.  Then the long slog to the lift where I was to meet David (after having completed a few runs on my own)   -- walking in these skis wouldn't work, so I carried them  A minute or two later, David met me, having completed the longer runs.  He was very nice and diagnosed my boot as the problem, where the hike in the powder had solidified a block of ice on the bottom of my boot that mere stamping could not dislodge.  Skis back on we took in several more runs before heading back to the parking lot  --   which we slid out of.  When you're on ice, downhill works better -- saw the snow turn to rain and then made it back home to pick up the kids.  We got back home at 8, but it felt like 10.