Special skoolz-out edition: chiggers and the "a" word

Chiggers don't mess with Blockhead the Train Pirate. He'll cut 'em! And Blue Lens-Distortion Ghost has his back.

You know what I'd forgotten about? Chiggers. But thanks to the hours I spent birdwatching and knitting last weekend on my mother-in-law's lovely deck in her heavily wooded backyard, it's coming back to me. Scratching my pocked legs calls up memories of childhood summers spent playing outdoors in the sticky heat and picking scabs. Childhood-summer nostalgia is overrated.

The bugs and the heat are why we don't do a "summer break" from free-range learning. That and the fact that I can't get my kids to stop learning anyway so what the hell. Rocketboy's back from Grandma's house and ready to get back into history -- we're at the building of the Berlin Wall. After we get up to the present, we'll take a little break and start over again with the Big Bang.

Hurricanehead is pretending to read lately. He knows some numbers but he's not identifying letters yet. Not that it prevents him from scrawling 'notes' for me on index cards, of course.

And me? I stumbled across The No Asshole Rule at the local library and am zipping through it. I was delighted to opt out of paid employment when motherhood drew nigh because I wasn't very good at dealing with assholes. I don't plan on working for other people again, but the day may come when I am working with other people and I want to be better-prepared. Plus I'd like to be a better asshole wrangler in general.

Apropos of nothing, here's an item from today's Austin American-Statesman:

A handful of Dripping Springs High School seniors will be called back into the principal's office for cheering and bouncing beach balls above their heads during their graduation ceremony Friday at the Shoreline Center in Austin.

[Principal Greg] Jung held on to diplomas for the entire 200-student graduating class for two days while district staff reviewed video of the ceremony in an effort to identify the pranksters. Jung said he expected to release diplomas for students not involved today or Friday.

It's worth reading the whole short piece for reporter Molly Bloom's dry, elegant roasting of Jung's decision. For those of you who do take a summer break from whatever it is you do, happy summer break. And for everyone, don't go into the woods without long pants tucked into your socks.

When the call came, I answered

I tried to answer a church today. Not only did I make an ass of myself and prove how gadget-illiterate I am, but I also lost an ongoing debate about ringtones. All that just by taking a call.

Hombre recently bought me a new cellphone. It places calls when I dial numbers and rings when someone calls me, which is all I wanted from an upgrade, but the new toy bristles with "extras" that confuse and irritate me. I don't want a low-resolution video camera and I won't web-surf on a tiny screen. I don't text. As I sneak up on the big 4-0, I can say with the fatuous certainty of age that phones are for talking.

My man, by comparison, is a gadgetphile and a music nut and likes to think about ringtones. He's still pondering the millions of possible tunes he can download to alert him to callers and about how he might personalize ringtones for everyone who calls him. This is a rabbit hole I'm not going down. Cellphones are supposed to make you more efficient. Fussing over ringtones is not efficient.

My generic, factory-preset ringtone doesn't bother me, dork factor be damned, although it's so new that I'm still not exactly sure what it sounds like. For this reason, whenever I hear a generic phone-ringing sound, I check my handset. Like today, sitting outside a coffee shop in Temple.

It was not, as I feared, Rocketboy begging me to drive two hours back to pick him up from Grandma's. It was a church down the street busting a hymn on its carillon. Hombre was much amused. Hurricanehead joined in the fun by yelling "poop."

I couldn't identify the hymn, either, which is too bad, because it would make a good ringtone.

Mapping everything and the carbon sink

Tim Walker at What I've Learned So Far sent me this, and I'm eager to get started on this project with the kids: Make a carbon-sink map of your neighborhood, schoolyard, or private property. The idea comes from TreeHugger:

[W]hat if the 4th grade class in your town set out to map every tree and bush on the schools property, and did it by creating an artistic map talking about how these act as carbon sinks that can help slow climate change and hung it in the local library? [...] The best part about this idea is that it really doesn’t have to be done in any huge, organized way. In fact, the idea is really that you make it an activity that people value and that children can do as an educational thing. Then let it happen in the little pockets where it might happen.

My idea is that we map our half-acre, then try to work out a rough estimate of the carbon absorption of the plants and trees on our land. We can compare that to our home's greenhouse-gas emissions, and see if our little plot is carbon-neutral or not. As time and interest allow, we could expand the map to include area creeks, parks and wild areas. In the process, we'd learn about local plant and animal species, water quality if we cared to take and test creek samples, construction impacts, who knows what else. There I go sounding all unschoolery again.

Building a better flashlight

Sunday's NYT has a story on a Texan who designed a durable solar flashlight and is trying to distribute it widely in the developing world. I had never thought of lighting as a humanitarian issue. When I think of programs for poor countries, I think of agriculture, water, health care and education, but affordable, environmentally sound lighting supports all of those goals. As the BoGo web site points out, forests are cleared for fuel wood for fires, water gets contaminated by tossed-out alkaline batteries from regular flashlights, fires are dangerous and polluting, and students can extend their reading and homework time past sunset with proper lighting. That's a lot of benefit from a small gadget.

Stamped out

I missed the start of the Food Stamp Challenge, a week in which everyone's encouraged to try living on a food-stamp allotment's worth of groceries. That comes to about a dollar a meal per person, and that dollar is buying less food than it did just a few months ago.

If you're not doing the challenge, you can read stories from participants here. And you can read about the real deal, someone for whom every week is Food Stamp Challenge week. Kactus at Superbabymama, one of my favorite writers on the net, is blogging her food stamp chronicles for the entire month of May. If you've ever wondered about the glamorous spending habits of the apocryphal "welfare queen," Kactus will set you straight: week one (with follow-ups and the long-awaited meat deal), week two and week three are already up. Buen provecho.

Zap! A lightning storm update

Those of you whose comments went up today -- and those of us who enjoyed reading them -- owe a tiny debt to Hombre, who graciously approved them from his secure, undisclosed location after our home computers were stunned by a nasty wee-hours electrical storm*. After an hourlong visit this evening by Mr. Broadband-Fixer that featured angry wasps and lots of testing, we know what's not wrong with our system, but we don't know what is wrong.

It's a start.

I'm surprised that a little computer twitchage is all we suffered after the show we got around 1:00 this morning. The thunder and lightning sounded like they were directly overhead. Rocketboy, who sleeps through everything, came cowering into my bed. Even with my eyes closed, I could see the light from strikes that felt uncomfortably close -- ear-jarring, hair-standing-on-end close.

I was afraid lightning would hit the oak tree that overhangs the house or fry our rooftop solar panels, but it was a house down the block that had its roof blasted away. I don't know if anyone was hurt, but I didn't see any news about it when I finally got online and I'm taking that as a hopeful sign.

Naturally, posting and comment-approving will be light and spotty** until we get to the charred bottom of the desktop-connectivity issue and the mystery of the busted router, but I'll do my best.

What's the scariest storm you've found yourself in?



*Yes, we have some kind of super-duper surge dealy. I don't know what to tell you.

**I know you thought of Aunt Flo when you read "light and spotty." Admit it.

Snap! A victory garden update

Want a few minutes to yourself? Send the kids out to pick peas.

The snap and snow pea plants I helped Hurricanehead plant are bearing like crazy. I credit all the rain we've had, the fact that said peas are stupid easy to grow and bunny poop. I sometimes use soiled bedding hay as mulch over new garden beds but most often I toss it into one of the compost piles where its nitrogenous goodness breaks things down p.d.q.

The producers: tuckered out from converting fresh produce to fertilizer.

Did I mention that our rabbits recycle things like Bermuda grass, dandelions and blown rose blossoms into this fabulous fertilizer? And unlike most fertilizers, the bunnies are happy to perch in my lap for an ear-scritching.

Bunny food

We're starting to get purple bush beans, and the black bean plants have little pods. Green tomatoes are popping out, too. And the corn is as high as a toddler's eye.

Tepary beans up on blocks

What are you growing? Surely even those of you up north have something started now.

Bottled

Psst! Wanna see how many plastic bottles Americans go through every hour of the day? Take a look.

I'm going to hug my reusable sports bottles and tell them I love them.

I get to tell someone what to think?

I'm so excited -- my guest post is up at The Lovely Mrs. Davis Tells You What to Think. For my readers who wonder how the great TV-yanking experiment went, the sorry denouement is there.

If you're not familiar with Amy Davis and her blogging on kids' music, television and media issues, now's the time to remedy that. She also blogs at Neal Pollack's new Offsprung along with Amanda Marcotte from Pandagon and a slew of other talented and insightful writers. Enjoy!

My minivan is so old-school

As cars go, this one is pretty interesting -- a hydrogen fuel-cell coupe with a solar-powered electrolyzer. Granted, it's an electrolyzer the size of a garage, but give 'em time.

You gonna read that?

Chicken Spaghetti, children's lit maven, wants to know what I'm reading.

I just finished Mark Hurst's Bit Literacy and am now eager to plumb the mysteries of the Dvorak keyboard, the better to save my tender wrists for knitting. I'm planning to next take up something from the fiction suggestions my readers shared recently and today I read these books with my kids:

The New Way Things Work by David Macaulay. Rocketboy got this book as a gift when he was two, and I read him the part about elevators so many times that I could recite it from memory. Now we're into the digital section of the book, with me reading and Rocketboy drawing his own diagrams to illustrate the concepts of binary code and bits.

Here Comes Tricky Rabbit retold and illustrated by Gretchen Will Mayo. This anthology of Native American trickster stories has been among Hurricanehead's favorites for months now. I think his overall favorite selection is "Me, Too!" in which Rabbit tries to best Otter at duck-hunting and ends up airborne and then at the mercy of a gullible woodpecker.

The Story of the World Volume 4: The Modern Age: From Victoria's Empire to the End of the USSR. SOTW is our main history text for now, and Rocketboy gets really into the narrative and the personalities. He told me today that if Joseph Stalin were still alive he should be "spanked with a flyswatter or a whip" for his crimes against the Russian people.

And our bedtime-story picture book selection for the evening was Flight of the Dodo by Peter Brown. When's the last time you read a kid's story with a cassowary as one of the characters? Plus, there's poop, a visionary penguin, a dangerous hot-air balloon flight and a happy ending.

I must read at least one of the books on CS's list: Food Not Lawns.

What are you reading?

Link farm with techno-veggies

The good: EarthPortal, a new site that's everything climate- and environment-related. I could browse its Encyclopedia of Earth all day. Environmental impact of the Civil War, anyone?

The so-bad-it's-good: The It's Alive math workbooks. I saw a friend's copy of It's Alive and Kicking last night at our homeschool group's curriculum "petting zoo," and I knew I must have these books for Rocketboy and Hurricanehead. Sample problem:

"Mucus moves through our body at the speed of 5mm per minute. If you were riding in a tiny, mucus-powered bus through your body, how long would it take you to go one meter?"

And the veggies: Ladies and gentlemen, the Vienna Vegetable Orchestra. If you don't have time for the whole thing, at least watch them make the instruments and check out the dance music starting at 4:20.

You gonna eat that?

It was unnerving enough when all that pet food was recalled, to say nothing of the news that melamine had found its way into human food. The latest round of news with respect to contaminated food from China has given me a last little push into vegetarianism -- farm-raised fish have also been fed this junk, and another pet-food recall may be on the way. David Goldstein lays it all out in a long piece at Huffington Post:

What we know:

• Tainted pet food has killed or sickened tens of thousands of cats and dogs, some dropping dead within a meal or two of first ingesting melamine and related compounds such as cyanuric acid.


• Autopsies have discovered "plasticized" cat kidneys, clogged with crystals comprised of equal parts melamine and cyanuric acid.


• Laboratory tests have have reproduced the formation of these crystals in a test tube by mixing melamine and cyanuric acid in the presence of urine.


• Tainted pet food containing melamine and cyanuric acid was "salvaged," and sold as livestock feed, contaminating untold millions of hogs and chickens.


• About three million chickens and several hundred hogs are known to have been slaughtered, butchered and presumably eaten. At least another 20 million chickens are known to have consumed contaminated feed.

What we believe:

• Tainted meat poses little risk to human health.

Wasn't the safety of the nation's food supply one of those crazy homeland-security projects that got talked about after 9/11? And if this contaminated wheat had come from, oh, Saudi Arabia (I know they don't grow wheat -- play along) instead of China, would the government be responding any differently? What's the difference between terrorism and corruption, anyway?

More at C&L, Horses Ass, and Pet Connection.

Lunchtime with biofuels

Conservation International hosts a live chat on biofuels today at 1 Eastern time. I won't be anywhere near a computer but I'm interested in seeing the transcript afterward. While it's been touted as a great solution to our power problems, biofuel production poses its own set of risks:

According to CI experts, the practice of clearing land to grow crops for biofuels poses a looming threat to the world’s biologically rich forests, peatlands, grasslands, and wetlands. Burning and clearing intact ecosystems to make way for sugar cane and other crops that can be converted into fuel could destroy the very habitats that store nearly a quarter of the world’s carbon – a natural means of tempering climate change.

In other words, the solution could be more destructive than the problem.

Tim Killeen of CI will lead the discussion and take questions. You can post a question in advance here. There's a ton of interesting questions already posted for Tim here.

I pledge allegiance to empty words

You know you've got a good man when he emails you things you want to blog about.

Check this: The Texas House has passed HB 1034, which modifies the Texas Pledge to include the all-important words "under God."

How big a deal is this? I was born and raised in Texas, like my father and his father before him. My dad taught Texas history for 26 years. And I had no idea Texas has a pledge. If Hombre hadn't emailed me the link from Capitol Annex, I still wouldn't know. He didn't know either; you'd think he would've heard it before one of his high-school football games, but no.

I'm surprised that the bill's author, Republican Debbie Riddle, doesn't have more pressing matters to work on. She sits on the Operation and Management Committee for the Texas Youth Commission; TYC has been mired in a disgraceful inmate sexual abuse scandal for weeks now, indicative of years of institutional rot and corruption. On the other hand the House just slapped a bandaid on TYC, postponing the heavy lifting of reform until 2009. Time to cut loose and get religion, I guess.

I would also assume other House members -- who voted in lemming-like droves to approve this world-changing legislation -- would have more important work, too. A bill that would protect the rights of nursing mothers and babies is stuck in committee. Our public-school and health-insurance trainwrecks have long been rusting by the tracks. Foster children are camping out in state offices because there's nowhere else to put them. But now we'll have a popular deity in a pledge most Texans have never heard of so everything's gonna be all right.

Fun note: Riddle says she wanted the state pledge to be more in line with the phrasing of the national pledge. A fellow lawmaker asked why she hadn't also then appropriated the "liberty and justice for all" part of the Pledge of Allegiance. Her response? She didn't even think of it.

I think that says it all.

Update: Commenter Gaia points out below that Texas public-school students -- like her own kids -- do in fact have to recite the state pledge each morning. So it's not just a waste of time, it's also another attempt to push a particular religion on children. Nice.

Your chance to tell me where to go

All right then, if we're not going to get into a discussion about women's issues, perhaps we can talk about this. In about two months, I'm going on vacation. By myself. It's a miracle made possible by Hombre's surfeit of use-'em-or-lose-'em vacation days and my recent realization that I haven't been out of the house on my own for more than a few hours at a time in more than eight years.

How the hell did that happen?

Well, you know. You get pregnant, swell up like a seasick walrus, and the next thing you know you've got a kid who doesn't sleep through the night until he's three and a half years old, effectively precluding your ability to think straight and plan a getaway. Follow that up with a string of failed gestational efforts, a major loss, and a long-awaited bonus progeny. Finally poke your head up one day to realize that you need a vacation -- and a fun-filled family road trip is not going to do the trick.

Thing is, the options are so broad that I have no idea where to go. Should I stay close to home and vacation in the Texas summer heat? Should I leave the country? Perhaps I could impose upon some friends? Are there any places I should avoid? So please, if you have any recommendations for a wayward mom taking a mid-summer four-day vacation, kindly lay them on me in the comments.

Remember Mother's Day, Sunday May 13!

Do you get a warm fuzzy feeling knowing that millions of people around the world take one day of the year to honor mothers for the hard work of bearing and raising humanity? I do, because it helps distract me from the fact that women and their children are still worthless crap in the eyes of a lot of men.

Because I get my news from the patriarchy-blamer supreme, you don't have to take my word for it. Watch, if you can bring yourself to do so, this video from Iraq at her blog* and tell me how it can be that a group of men can kidnap some mother's teenage daughter, strip her half-naked, stone her to death in the street, and onlookers not only don't intervene but whip out their camera phones to record the show. After all, it's not a murder, it's an 'honor killing'. It's not about the girl and her life or the mother who birthed and raised her. It's about those men and their precious 'honor.'

This murder happened last month in Iraq, a country to which we've putatively exported democracy, even though women's rights were shafted by the new and improved constitution there -- a situation about which neocon talking head Reuel Marc Gerecht had this to say nearly two years ago:

I mean, women's social rights are not critical to the evolution of democracy. We hope they're there. I think they will be there. But I think we need to put this into perspective.

Well then, a little perspective. Honor killings were part of the culture in Iraq and elsewhere in the Middle East long before we showed up, true. You might expect that after years of war, thousands of lives, and billions of dollars, we'd have more to show for our little democracy-export business than the same old same old. But hey, Time says that Kurdistan, the part of Iraq where this where this girl was killed in the street, is the part of Iraq that "works." I saw no mention of honor killings or women's rights in the article cited, although the author did have difficulties of his own in Kurdistan:

Upon arrival, my biggest problem was the $50 fare charged for a 10-minute cab ride by the drivers of Hello Taxi, and finding a reservation at one of the city's packed hotels.

See? 'Perspective' makes women and their problems disappear. It would be easy to say, especially if the US hadn't made such a big deal about liberating Iraq from tyranny, that this sexist violence is Iraq's problem, that it runs deep in the culture, and that we're not like that.

Here's my perspective. It's a matter of degree. Maybe we here at home don't stone girls in the street, but give the Christian Reconstructionists some time. In the meantime, we deny girls accurate information about sex and contraception, we underfund domestic-violence shelters, we restrict access to abortion, we let children go without health care, we underpay women (when we pay them at all) and we threaten, harm and denigrate women like pros. The underlying message is the same: women and their children are still, to a lot of men, worthless crap.

So go ahead, have a happy Mother's Day. If you're lucky enough to get something special on Sunday, take it. Just remember that while you enjoy your once-a-year carrot, a lot of women are beaten daily with the stick.



*I worked in broadcast news eons ago, before I became disgusted with, among other things, the nonstop presentation of violence and suffering as infotainment. I've seen some horrifying video, but this is the worst. I think it's important for people -- especially those who think feminists are full of it -- to see that these crimes and the hatred behind them are real, but I just can't put the video on my site. I salute Twisty for being steelier than I am.

Getting the bird

The budgie hen with which Rocketboy plans to build an empire

Yes, posting's been light of late. I'm still recovering from Hombre's recent business trip to New York, during which he was (among other things) led blindfolded through Central Park on a rope while I stayed home doing the same-old with two very wired kids. And as you can see we've added another creature to our zoolet, a budgerigar named Peach, who is Rocketboy's new pet. He plans to get a male budgie and a nest box soon and start hand-raising budgie babies in my living room. I, the jury, am still out on that one.

Meanwhile, Hurricanehead is addicted to this website full of bird images and songs.

To round out tonight's theme of getting the bird, there's this, which is supposed to be all over cable. I don't have cable; thanks to TGW for clueing me in: