Good manners

I was lost in thought on my afternoon walk, rockin' out to Frank Black and admiring the view of a large drainage ditch, when I heard conspicuous throat-clearing behind me.

"I didn't want to scare you," said the petite older woman as she jogged past me, which made a kind of neighborly sense, until I realized she was running down the street carrying an ax handle.

Nobody here but us chickens

While I scoured the bathroom this morning after Hurricanehead's all-night virus extravaganza, Wanda peeked in to supervise. Despite the shorter days and cooler temperatures--coolness being relative, of course--she and Neutron are still cranking out eggs like it's summertime. I don't know how they make time to keep an eye on me.

Hurricanehead seems to be on the mend this evening. It's tough for me to get a good read on him when he's sick because he gets quiet, unlike the rest of us who seize the occasion of minor illness to practice weeping, gnashing our teeth and making absurd requests. Whatever he's got, it's definitely not a Man Cold or Crouton Shard Lung.

Wean’d!

After four months of silence--because I didn’t want to jinx it--I can now confirm what I’ve only mentioned in passing: I am a chronic lactator no more. After a total of 6.5 years of nursing two children, the Girls retired at the end of July when I took my solo vacation. I present this episode of TMI because after all the weaning worries I had, it’s nothing like I’d expected.

Hurricanehead is my final hurrah. I had decided when I got the test result that my sixth pregnancy would be my last, whether or not it resulted in child number two. I loved nursing Hurricanehead--it was genuine bliss after wondering for so long if I would ever have another baby--but I knew that when he weaned it would end the last intensely physical stage of mothering, the final reproductive milestone before menopause, another roadblock cleared between me and the grave. Brrrrrr.

I also feared the physical fallout. My reading led me to believe that my retired bosom would deflate like a pair of week-old helium balloons, signaling my advancing decrepitude. And I’d read cautionary tales of weanings gone bad--mothers getting depressed, children regressing, breast infections and regret. Mostly, it seemed, the regret was for not nursing longer. But after three years, Hurricanehead’s infrequent nursing sessions were habit rather than need. He was well past breastfeeding for sustenance, and the day he started blowing raspberries while nursing was the day I decided that his emotional needs were secondary to my personal dignity. I went on vacation alone, wondering how it would feel to be untethered at last and whether I would have a hormonal crisis out in the woods.

Give me the Bad Mother Award, but I missed him exactly once during that long weekend. My biggest crisis was trying to do the math for massage-therapist tips. I didn’t weep, get engorged, or go running home. Before you feel sorry for Hurricanehead, you should know that he asked about me one time (because his great-aunt asked him when I would be home). My instinct had been right. He was ready and I was ready. We were moving on to the next stage in our lives.

What about the physical and hormonal aftermath? I’ve been waiting four months for my chest to shrivel. When it eventually does, I won’t be able to blame weaning. As for hormones, I had vaguely expected some drab, older-person sensation. What actually happened surprised me.

It caught Hombre off guard, too. In church one Sunday as the service ended, he glanced at his watch and remarked that we had half an hour before we had to pick up the kids from their classes.

“What do you want to do with all this free time?” he asked.

I had an idea.

“No,” he said firmly.

“Come on,” I whined.

“The car will be way too hot out there in the parking lot.”

I sulked and wondered whether I could guilt him into it before our half-hour was up. That was my payback for thinking I would become ancient and sexless after weaning: I felt ten years younger, but I had the mindset of a teenage boy.

After the shock wore off, we adjusted to the new normal. Life after nursing, against my every expectation, rocks. Considering the difficulty I had getting that second child, I can’t quite believe how well the last intensely physical stage of motherhood has ended. I’m sleeping better. I feel great. Hurricanehead and I are as close now as we were toward the end of his nursing stage, only without the indignity of boob-raspberries. We’ve suffered no withering, no depression, no regression, no illness, no regrets.

Maybe one regret. I wish I hadn’t been so anxious about weaning and so convinced that it would mark an abrupt transition from young to old for me. I’ve learned that just as Hurricanehead grows seamlessly and fearlessly from one stage of life to the next, so do I. And I’ve learned to make sure I park in the shade.

Me, wisdom? Come on.

I'm choking on a deadline and throwing myself on your mercy. A Dear Friend has a daughter, Miss M, who will soon turn ten, and DF is making a surprise scrapbook of women's wisdom from the other gals in Miss M's life, including me. I told DF that my only guiding principles are "keep your overhead low" and "never show your underwear on accident," but she thought I was joking.

DF wants to know what words of wisdom I wish I'd had when I was ten. That would have been "Ease up; none of this crap will matter once you get your first job," but I was stuck in school. Miss M is a life-long free-range learner who's already writing plays, stories and reviews. The usual tropes about school, cliques and "the real world" aren't relevant to her life. I'm stuck.

Any suggestions for a smart, independent, creative kid who's about to be ten years old? What do you wish someone had told you?

Cut me some slack, eh?

I knew there was something I meant to do yesterday besides eat leftovers. I meant to post. I let you down, NaBloPoMo, but I swear I'll make it up to you.

I also have a confession to make. I bought stuff on Buy Nothing Day: a flu shot for myself and a tow for Hombre's car, which has developed a copious fuel leak. I learned this while I was driving it. There's nothing like realizing you're strapped into a potential fireball to sharpen the senses and clear your to-do list.

My to-do list today is simple: find a place near UT to grab lunch and a slice of birthday cake with the fam. That keeps us from having a whole cake around to OD on, and there's no way my smartass kids can fit 38 candles on a single slice of cake.

Do you buy Buy Nothing Day?

Chill, people.

(art from The Toymaker, my favorite site
for paper toys and cards by Marilyn Scott Waters)

Happy Thanksgiving. I have mixed feelings about this holiday but then I have mixed feelings about most things, including tomorrow's annual Buy Nothing Day.*

I'm all for calming down and buying less during the holidays. I also find absurd one day's tableau of gratitude followed by a Pavlovian, acquisitive rush the next. Which is it? Are we thankful and content or not? My cognitive dissonance aside, the timing and the target audience seem slightly off for Buy Nothing Day. Hermits like me stay home no matter what, while folks jonesing for bargains aren't going to call off the hunt just because Adbusters says so.

To effect real change we need to alter the story we tell ourselves about the winter holidays. Those of us with enough stuff could just gratefully accept that fact even after the official day of thanks is past. Then we could reframe Christmastime to focus on gift-giving to people who actually need something--obstetrical care, maybe, or a safe place to spend the night.

Do you keep it simple or let it rip at the holidays? What's it about for you and your family?



*That's here in the States. Everywhere else, Buy Nothing Day is Saturday.

Cabin fever prevention program

Famous last words

It was 81°F today inside the house. By morning it should be about 42° outdoors. Then the three-day rain begins. I'm gathering a few things to ward off cabin fever over the long weekend, and I think the most popular will be the project comix from Howtoons for the kids. There are plans for marshmallow shooters, a CD hovercraft, and a little gadget that imitates the sound of hippopotamus flatulence. Maybe--since I have to be around all weekend, too--I'll keep that last one to myself.

Thanks, Tim!

Why has no one filled this market niche?

And why am I lately seeing niches everywhere that need filling? Here's my latest inspiration, to complement The Snotty Nipple pub and the STFU dining experience: a 24-hour, drive-thru chocolatier. Not crap convenience-store chocolate, either. Handmade truffles and bricks of El Rey, the stuff to sate that nagging need in your soul.

Think about it. You're out running errands and realize you need chocolate, stat. Why should you have to get out of the car, especially as your lower back is killing you? Or it's eleven at night and you're craving chocolate but you're in your pajamas and just dosed up on Vicodin. What if you could send your honey to the all-night chocolate drive-thru for a little pick-me-up? Imagine the contentedness such a place would spread across the land.

I'm calling it Flo's. If you have to ask why, you're probably outside my target demographic.

Rice addiction

You may have already seen this, and if not it's only a matter of time. Like now. Free Rice gets sponsor donations worth ten grains of rice for the UN World Food Program for every vocabulary word you get right on the site's quiz.

Rocketboy and I have spent about an hour there already today. The beauty of the quiz is that it's tailored to your skill level based on your answers. Rocketboy gets words he has a shot at; I get terms I haven't thought about since college biology, and we get to watch the rice pile up in the bowl as we play. For a word nerd, it's like crack for a good cause.

An apology from the district

You may recall my homeschooling friend Carol's tale of woe after a school-district employee came to her door and demanded to see her curriculum on the spot, contrary to what Texas law allows. Well, Carol had a talk with a district truancy honcho this past week. An anonymous someone had reported her kids as possibly truant, and the district was required to send someone out. So far, no foul.

But that employee's job was to see whether the kids were genuinely truant, not to inspect Carol's curriculum. Carol got an apology for that. She also got a promise that the employee who came to her door will get a copy of the Leeper decision and a refresher on district policy. Carol had this to report after her conversation:

"The RRISD person who investigates is supposed to identify herself and explain the nature of the visit. If the family does, in fact, homeschool, she is supposed to ask if the family has an affidavit on file with the district. If there is no affidavit, she is supposed to ask what curriculum is being used[...] to determine if the family is truly homeschooling. At no time is the family required to submit curriculum for inspection. If the family makes their own curriculum, they do not have to produce it for inspection.*"

There you go. It turns out that the district doesn't actually want to antagonize local homeschoolers. They just want to do their job and let us do ours. Let's hope everyone's clear on that now.

*If you're homeschooling in Texas, please don't think this means you need to rush out and file an affidavit with the local school district just in case. All you have to do in case of an inquiry like Carol's is ask the visitor to put the request in writing and then send in a letter of assurance in a timely fashion.

Plastic octopus intervention

"I coulda killed somebody!"

I took the family on a special field trip today to the ditch behind the fence. We went to find stones for flower-bed edging. Before you accuse me of rock-rustling, understand that this swale is continually filling with debris and having to be dredged for flood control. I felt no compunction about removing a couple of wagonloads of small stones and broken concrete, especially since we also picked up plastic.

For a little area there was a lot of crud: juice and soda bottles, shredded landscape cloth and assorted plastic toys including the afflicted cephalopod above. He obviously understands how close he came, during the next storm, to washing downhill into the big creek and on to the Gulf of Mexico, where he might have become some unfortunate sea creature's last meal.

It's raining a little right now, but Octie has a new home indoors with Hurricanehead, who thinks he's a swell toy. Hurricanehead also found a small plastic boat that Octie rides in. I should tell the grandparents to forget the mall this Christmas and go inspect their local drainage ditches for gifts.

Creative commuting

This is my favorite story of the week -- a local couple saves several hundred miles of driving each week by crossing Lake Travis in their rowboat:

Marlowe leaves her 13-year-old Volvo station wagon parked on the north shore of the lake across from her home. Then, after the boat ride, she just hikes up the hill to her car. And from there it's only about a 20-mile drive to the school. She carries a bag of deer corn to toss to the deer, to keep the rutting bucks from messing with her.

Have I mentioned that there will be a commuter rail station near our house in about a year? That's the plan, anyway, and it may allow us to sell one of our cars. Too bad there's no lake between the station and our house.

Pre-binge purge

Yonder comes the Lone Mantis of the Christmapocalypse!

Gourd* help me, it's that time of year. Christmas looms like a pile of toys poised to collapse and scatter all over the inside of my home. For the record, I'm not the one who creates this pile. I've learned what it's like to live with the consequences.** But for generous gift-givers who don't have to do the Lego Hobble to the bathroom at 4 a.m., Christmas is about stuff.

Every year at this time, when I "should" be planning a bounteous feast and making my Christmas shopping list, I go through the house with the boys playing "Like It or Spike It." My guys almost never part with books. Everything else is negotiable. Broken, outgrown or just plain dull toys--along with ratty blankets, outgrown socks, the odd piece of furniture and stained clothing--get lugged downstairs to my craft room, the anti-Santa's workshop.

There, it takes me about an hour to process a room's worth of crap, because I tend to be overly conscientious. Clothes too worn for Salvation Army get scavenged for buttons and cut up for rags; toys get sorted into sets and divided into piles for church playroom, nephew and thrift store; everything that can be repurposed or passed along is. Then I have to get it all out of the house and into the van before anyone has second thoughts. (I find that once out of sight, the junk is firmly forgotten.)

That's how I prep for the holidays, purging old stuff to make room for new stuff. There's a rhythm that fits with the Yule season, I suppose. But we're marking the change of seasons with a turnover of material things rather than actually taking note of the natural world, and that seems sad and sterile to me. And please don't start me on the linkage of baby Jesus to the edict to Buy More Stuff. Or the environmental impact of all that stuff. Or the working conditions where it's made. Or the opportunity costs in a world where people starve to death by the hour. Because when I get going on that stuff I'm a bundle of holiday cheer.

In an effort to break the purge/binge cycle, I've encouraged the boys' gifters to focus on outdoor and art items this year, things that will be used outside or used up in creative endeavors. For the first time, Hombre and I are not getting the boys any toys at all for Christmas. They'll be getting books. Books are darned near forever, and they hardly ever break.



*god + lord = gourd. Thanks, Hombre.

** Six years ago I bought a Hefty bag full of Legos for 50 cents at a neighborhood thrift store. No bargain has ever cost me more subsequent effort.

Teen godmothers

Every teenager could use an Auntie like B:

You’re going to face a lot of messages otherwise–that you have to be prettier, thinner, more appealing to boys, less appealing to boys, more of a good girl, smarter, less aggressive, stupider, weak, strong–a lot of contradictory messages that boil down to the same thing, that you have to be very different than you are in order to be good enough to be here.

It’s hard not to believe that there must be some truth to that, but I’m begging you, please believe, right now, that you, just as you are, deserve to be here. And keep that in your heart so that when the hard stuff comes up and the people you love let you down, you’ll see that it’s no reflection on your worth as a person. It’s just some difficult stuff you’ve got to get through.

And a friend like Amy Jo:

It wasn't long before I became knows as 'the condom girl' at school. I lived in a small town, and kids would have to drive at least a half an hour to find a drug store or gas station where no one there knew them. No 16 year old wants to be buying rubbers from the lady who lives down the street from their grandmother's best friend. But when word got out that I had a seemingly limitless supply, well, I became pretty popular.

Who had your back when you were a teenager? What did you need that you hope you'll be able to provide for your own kids?

I could tell my mom pretty much anything, even though she sometimes had to be brought up to speed on the vocabulary. But what I wish I'd had was a better instinct for pursuing my own interests instead of passively focusing on the tasks set before me by other people. Coulda saved a lot of time having to unlearn that habit later. I want my kids to know they can make their own way. Judging by the outcry when I require them to do something they don't want to do, I'd say they've got the idea.

Craft my ride

What would you do with four miles of yarn, some marine-grade velcro and a classic car? Here's what Tim Klein did:

Yes, that's an old Imperial Crown. Yes, it really is covered in yarn. Yes, he drives it, and no, the yarn doesn't blow off at high speed. That's what the marine velcro is for.

Hurricanehead and I met Klein and got to touch this stringy machine at last month's Maker Faire. I don't know that I'd cover the outside of my van in yarn--we have serious grackle issues in Austin--but maybe I could liven up the dull, gray interior.

What would you cover with yarn if you could?

Hold your water

Texas hadn't seen rain like last summer's in decades. It brought most of the state out of drought conditions for the first time in several years. I had green grass all summer long with nary a turn of the sprinkler -- a fair trade for the rainy days struck indoors. Now it's fall and the rain is gone, but this is the time when things brown up and go dormant anyway.

Inexplicably, a lot of my neighbors are now watering their lawns. It's as if they can't believe they got the whole summer for free and need to undercut themselves somehow. It's also as if they don't know that fall usage is what their city water rates for next summer will be based on, so they're wasting money now and in the future. Also, have they ever seen native grasses in November? They're brown, not green, because they're sleeping. Shhhhh.

After growing up in a state that seems to spend more years in drought than out of it, it's odd to see Texas outside the severe-drought areas on this nifty map. You can find your current conditions and forecasts and then decide whether you want to water that grass or just let it rest awhile.

Near-instant knitting gratification

You know what's even better than finding a couple of leftover half-skeins of white and purple wool that would make a great baby hat? Being able to knit most of said stripey hat during a 90-minute drive, the better to take your mind off the ride.

What's even better than that? Being able to size the nearly completed hat on your tiny nephew upon arrival at your destination, then finishing the hat and plopping it on the little guy's not-quite-one-year-old noggin.

But know what's best? Watching Neph yank the hat off his head, cram it into his mouth and shriek with glee.

Recommended reading

The first issue of Deborah Markus' new magazine, Secular Homeschooling, is now in print. I've got a copy in my hot little hands, and it looks great. I'm quite amused, in a world-weary way, by "The Bitter Homeschooler's Wish List," the smart-ass answer key to the thoughtless things people sometimes say and ask about home education. It's hard to pick a favorite, but this one's mine for now:

If my kid's only six and you ask me with a straight face how I can possibly teach him what he'd learn in school, please understand that you're calling me an idiot. Don't act shocked if I decide to respond in kind.

Those of you teaching your own budding writers and artists might want to check out the pull-out Home Scholars section, featuring artwork, articles and poems by homeschooled kids--perhaps yours. There's also a nice how-to article on getting started with homeschooling. Hint: You don't need to have a curriculum-in-a-box on the kitchen table in order to begin.

Carnival time!

The 47th Carnival of Feminists is up at Ornamenting Away with lots of good posts to check out, just in time for the weekend. Go!

My dream restaurant

When Hurricanehead was a sniffly infant, I often fantasized about the pub I would open if I knew how to go about it. It would be a place where exhausted mothers of sick nurslings could drop by in their stained jammies for a brief respite, a drink, and a nap right there on the barstool, possibly even a shower in the back like a truck stop. I would call my pub The Snotty Nipple, and the smell of baby spit-up would be your ticket in.

My boys are older now, no longer nursing but much more active, defiant, impish and loud. After they put those attributes front and center all day today, I had an even better idea than the pub: a restaurant for stay-at-home parents. Not a place to take the kids because you're too tired to cook, but a place to go alone. I'd have a menu of comfort food and and a full bar--the kind of thing you want when you're frayed and your ears are ringing from fatigue, distraction and noise--in a setting designed to balance the effects of one of those days with the kids. It would be a mini-monastic retreat with tacos al pastor and blueberry blintzes where, for a couple of hours, you could indulge in thinking your own uninterrupted thoughts.

There would be no televisions or clutter on the walls, no tacky background music. Mariachis and children (even mine) would be banned from the premises. The hostess would show you silently to your seat. You would order by pointing to the menu; the waitstaff would all be mimes without greasepaint. A table for one would be no trouble because they would all be tables for one, the better to savor the quiet and the blessed relief from answering questions. I'm calling my restaurant STFU. I think it could be huge.

They've sniffed every page to save you time!

Latest winners: Nitro High School and PABBIS

From binky comes news of a West Virginia school where two Pat Conroy books have been "suspended." Don't call them banned; that hasn't been officially decided yet. The AP Lit students at Nitro High have read--but cannot discuss in class--Beach Music and The Prince of Tides, because two parents complained about descriptions of the Holocaust and rape.

I'm not surprised that a couple of foolish parents tried to interfere with the education of other people's children, nor am I surprised that the school caved to the hand-wringers' silly demands. But I'm delighted that a group of students plans to sue the school board if it bans the books. Perhaps that will motivate board members to support intellectual freedom instead of implementing a book rating system in an attempt to please everyone/no one.

If the school board does go ahead with a ratings system, I know who they can turn to for the most detailed and lascivious nitpicking on the internets: PABBIS. PABBIS stands for, no kidding, Parents Against Bad Books in Schools. One evening in bed, Hombre read me this excerpt from Patty Campbell's Horn Book article on PABBIS and other censorship groups. She shares a perfect example of Tutting Pervert Syndrome^TM:

Here, for example, is their scale on “description of breasts,” in their own words:

•Basic: large breasts
•Graphic: Large, voluptuous bouncing breasts
•Very graphic: large, voluptuous bouncing breasts with hard nipples
•Extremely graphic: large, voluptuous bouncing breasts with hard nipples covered with glistening sweat and bite marks

Note that the scale says nothing about the context of such descriptions. Any engorged mother who's tried to nurse a squirmy, teething baby on a hot day knows that context matters, but these folks are all, "Breasts! Large, voluptuous (Homer Simpson gargling noise)."

Still, once I heard about Nitro, I had to check out the PABBIS website to see if Beach Music or The Prince of Tides was on their naughty list. No luck. But I did find something else.

After promising that I'm over 18, I was treated to a resource that made me wonder where the hell PABBIS was when I was twelve years old and paging through my parents' Peter Benchley and Leon Uris novels for the racy parts. PABBIS, my friends, serves up excepts from books that did make their naughty list, along with more links to more no-no parts.

You can find it all at sibbap.org. (See what happens when you play your URLs backwards?) Just follow the big, tempting "Click Here" and, as they say, be patient because it's a large file--meticulously compiled, no doubt, by someone who was traumatized by having to cherry-pick every cuss word, act of violence, and sexy part out of dozens of books. I found it nearly impossible to pick a favorite excerpt, because stripped of context they're all so hypnotically sleazy, but I finally settled on "midget exposes 'full-sized penis.'"

It's sad to see books from Woman Warrior to Animal Dreams broken down by people who could see evil in the crotch of a tree, to borrow a phrase from Mary Karr. The cataloging and briar-patch protesting ("Please don't make me tell you in detail why this book is objectionable!") says much more about the minds of wannabe censors than it does about the books or the readers who get something worthwhile from them.

Pat Conroy had this to say about the Nitro High book-banning: "The world of literature has everything in it, and it refuses to leave anything out.'' The world of book-banners seems limited to prurience and violence, unable or unwilling to let the rest of the world of literature in.

Litterbugs

Trailhead at Mountain Time recently posted about her seaside plastic-pellet roundup, as part of the International Pellet Watch project, and I got inspired. Those little pellets, along with other plastic junk, wash into the ocean by the billions. There they soak up pollutants and get eaten by sea life. I would prefer that my food web not be made of toxic plastic but I don't live anywhere near a beach, which hinders my beach clean-up proclivities. What to do?

Although inland, I live near a series of flood-control swales and creeks that lead into the Colorado River which, wouldn't you know it, runs to the sea. There's a small creek right behind the back fence, which is where runoff goes and with it, any plastic that might be on the ground nearby. So yesterday I took a look at my yard.

Between the trash-day debris that blows in from wherever, wrappers and ties from the remodeling project, plant tags, and the chewed-up and spit-out work of two large dogs and two busy children, I collected more than 100 small pieces of plastic in about 15 minutes. I sealed it in a re-purposed plastic bag (oh, irony) and congratulated myself, sort of, on 100 fewer pieces of plastic that can get into the water -- unless the landfill floods someday.

On a walk over the weekend, I checked out the two larger creeks nearby. On their shores I saw plastic crap ranging from bags and tarps to a bouquet of fake flowers. Herons sometimes troll the creeks for food, along with little birds that look like sandpipers. Mistakenly snacking on plastic can't be good for them. I can't keep everything out of the waterways, but if I'm diligent (or even somewhat careful) about what washes from my property into the creeks, that's got to help.

What do you do to cut down on plastic pollution? Careful buying? Lobbying? Picking up? Anything? How many little pieces of plastic would you find in your yard/beach/nearby park if you gave it a thorough look?

Go for the holiday shopping, stay for the social justice

My craft-geek-ometer is redlining. Remember my plug for fair-trade canvas shopping bags made by Maquiladora Dignidad y Justicia last month? Women from the maquiladora will be in Austin this weekend at the Women & Fair Trade Craft Sale and Fashion Show. Josefina Castillo, regional American Friends Service Committee program director, spoke to my church about it on Sunday. I am kind of excited about this.

You can see a list of the the other vendors here. The sale will be at Dominican Joe Coffee Shop, 515 South Congress. A fashion show with "real people" as models is scheduled for 2 o'clock Saturday. At two on Sunday there will be a screening of China Blue, a secretly filmed documentary about sweatshop labor. Shopping runs 10 to 7 on Saturday, 10 to 6 on Sunday. There'll be live music Saturday afternoon. And of course there'll be coffee. What more do you need?

A visit from the homeschool inspector

My homeschooling friend Carol had unexpected visitor Friday afternoon: a woman introducing herself as a Round Rock School District employee, demanding that Carol show her--right then--the curriculum she uses with her two children. It would be alarming enough to have a stranger knock on your door and ask you to explain yourself at once, but the request was also out of bounds. Texas home schools are legally considered private schools, and public schools have no authority or jurisdiction over them per Leeper v. Arlington. In other words, Texas school districts have no more legal authority to review a Texas homeschooler's curriculum than they have to march down to, say, the local Waldorf school and demand to see their coursework.

Carol had been up all night caring for and cleaning up after her sick daughter so she was not in the best state to receive visitors or debate Leeper, as you might imagine. The woman didn't offer a card and Carol doesn't recall her name, she was so taken aback and worried that the woman would wake her daughter, who was asleep at last. The visitor, Carol said, was "quite aggressive about seeing my curriculum even after I told her she couldn't ask me that," telling Carol that she did have the right to ask to see her materials.

"She said, 'you could make me submit a written request,'" followed by what Carol described as a long pause that felt threatening.

My friend felt coerced into bringing her materials to the front door so a stranger could pass judgment on her. She was exhausted, her son was scared the woman was going to take him out of the house, and Carol "really just wanted her to go away." The visitor did, after Carol showed her the school books they use.

As you might imagine, this is not the end of it. Carol took it to the hive mind (which one should never poke with a stick) and people have been brainstorming all weekend to get Carol's many questions answered. I plan to call the district tomorrow to see what I can learn.* I have no quarrel with truant officers doing their job, but there's a lot to be said for professionalism. My guess is this is a new employee or someone in a new position who isn't quite clear on the law. I live in the same district as Carol--a block from an elementary school--and we've never had any static, even when my little homeschoolers and I march into the school-foyer polling place on election days.

Still, these kinds of incidents happen from time to time, and we can learn from it. Know your rights. If you homeschool in Texas, a good guide to handling this sort of visitor is here, and the scoop on school-district non-authority over your curriculum is here. The bottom line is, tell them politely to submit their request in writing. If you homeschool elsewhere and aren't clear on rights, look 'em up. A to Z is a good place to start.

Have any of you homeschooling readers had to deal with school or truancy officials yourselves? If you have any advice or insight, please share it.


*Update: Since Carol's lawyered up (Yes, Virgina, there are lawyers who homeschool and they tend to be proactive on the subject.), I don't feel the need to pester the school district. They're going to have enough to deal with. Updates TBA.

Rockin' field trip

My friend L and I took our crew to the (surprisingly slick -- ouch) shores of Shoal Creek yesterday to admire the cairns and to build a few of our own. It's always good to see Rocketboy -- who recently, happily told me he plans to spend his teenage years "alone in my room playing video games" -- enjoying outdoor activities. He was quite content to build cairns, harass minnows and climb rocks. He was talking to his friends about Super Mario the entire time, but I'll take whatever fresh and air sunshine he can get.

Sentence of the week

"His own memory of what happpened after that was dim and fragmentary--all he really knew was that the Spirit had entered his heart and irrevocably transformed him--but he'd been able to reconstruct much of it from the police report, conversations with sympathetic eyewitnesses, and the amateur video taken near the end of the incident."

Tom Perrotta, The Abstinence Teacher

Ignoring Ms. Welty

Or, Why I don't watch TV news

Happy first day of NaBloPoMo, everyone! Susan encouraged me to share this a while back when I mentioned the intellectual dry hole that is television news, in which field I worked for a short while before coming to my senses. This episode wasn't the straw that broke the careerist's back, but as straws go it was surprisingly heavy.

At my last broadcast job, we talked daily with a certain network's local affiliate stations throughout the Southeast, learning what they were covering and deciding which video was worth getting for ourselves. Once we got it, we shared it with affiliates nationwide on our afternoon satellite feeds. If you've ever wondered how your local station got video of that water-skiing squirrel halfway across the country, we and our cohorts at competing networks were how, although for all I know it's not done that way anymore. This was years ago, and I'm happily ignorant of current industry technology.

At any rate, it cost money -- in shipping fees and satellite time -- to get video so we had to be a bit selective about what we requested. The final decision was up to my boss, a woman I would charitably describe as ignorant. (No, the Mir space station was not an actual mirror, no matter how similarly one may pronounce the words.) If you don't know much about the world at large, it's hard to put stories in context and decisions get made based on the video rather than the content.

That's why we proudly sent out footage of an escaped monkey running amok in a Florida subdivision wielding a tranquilizer dart that missed, but we were unable to distribute a multi-part exclusive interview one of our Mississippi stations had scored with Pulitzer Prize-winning Southern writer Eudora Welty.

I can't recall the occasion for this interview, but I remember the pride in the local assignment editor's voice as he told the Mississippi conference call about it one morning. One of the other in-state affiliates wanted the series and asked us to put it on the feed. When I passed this info to my boss, she nixed it.

She'd never heard of Eudora Welty, obviously being neither widely read nor a Simpsons fan. The station requesting the series had no leverage: Nothing ever happened there, and we almost never requested vid from them. If they wanted it they could arrange to get it themselves. Plus, video of some old lady talking is boring, unlike alligators biting golfers and small-plane crashes. I couldn't convince my boss that any other affiliate anywhere in the nation might be interested in the interview for their morning shows, which tended to be feature-heavy and in need of material. She'd never heard of Welty. That was that.

Decisions like this -- callous and stupid -- were made every day in my line of work, and I made more than a few myself. But the lost Welty interview, as I secretly thought of it, struck a chord with me. I had one of our four Mississippi affiliates begging for this piece of their state's cultural heritage, and another one pleading to share it with the rest of us. Trust me, stations didn't often beg to send us their work; it was more for them to do. But the Welty tape was a big deal to them, and we blew it. As an amateur writer, I wanted to watch the series myself. How could shootings, wrecks and other quotidian local tragedies be more important than a conversation with a great writer?

That was one of a snowballing series of events that just made me sad. I had gone into news thinking I could help people examine issues and learn more about the world. It was a nice theory, but in practice TV news was about flashy images, ratings and ads.

(It was also about dumbing down what little content we did have. When I was fresh out of school a producer at a local station told me I was overwriting.

"Write to the fifth-grade level. Your audience is Joe Six-Pack, " he said. "José Six-Pack, really." That was the first time I wanted to slap him. It was not the last.)

Hombre's grandfather once visited my Welty-free workplace and seemed impressed that I was competent to run an edit bay, an intimidating-looking pile of Beta machines and monitors. It was expensive technology, now archaic, linked to millions of dollars worth of satellites, dishes, and other equipment that should have been able to make us smarter, better-informed, and more connected to our world.

We got syringe-waving monkeys instead.