04.29.07
Posted in Activism, Environment, Food, Household at 12:21 am by Christina
Tomorrow – hopefully in the A.M. because it’s supposed to be just as hot – the girls and I will get the tomatoes planted. This involves preparing holes for the plants in and around the current landscaping, planting the seedlings, and setting up the irrigation. I purchased (hopefully all!) the necessary supplies today, including compost, organic fertilizer, drip irrigation apparatus, and some handheld tools.
I also purchased a significant number of compact fluorescent bulbs to spread around the house and lower our energy consumption on that front. I had thought to buy even more than I did, but I bought out the stock in the large floodlight size that we have a lot of (17+). However, a number of those are on dimmer switches, and most compact fluorescent bulbs are not designed for dimmers. (The only ones I saw were replacements for standard bulbs only, not other shapes.) Hopefully when my parents are visiting in June (they’re here for a week between the girls’ homeschool choir concert and Emma’s birthday/Katie’s camp concert) my father will help me convert off the dimmer switches in most places so that we can insert fluorescent bulbs almost everywhere. (Yes, this is a rental, but we figure to offer the landlord a swap of some kind; if we have to convert everything back when we leave, we’ll do it, and I’m sure we can find takers for our materials elsewhere if we need to.)
These things are all part of an effort to reduce our “carbon footprint”; in other words, we are trying to do what we can to reduce our personal contributions to global climate change. The tomato growing is hopefully the first step in a process that trains us up in growing more of our own produce. I haven’t looked for detailed numbers yet, but our food supply is so nationalized (and becoming more globalized daily) that almost every bite we eat has an enormous amout of greenhouse gas behind it, as it’s been trucked hither and yon before arriving in our pantries and refrigerators. Even for us here in California, which produces so much of the nation’s produce, most things get trucked out of California to distribution hubs, to be reorganized and then sent back to us.
While we’re trying to learn the skills and discipline to grow more of our own food, I’m exploring options for getting local organic produce. Right now, I’m not buying anything beyond the west coast and Mexico. There are a number of CSAs (community supported agriculture) in the Bay Area, as well as other produce suppliers; it’s taking time to gather information about the provenance of their produce in order to make a decision. Going with local produce demands a shift in how we eat that will be interesting to experience; it means accepting a more seasonal diet, since many foods are not available year-round except within the globalized system.
I just wish there had been a hybrid minivan on the market by now…
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Posted in Life in general at 12:04 am by Christina
It’s only April 28th, but it was a hot summer day and we spent the afternoon at the pool! We decided to keep our membership at the old pool; it’s only a little bit further away (in time, not distance – 5 minutes), it’s cheaper because we only have to pay the annual dues and not the initial membership fee, and some of our closest friends are members so we’ll have an easier time swimming with them if we’re at the same pool. Jeff brought the laptop along and did some work, and the friends met us there so the kids had lots of fun playing mermaid games and who knows what else! Jamie enjoyed himself on the (pool) stairs and in the toddler pool, and we all went out to dinner afterwards.
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04.26.07
Posted in Commentary, Food, Homeschooling, Kids, Parenting at 8:29 am by Christina
I was listening to NPR on the road yesterday, and there was a segment on educational software in schools. Apparently a study recently released showed no impact on test scores in schools that implement such software.
The topic itself didn’t interest me overmuch, but I was stunned by the repeated emphasis place on one concept: performance. How kids are performing on the tests, shouldn’t the software help kids perform better, and so forth.
Hey educrats – are these kids, or are they circus seals? Do you merely want them to be able to hold balls on their noses until you toss them a kipper?
How stupid of me. Of course you do. They’re easier to manage that way. So help them perform well in the short term, on these tests in school, and in the long term, as a malleable populace.
All I know is, this is why I homeschool. I want my children to learn. I want them to understand and seek joy. I want them to have the fortitude to recognize and follow their own unique path. And when they’re performing, I want them to understand that they have an audience of one – themselves.
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Posted in Music, Singing at 8:08 am by Christina
Last night I enjoyed a night on the town while my much-appreciated partner Jeff held the home-fort down with the kids. (This in the middle of a very busy work stretch – he’s not been getting much sleep lately, but the karaoke has been scheduled for a while!)
I drove a couple of towns over to rendezvous with friends from chorus at a bar, which is not the sort of place I have frequented under usual circumstances, not even in college or pre-kids. But it is fun with friends, and in this day and age there is a better understanding of people who don’t drink – when I ordered my first soda I immediately got the comment, “That’s great, you’re the designated driver!” (Not that that’s why I wasn’t drinking…)
Anyway, I had to swallow some butterflies – somehow standing up and performing in front of your friends can be more anxiety-producing than performing in front of strangers! But I had fun, and got to get up there three times on my own and once with a friend. On my own, I sang “Please Mr. Postman”, “There’s Your Trouble” (Dixie Chicks), and “Something to Talk About” (Bonnie Raitt). The duet was “500 Miles” (by various folk artists); that friend had wanted an opportunity to hear what our voices sounded like in close singing, as opposed to ensemble singing which we have done together several times now in chorus.
When we weren’t singing we had lots of fun conversation about life and, of course, about singing. Everyone is planning their ensembles for the new concert, and we’re getting ready to start again in just over a week. Yay!!
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04.24.07
Posted in WordPress at 11:39 am by Christina
I’ve been trying for some time to post my last entry on gun control, but kept getting denied. Tech support told me that I had the illegal word “cat” – which made me laugh wryly, as I’m sure many WordPress users write about their cat! Details showed “cat//X20″ as the problem (wonder if I’ll be able to post this one?). Of course, that wasn’t in there either!
So, I started posting just a paragraph at a time, trying to find out where the culprit was. Eventually, I narrowed it down to the following phrase: army[slash]navy[slash]etc. Within that, the specific culprit was [slash]etc – the period was irrelevant, and /et published just fine!
Jeff is looking up some kind of direct html – the one that substitutes %20 in URLs and so forth – to try and give me an alternate character set for that text. What a pain!!!
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Posted in Commentary, Current Events at 11:29 am by Christina
but maybe we should give it a try!
Listening to NPR this week, there of course have been lots of shows covering the murders at Virginia Tech (usually calling them “killings” or “shootings”, but that’s another post entirely!). Many of the shows have a call-in aspect, and so I’ve had the untrammeled pleasure of hearing numerous people spout the infamous and unfortunately successful tagline of the NRA: “Guns don’t kill people; people kill people.”
I don’t think I will ever understand the rationalizations and logical fallacies that lead gun owners to believe that their rights to hunt and keep handguns around the house will be targeted if we pass legislation limiting access to military- and police-force weapons to the military and the police! It’s not like the NRA is even being literal to the entire Second Amendment; they deliberately ignore the opening modifier: “A well-regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free state,” etc. Sorry folks, it’s been a long time since the U.S.A. depended on a militia of average citizens for its security; now we use a standing, i.e. permanent, army/navy/ etc. Or didn’t you know that?
But, if we’re going to be so darn literal, why don’t we focus on what exactly “arms” meant in 1791? A revolver mechanism had been invented by then, but it hadn’t taken off; it wasn’t until the 1800s that multi-shot weapons starting spreading around. And semiautomatic (requiring only trigger action for shooting) and automatic (requiring only one trigger action for multiple shots) weaponry took even longer to come around. “Arms” clearly didn’t mean weapons of mass destruction like the ones used in the Virginia Tech murders. Or is there some reason we can’t keep automatic weapons out of the public marketplace, but we can regulate grenades, land mines, ICBMs, nuclear weapons, biochemical weapons, and so forth? “Arms” either means “armaments”, or it means something more restricted; I’d bet the NRA doesn’t think it means any and all weapons, so what’s the support for their position? The modern militia – the standing army – uses all sorts of weapons that the public can’t access legally.
The gun spokespeople on the shows argued that we need less restriction, not more, because if we had less restriction, other students in the classrooms would have had weapons of their own and could have stopped the killer sooner. Folks, if the killer was able to get guns through legal channels, I’m betting most of the students could have done the same. The fact of the matter is that they chose not to.
Unfortunately, they don’t teach logic and rhetoric in schools these days – it would undermine the unspoken goal of creating a malleable populace – and as a result many swallow the slippery slope argument hook, line and trigger.
My thoughts have been heading to Blacksburg all week, but more than that, heading out to the country in general. There will be another tragedy – more than one – and they could happen anywhere.
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04.20.07
Posted in Books, Humor, Kids at 12:12 am by Christina
I am reading Oliver Twist to the girls now, in anticipation of their auditioning for the musical Oliver! at the community theater this August. We’re only through the fourth chapter (short chapters, too). Right away we learn that Oliver was born in the workhouse and that his mother died immediately thereupon without disclosing his father’s identity.
Following close upon that, Oliver draws the short straw in the boys’ dormitory and is therefore the one who goes up to the warden to ask for more food; he is of course quickly punished in various ways, including beating and solitary confinement. He is also beaten in front of the other boys as a deterrent, and made to stand there while a sermon is preached over the boys to avoid Oliver’s wicked ways, because he is surely the spawn of the Devil.
Katie’s satirical comment? “Well, at least we know now who his father is!”
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04.19.07
Posted in Books, Parenting, Reviews at 1:26 am by Christina
Buddha Never Raised Kids & Jesus Didn’t Drive Carpool: Seven Principles for Parenting with Soul
by Vickie Falcone
I added this book to my queue after coming across its very interesting title at The Learning Umbrella. Frankly the title is almost meaningless to the book itself, although it is nice and catchy and I’m sure draws susceptible folks like myself in. Fortunately, it was a good book despite the red herring; the subtitle is the heart. I spent the last couple of evenings outlining the book into a Word file for myself so that I would be able to refer to it in the future. (This is also an essential aspect of my learning; I took copious notes as a formal student, though after I take them I don’t need to review them much. Just the act of writing helps cement my memory…)
So you want to parent with soul? Falcone doesn’t mean James Brown, so don’t get your hopes up; still, her goal is to enable you to parent in the state of “I Feel Good!” If you’re looking for advice and recommendations about how to toilet-train your child or get them to eat vegetables, look elsewhere. This book is about the big picture of parenting; it’s about how to parent your child in any and every situation, and still be able to look them – and perhaps more importantly, yourself – in the eye in the morning.
Some of the basic concepts will be familiar to proponents of attachment parenting and other nonviolent parenting philosophies. The theme of connection threads through several (if not all) of the principles. #1 is actually called “Connect”, and it refers primarily to connecting with your child, but also with yourself. #2 is about connecting with your intuition; for my tastes, the author goes too far into the realm of paranormal phenomena (psychic behavior, signs from the universe), but enough of it is grounded in true intution and learning to understand and trust it.
(By “true intuition” I mean cerebral processes that happen so fast we don’t understand how we derived the conclusion. Many people distrust their intuitive conclusions because they can’t parse the rational sequence. It’s a shame to waste good brain work just because we can’t keep up with it, and in some situations it can be downright dangerous, as when we don’t feel safe in a situation but don’t know why. See Gavin De Becker’s The Gift of Fear and Protecting the Gift for two excellent books on this topic; I also recommend Malcolm Gladwell’s Blink: The Power of Thinking without Thinking.)
Three further principles include live in integrity, infuse your life with peace, and transform your life with gratitude. They might be named connect with yourself, connect with reality, and connect with others! The final two principles, which might be a little tough to chew on for those who don’t feel resonance with spiritual/self-help language, are become a conscious creator, and create abundance. Setting aside the fuzzy lingo, these two are based on a fundamental truth: life is what we make of it. (In other words, if you choose to complain a lot, you could be as rich as Midas and as fortunate as I don’t know who, and you’ll still be miserable; and conversely, you could be living in abject poverty and suffer terrible traumas, but look for silver linings and wear a smile and be essentially happy.)
Some key discussions and techniques that I made special note of:
PHIL- Children, and indeed all people, need to feel Powerful, Heard, Important and Loved. These don’t mean you assist your offspring in becoming little Napoleons. Rather, they emphasize the value in treating your child as a person distinct and separate from you, with all the agency and individuality thereupon. Power doesn’t mean permissiveness; hearing doesn’t imply agreeing. Important means you value them; love requires unconditionality. When a child misbehaves, if their physical needs are satisfied (not sick, tired, hungry, uncomfortable, etc.), look for an empty tank in one or more of these PHIL areas.
Breathe- How many books and seminars in the world of personal growth recommend this technique? I’d venture to guess at least 3/4 of them! It’s not all pseudoscientific hooey, you know. Deep, relaxed, focused breathing has actual physiological impacts on the levels of stress in our bodies. I use this one with my kids, but not enough with myself.
Change process- The naming of four steps for change was particularly enlightening. 1: Unconscious incompetence; you don’t know what you don’t know. 2: Conscious incompetence; you know what you don’t know. 3: Conscious competence; you know what you know. 4: Unconscious competence; you don’t know what you know. The goal is to become aware, to learn, but also to have the knowledge become second nature.
Come here, not go there- This one fascinated me. So often we give our children commands to “go there” and do something, alone and without support. When the task is something the child has some internal issues with, they will balk and a power struggle inevitably begins. “Come here” gives the child a connection with the parent, their mentor, and a feeling of security in which to open up to those internal issues. And the connection grounds the child for overall better behavior.
Put connection before logistics- This is a hard one, and yet in my own experience and what I always hear from others, any and every power struggle is deflated when the parent takes the time to give the “misbehaving” child the connection they are asking for. How many of us have had this experience: Monday’s bedtime takes two hours because the child comes out, we send them back in, ad infinitem, with tempers rising all the while. Tuesday’s bedtime starts off the same way, but something in us on Tuesday shifts after fifteen or twenty minutes; we snuggle with the child for ten minutes and they glide right off to sleep. Sound familiar? It’s often called “caving in”, and yet all we really did was respond to a need the child was having to be refilled on connection with us. The younger a child is, the less they grasp the concept of delayed gratification; if they need a connection with you, they need it now and at the expense of all else. As Falcone says, logistics are always made easier when we put connection first, because the child will then be in a place to behave as we desire them to.
Parenting with soul means that when your fledgling child leaves the nest, you don’t go home and destroy yourself with shoulda-coulda-woulda and if-only. You go home content with yourself that although you weren’t perfect (because nobody is!), you parented in a way that made things better, for your child and for yourself. This was a good, informative and reinforcing book, balanced in philosophy and technique, and I recommend it to anyone who is aware or wants to become aware of the bigger picture in which we parent our children.
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04.17.07
Posted in Articles, Commentary at 12:08 pm by Christina
Thomas Friedman has a new (very long, very good) article up at New York Times Magazine: “The Power of Green”. Friedman’s very well-built horn is petropolitics and oil dependence, and I hope he keeps getting louder and louder with it. The time for clean, renewable energy is NOW, although it really was yesterday and we all missed the boat.
Consumerism is preventing us from thinking out to the seventh generation; the motivations of those before us to build toward a better future for their descendants are lacking in our modern culture. “Buy now, pay later” is a maxim that doesn’t refer only to credit cards; it is the byword of American action, from junk food to energy to drug wars to oil wars. We are likely residing in the first historical era that will pass on a reduced future to our children; the impacts of our communal choices, even if we were to make significant changes now, will devolve on my kids and your kids and they will have to be up to the struggle of it.
Our government needs to take action now to set standards that market capitalism is not willing to outline. Why that is, I don’t know; as Friedman says, the most energy-efficient car manufacturer is also the most profitable one (Toyota). Why haven’t U.S. manufacturers followed suit? Perhaps it’s because Congress has not taken their regulatory steps; according to Friedman, Japan has extraordinarily high gas taxes and efficiency standards, and Toyota has had to figure out how to operate a successful business within those regulations. I don’t believe that unregulated “free market” capitalism is the perfect system; it’s a pretty good economic model, but a rather poor social model. Government does have a role to play, and unfortunately ours is abdicating rather than standing at the plate.
I found it very interesting that as governor of Texas, George W. Bush pushed for a “market intervention” mandating that 2000 megawatts of new, renewable energy had to be online in Texas by 2009. The market responded to that with a burst of progress in wind energy and met the goal in 2005! Unfortunately, as president Bush has become a one-note trombonist – terrorism and nothing else – unfortunately without the analytical depth to realize that one can combat terrorism along many vectors.
When we moved into this new home, I contacted our energy supplier to purchase our energy from renewable sources. Unfortunately, PG&E doesn’t have a residential program in renewable energy. I left it at that. Starting today, I’m going to push harder to find a way to bring renewable energy to our home. What are you going to do?
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04.16.07
Posted in Books, Household, Kids, Life in general at 6:35 pm by Christina
I wonder why grooves don’t happen more often? I suppose it’s because they are so susceptible to hiccups, like scratches in the grooves of a record album. But when they do happen, such bliss!
Last week’s sickness captured every member of the household in sequence, so all of the catch-up that we’d been planning to do after the chorus tech week schedule was postponed while we focused on health and necessary work. We were all recovered in time for the girls’ Wednesday music classes, Thursday and Friday playdates, and Friday’s orchestra concert. Chorus does not start up again until May, so on Saturday morning we began tackling some of the larger projects in the house. The two biggest projects (okay, I’m leaving the full-of-boxes garage out of the equation; it’s not technically in the house) are the books and the playroom.
The books – well, what can I say about a family full of bibliophiles, around-the-clock readers, and books? This is one large project! We have two 42×72 cases and one 42×84 case; if we’re lucky, these bookshelves manage to house the children’s books. Actually, we also have two 42×36 shelves as well that are part of the kids’ shelving; those are in different parts of the house, one holding board books for Jamie and the other homeschooling books in the study. The jumbo shelves are upstairs in the girls’ bedrooms. They are not totally full yet, because there are plenty of books scattered in boxes still, but I did manage to get the “kids’ books” boxes unpacked earlier this year, and over the weekend worked with Katie to organize them better on the shelves (chapter books, picture books, nonfiction, etc.).
Books get more than one paragraph of attention, though, because “kids’ books”, while plentiful and definitely making a dent in our collection, represent maybe a third of the total bookage. There are another 75+ banker boxes of books waiting for new shelving, 56 stacked in a block behind the couch in the front room, and at least 20 more out in the garage. Shelving is in my opinion the bane of a booklover’s existence. We really should come up with a figure that we can add on to any book we purchase, representing the shelf cost of the book. Libraries calculate this information for themselves, the cataloging fee, which of course includes more than just the physical shelf space but also the data entry and tagging costs; at my library it costs $10 in addition to the cost of the book itself when you lose a book and have to replace it. For many years we had Home Depot pressboard shelves, but we learned after Katie came along that these shelves offgas toxic fumes (though it decreases over time) and we decided to get rid of them.
We are finally in a position to treat our books well, giving them a lovely home not made of cardboard. (Most of the books have lived in boxes – catalogued of course so we could find them! – since the shelves went away.) Today, I ordered simple maple cases from Ballard Bookcase in Seattle: three 30×72 regular cases, and three 24×72 shallower “media cases” for paperbacks. These shelves are going to reside in the master/family bedroom (which is lovely and large; it’s wonderful to have five people in there and not feel claustrophobic, to have room for my rocking chair and to have room for our books!). In about five weeks, we should be able to unpack the rest of our books! I prefer books to any other decorating style 
Once the kids’ books were done, the girls and I began to tackle the playroom, which had never received an organization attack since we moved in (but was of course functional, otherwise we would have gotten to it sooner I guess). There, we have Ikea wardrobes (which are also pressboard but which are laminated and so the offgassing is much diminished), which is the setup we had in the playroom at the old house. This worked very well, especially the ability to close the doors on much of the equipment. (Although right now the hardware to remount the doors is AWOL – aaaaah!) The girls each have a bedroom now as well in that part of the house, the playroom being an unoptioned fifth bedroom and open to their rooms; they have very generous closets, easily twice what they need for their dresser and hanging clothes. So we rebuilt our wire basket units and put those in their closets.
Lest you wonder exactly how much organization a playroom needs – or perhaps feel that two children should not have enough play equipment to fill a wall of wardrobes and an entire closet – I’ll mention that my girls are enormously into imaginative play and we have built an enormous collection of costume supplies for them out of mostly secondhand apparel. For example, they have a toybox worth of hats alone, and an equal volume of old bathrobes and old shoes! One of the best purchases we ever made for them was a large quantity of cotton gauze scarves (white) that we dyed in a rainbow of colors at a tie-dye party one summer; these scarves have played every role you can imagine! They use them to turn themselves into cats or mermaids, to turn rooms into stages or forests; they become baby slings, plaster casts, and three of them together are permanently dedicated to being Rapunzel’s braid. (Tom and Elizabeth, no matter how great I say they are, don’t buy any – we’re making a collection for Dorothy at the next tie-dye party!!)
We’ve been spending Jamie’s naptimes over recent days sorting, organizing, getting rid of accumulated recycling and trash, and so forth. The transition of some categories into the wire baskets in the closets will open up shelves in the wardrobes to hold some of our games. (I can hear the garage sighing in relief at the prospect of losing some of it load…)
All we ask of the universe is that we remain happy tenants of this house for a while, not just through November! And actually, I’d like for the energy that keeps us groovin’ to stick around for a while, too
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