bearing blog

bearing blog


bear – ing n 1  the manner in which one comports oneself;  2  the act, power, or time of bringing forth offspring or fruit; 3 a machine part in which another part turns [a journal ~];  4  pl comprehension of one’s position, environment, or situation;   5  the act of moving while supporting the weight of something [the ~ of the cross].

  • Les Misérables: the film.

    I'm trying really hard to get back into the blogging thing after a dry spell.  

    Acting on a hunch, I declared to the children that they were no longer allowed to set their alarms for 6 AM so they could get downstairs before I wake up and claim the computer in order to play Minecraft.  

     I assured them it was not a punishment, just an attempt by me to reclaim my working and blogging time.

    "You need more sleep anyway," I said.  "Unless there's schoolwork you need to finish, please don't set your alarms to go off before eight."

    + + +

    Mark and I went out this past weekend to see the filmed Les Misérables.  I've noticed that it's received many cool and critical reviews, and I get the impression that it's going to be a love-it-or-hate-it thing.  A local reviewer disliked it (but he also dislikes the staged musical:  "I'd like to say the show never got boring, but that would be a lie: it does stop often for songs, and once you realize what any given round of bellowing is about, you can let your attention drift.")  Jeffrey Overstreet at Patheos wrote a more thoughtful (and occasionally amusing) criticism, acknowledging that his dislike of it might be in part because it was his first exposure to the story, songs, and play.  

    (Overstreet's a little inaccurate, though, calling Jean Valjean a "Christ Figure" — if he's a figure of anything, he's a "redeemed sinner" figure, not at all the same.)

    My take on it:  I enjoyed the whole thing.  I am apparently one of the unwashed masses who, having loved the stage show, doesn't know any better than to like the movie too.

    (Mark enjoyed it too, even though all he remembered of the story was the TL;DR:  Jean Valjean is chased by a policeman.)

    I've seen the opera form of Les Misérables on stage, performed by top regional/traveling companies three times.  I own 3 different soundtracks, and I know the libretto by heart, including the French concept album.  (Come on everybody!  Á la volonté du peuple!  et á la santé du progrès, Remplis ton coeur d'un vin rebelle, Et á demain, ami fidèle…)

    Let's discuss the big-name stars.

    • Anne Hathaway: surprisingly good, I don't know why anyone was complaining.
    • Russell Crowe: Good on him for stepping up to the plate and trying so hard. Javert does deserve a stronger voice, but I couldn't blame Russell; just wanted to pat him on the head and say "You're doing a GOOD JOB." 
    • Sacha Baron-Cohen and Helena Bonham Carter were fine, but I kept wishing they were Eric Idle and Madeline Kahn for some reason. 

    Overall an excellent adaptation of the stage to the screen, retaining the stagey feel very well without trying to BE a stage production when it couldn't possibly have been, while exploiting well the things that cinema excels in.

    In particular, the close-up solos ("I Dreamed A Dream," "Empty Chairs and Empty Tables") were fantastic — they all really took the strengths of film and ran with them.  The film is being mocked for its close-ups, but I thought that the close-up was a good translation — into film — of the "spotlight" effect that's the best a stage production can do to highlight a character.

    The live-singing technique transformed the songs, especially the emotional solo songs, into something new.  (Here's a little video that explains it if you're unfamiliar) When you know the recorded versions very well, as I do — I  blast show tunes in the car from time to time to cheer myself up — you get accustomed to a certain "polish" on the voices.  In a stage production, the singer has no choice but to (a) belt it out, so that she can be heard all the way to the back of the theater, and (b) follow the timing of the orchestra.  

    But with the live singing, the actress/singer could adjust her voice timbre and volume, and the timing of the phrases to match the emotion of the moment.  (An earpiece provided a live piano accompaniment to keep them on key.)   Instead of the singer following the orchestra, the orchestral accompaniment was instead added later to match the singer.   This makes a big difference in "I Dreamed A Dream," which is placed here after Fantine's descent into prostitution, and in "Empty Chairs and Empty Tables."  Both of these characters are grieving, and you know, grief only sometimes calls for you to belt it out to the back of the hall, and it goes at its own pace.

    I forgot where I was and fell into the story and the screen for at least the first half, although that was possibly an effect of the two margaritas I downed before the film.

    (My new favorite date is to go out for nachos and too many margaritas at the bar next door to the theater, and then sober up while watching the movie.)  

    There was a certain grittiness to the look of it all which the film wore very well, too.

    I expect that if you go to it expecting it to be cinematic you will be disappointed; if you go to it because you love the stage production and you want it to be stagey you will be happy. 

    Here's the Overstreet review again:

    Hey, I have no problem applauding a narrative as profound as this one. But here I go again, digging out Ebert’s fundamental rule of film criticism: “A movie is not about what it is about. It is about how it is about it.” The filmmakers don’t get credit for the story; that belongs to Victor Hugo. As Gandalf might say, all the filmmakers have to do is “decide is what to do with the material that is given to us.” These filmmakers made me feel like I was suffocating, and I was oh so glad to get out of that theater.

    See, what I think Overstreet misses here is that this movie is not about what he thinks when it is about how it is about it.  It's not a movie about Restoration France.  It's a movie about the blockbuster stage opera Les Misérables about Restoration France.    The point is to bring the experience of the opera to new audiences in a new way.  And the movie goes about being about a blockbuster stage opera very well.  

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  • So how did that whirlwind overview of Spanish for Latin speakers go, bearing?

    We're halfway into our school year and I thought I'd report back on an idea I had earlier that gathered some interest in the combox.   A little more than a year ago I wrote:

    The Memoria Press Latin programs that we are using – Prima Latina, Latina Christiana, and First Form Latin – all have a component that examines Latin-derived words in the English language.  It has seemed like a bit of a waste of time, sort of an afterthought, and we really haven't used it much at all.  But what if instead of learning about Latin-derived words in English, we looked at Latin-derived words in Spanish?  What if we studied Spanish as a specimen of late Latin – very late Latin?  What if learning Spanish became an extension of our Latin study?

    All the beginner's Spanish programs start from scratch.  But we're not starting from scratch:  we're starting from a few years of Latin.   Why can't we build on what they know already?  After all — a great deal of the effort that English speakers have to make, when they learn their first Romance language — we've already been through that.  Verbs are conjugated.  Nouns have gender.  Adjectives can come after nouns.  Adjectives agree with nouns.  And we've already talked about tense, and principal parts, and negation and interrogation… a lot of concepts that take up time grasping for the first time have already been grasped.  They just need to know how to do in Spanish what they already know to do in Latin.

    I wrote here, a little later, about teaching pronunciation lessons based on Latin pronunciation:

    I made a little chart of Latin words and Spanish words that are their cognates and that demonstrate the differences and some of the similarities between ecclesiastical Latin and Spanish pronunciation rules.  For example: 

    • In Latin gens (tribe), the g is pronounced like English /j/.  In Spanish la gente (race, nation), it's pronounced with a throaty /h/.
    • In Latin hora (hour), the h is pronounced as in English.  In Spanish la hora, it's silent.
    • In Latin signum (sign), the gn is pronounced as in English "lasagna."  In Spanish el signo, the g sound and n sound are distinct.
    • Vowels are similar: A: pater/el padre (father), E: cena/la cena (dinner), I: vita/vida(life), O: oculus/el ojo (eye), U: mundus/el mundo (world) and aqua/agua (water).

    So I figured I would work my way down the chart with the kids.  The emphasis is on similarities and differences between ecclesiastical Latin and Spanish.  I thought maybe Hannah, who knows more about linguistics than I, could talk to the kids a little bit about consonant shift and things — why filius became el hijo, why pax became la paz.

    But I am taking seriously the need to hear a native Spanish speaker pronounce the words, so I went looking for an online audio dictionary….

    H. found a neat article, which I described here, on which I constructed a pretty cool history-of-language lesson.    And then here's where I describe how we got started, just before last summer (summer's when I generally experiment with new subjects):

    Lesson one was conjugating regular verbs ending in -ar — those are very much like the verbs of the first conjugation in Latin. I picked "hablar" (to speak) as a model verb, not "amar," because I did not want to muck up the "amo, amas, amat" in Latin class. So I gave them about three dozen verbs, many of them derived directly from Latin verbs they know, and we practiced making sentences with those for a week. I had them translate from English to Spanish and Spanish to English and Spanish to Latin and Latin to Spanish.

    Lesson two was the irregular verb "estar," one of the two verbs that translate "to be," and then using it to form the present progressive tense — "I am speaking," "Estoy hablando" — with the three dozen regular verbs. The kids liked that Spanish has this construction that they are so familiar with in English and that is missing in Latin.

    What was great about it was that we could jump right in without having to explain about why verbs are conjugated, or how it can be that you do not need to use a subject pronoun, or what person and number and tense mean. The same recitation of the same meanings in the same order: hablo, hablas, habla, hablamos, hablais, hablan. There are some differences to get used to, like the appearance of informal and polite forms of address, but most of it is comfortable already.

    After my few experimental lessons, it turned out to take me approximately one semester to get a very basic Spanish grammar overview into them.  I have to tell you, I'm pleased with the results.  Let me tell you what I did.

    + + +

     I have three Latin students in this "class."  One's a ninth-grade girl, the other two are seventh-grade boys.  At the start of this year they had been doing Memoria Press Latin together for about 4 years; we had finished Latina Christiana I and were about halfway through First Form Latin, supplemented with translations I cobbled together from other sources and some other things I added along the way.  So they had had six tenses, two verb conjugations, three noun declensions, and some experience reading and writing Latin.

    Here are the lessons I presented.  I teach two days a week; on Mondays we did a lesson, and on Thursdays I assigned a written exercise based on the lesson.

     

    1- Pronunciation lesson, focusing on similarities and differences between Latin and Spanish.  Saves a ton of trouble as the vowel advice is all about the same, and there are only a handful of consonant differences.

     

    2 – Regular -ar verbs like hablar, "to speak."  I presented our verbs, including hablar, exactly as we would learn a new Latin verb:  through recitation.  Hablo, hablas, habla, hablamos, habláis, hablan.  We compared it to the first conjugation in Latin.    I also gave them a little chart that contained the infinitive, gerund (hablando, "speaking"), and participle (hablado, "spoken").  And I gave them a lexicon of about thirty completely regular -ar verbs and their meanings, including all the ones I could find that are cognates of Latin words they know:  convocar and adorar and amar and habitar and laborar and navegar and narrar…


     3 – The irregular verb estar, which is one of two "to be" verbs.   Again, we recited it (estoy, estás, está, estamos, estáis, están), and I taught the gerund and the participle as well as the infinitive.  They learned a little bit about the usage difference between estar and ser (the other "to be" verb), and then I taught the present progressive tense, which uses estar + gerund just as in English:  hablo = "I speak," but estoy hablando = "I am studying."  

    Three lessons in and already two ways to speak about what is happening now!

     

    4 – Regular -er verbs like comer, "to eat."  I taught this lesson just the same as Lesson 2, but keyed to the second conjugation in Latin: Spanish deber is the exact cognate of Latin debere.  I explained that what we call the "stem" in Spanish is short one vowel — for example, the Latin stem of debere is debe-, with endings -o, -s, -t, -mus and so on, but the Spanish stem of deber is deb– and the vowel is considered part of the endings -o, -es, -e, -emos and so on.  And I gave them more words for their lexicon — about ten completely regular -er verbs.

     

    5 – Irregular verb haber, the helping verb for the perfect tense.  I taught it like the other verbs (he, has, ha, hemos, habéis, han), and then showed them how to use it with the past participle to form the perfect tense (como = "I eat," he comido = "I have eaten, I ate.")  Also habiendo comido ("having eaten…") and haber de comer (to be supposed to eat, to "have to eat.")

     

    6 – Regular -ir verbs like vivir = "to live."  Compared the conjugation to the two other families of verbs.  Added a dozen more verbs to their lexicon.

     

    7 – The irregular verb ir, "to go."  Voy, vas, va, vamos, vaís, van.  I built on that to teach the immediate future construction, ir + a + infinitive, which is very much like English:  vamos a decidir = "we're going to decide."  

    Seven lessons in, and they have one way to speak of the past, two ways to speak of the present, and one way to speak of the future.  (And in case you're wondering, they were doing fine on the exercises, except that they kept forgetting to add accents.)

     

    8 – Direct object pronouns.  We recited them in the same pattern as verbs (singular – 1st, 2nd, 3rd person; plural – 1st, 2nd, 3rd person):  me, te, lo/la, nos, os, los/las.  This came with a lesson on word order.  The usual order is S-V-DO just in English:  María lava la toga.   But when a pronoun replaces the direct object, it comes before the verb:  María la lava.  And when the verb is an infinitive, gerund, or command, the pronoun is attached to its end:  María debe lavarla, Maria should wash it; María está lavándola, Maria is washing it; Lávala, Wash it.

     

    9 – Irregular verb dar, "to give."  I taught this with a long list of idiomatic expressions that use dar, like dar la hora, "to strike the hour," dar un paseo, "to take a walk,"  and dar a conocer, "to make known."  I used this lesson to introduce the idea of idioms that don't translate exactly, and the technique (from The Loom of Language) of learning to think in the target idiom – to get it in your heads that whereas English speakers "take" a walk, Spanish speakers "give" one; that English clocks "chime" or "strike" the hour, but Spanish clocks "give" the hour; that in English you "make something known," in Spanish you "give to know" something.

     

     10 – Reflexive and reciprocal pronouns, i.e., object pronouns that refer back to the subject:  me, te, se, nos, os, se.  As in, El gato se lava, "the cat washes itself."  I needed this lesson in order to teach the large class of …

     

    11 – Pronominal verbs, which have a reflexive pronoun as their object.  I felt I had to explain these before we could do any dictionary work, because they get their own entry in the dictionary with the pronoun stuck on the end, and I feared the kids wouldn't recognize them as verbs.  For example, llamarse, "to be called, to be named," so that you wind up saying Me llamo Juan, "I call myself Juan," instead of "My name's Juan."   I gave them a list, sorted into -ar, -er, and -ir families.

    At this point I gave them a dictionary and began using words they didn't know in their exercises, forcing them to look them up.

    12 – Irse, "to go away," an example of an irregular pronominal.  When you go, you go; but when you go away, you go yourself away.

     

    13 – The imperfect tense.  We recited all the forms in all three verb-families.  Thanks to Latin, they already know the difference between imperfect and perfect, so I didn't have to get into that.

     

    14 – The imperfect tense and the pluperfect tense.   Since the pluperfect is just made by adding the imperfect form of haber to the past participle of the verb (había lavado, I had washed) the two tenses go together quite nicely into the same lesson.  Thanks to Latin, they already know what the pluperfect is for and how to translate it.

     

    15 – Dissecting the noun phrase.  I presented this lesson as a lecture, after which I gave them an open-notes pop quiz.  Here's the gist of it:

    • The noun phrase is the part of a sentence that names participants in the action that's laid out in the verb phrase. 
    •  All nouns have gender.  They know about that from Latin, and were cheered to find out that there were only masculine and feminine, not neuter.  
    • All nouns have number.  
    • Nouns do not have case.  (More cheering.)
    • Common nouns need a "determiner" such as an article; proper nouns don't.  (Here I discovered that they were rusty on the proper-common distinction, so we veered into a general grammar lesson for a while.)    
    • Determiners and adjectives must agree with the noun in gender and number.  
    • Adjectives can come before or after the noun, and the placement affects the meaning.  
    • The entire noun phase may be replaced by a pronoun.

     

    16 – Plural forms.  Rules for making a singular word (noun or adjective) plural.

    17 – Feminine forms.  Rules for making the feminine-singular form of an adjective when they know the masculine-singular form.  We compared this to what we know of 1st/2nd-declension adjectives in Latin.

    And that's where I stopped.  By the end of that they were translating things along the lines of "Hace cuatro días la niña sufría.  Luego el médico la ha socorrido."  ("Four days ago the girl was suffering.  Later the doctor helped her.")  And "El espectáculo se ha acabado.  En seguida el auditorio ha aplaudido.  Luego lo loaban."  ("The show finished.  At once the audience applauded.  Later they were praising it.")

    I think that's not bad for 17 lessons, eh?

    Now we're starting something new:  we're using a Pimsleur audio course to work on spoken Spanish. I'm interspersing audio lessons with grammar and translation lessons based on the material in the audio course.  

    For example, after the first audio lesson, which introduces the utterances Entiendo ("I understand") and ¿Entiende? ("Do you understand?"), I taught them on paper to conjugate entender, which has regular endings but, like many, many otherwise-regular Spanish verbs, undergoes a stem change ("in the boot", as my high school French teacher called it when French verbs did it)  to make entiendo, entiendes, entiende, entendemos, entendéis, entienden.  This is a recurring pattern, and is necessary to know if you're going to try to find verbs like this in the dictionary.  

    After subsequent audio lessons, I did translation exercises based entirely on phrases that had been spoken in the most recent lesson.

    I didn't have any goals, starting out, other than to see what would happen, how fast they could learn, if we built on what we already knew from Latin.   I'm really pleased with how it's going.

     

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  • Zoning quirks.

    A number of people, some in my area, were surprised by my comment in the last post that we can't legally finish our basement in Minneapolis.

    Lemme  'splain.  

    • Our lot is zoned R1A:  residential, single-family.  
    • R1A properties are zoned for a minimum lot size of 5,000 square feet and a minimum floor area ratio of (habitable floor area)/(lot area) = 0.5 .
    • The lot is nonconforming, only 4800 square feet.
    •  All the other lots in the neighborhood are also nonconforming, because they were created before the current minimum lot size went into effect. 
    • Nonconforming properties are not the same as "illegal properties."  A great deal of properties in Minneapolis are nonconforming, because the zoning changes all the time.
    • Just because a property is nonconforming doesn't mean you can't sell it (without an issue) or live in it.
    • They do create an issue for new building permits. You have to get a variance from the city to pull a permit for creating anything that is new that will not conform to the zoning code. 
    • We had to do that in 2005 when we split the lot we owned from 9600 square feet to 4800 square feet — even though all the neighboring lots are also 4800 square feet, we had to get a variance to create two new lots < 5000 square feet each.   (We built our current house in 2006 on one of the two smaller lots, and sold the other lot along with the house we lived in previously.)
    • We do not have a variance for the minimum floor area ratio on our lot.
    • In R1A at this time no building permit will be issued without a variance for a new multifamily dwelling (even though the neighborhood is full of duplexes).
    • Similarly, no building permit will be issued for a new dwelling that would have a habitable floor area > 0.5 (lot area). 
    • And no building permit will be issued without a variance for any construction that will expand the habitable floor area past the minimum floor area ratio.  So our home is limited to 2400 square feet habitable space, even though many pre-existing homes don't conform to this and can legally be sold with no trouble.
    • In the past few years the rules were stringently tightened up for awarding variances. 
    • If we were trying to get the same variance we got in 2005 to split our old double lot today, we probably would not be allowed to, and building the house we own would not be possible.
    • Obviously it is possible to finish the basement on our own without pulling a permit and thereby coming to the city's attention. 
    • But it isn't legal.  

    That's the story.

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  • This post is so I won’t forget.

    I am coming off an almost golden weekend, chiefly because I got enough sleep.  

    + + +

    But perhaps the causality is not quite so simple.  Here's another data point:  Two weekends ago I also got plenty of sleep.  The last waking act I committed was, on Friday afternoon, to make a pot of chicken soup*, and then — as soon as Mark got home — I crawled into bed with a box of tissues and a bag of cough drops and stayed there until, oh, three or four o'clock on Sunday.  I did emerge, wrapped in a blanket, to watch Blue's Clues with the 2-year-old while everyone else went to Mass.

    It was great.  I love it when I'm just sick enough to stay in bed and not be bothered, and there's actually someone else around to take care of everyone else and make it possible.  There's something wonderfully decadent about feeling just bad enough to justify spending the day in bed, and it's truly a luxury to be able to afford it — because of a background of good health and another adult in the family who can take over for a couple of days.

    I thought a lot about Jen Fulwiler during those hours, counting my blessings and offering them up.  I'd have offered my sufferings, what with being sick and all, but as you can see I was enjoying it far too much to make that possible.

    + + +

    Again, that was two weekends ago.   I wrote on Facebook that my second superpower is, apparently, the ability to get sick on Friday afternoon and be up and about by Monday morning.**   But this past weekend I still felt kind of draggy, draggy enough that I rolled over and went back to sleep when my Saturday morning alarm went off.  

    That's a big deal.  Normally I flee the house on Saturday mornings, desperate for a few hours to myself.  The thought of an omelette and a bottomless cup of coffee and a Wi-fi connection in a busy Lyndale Avenue café that opens at 6:30 a.m. is plenty motivation for me to roll out of bed and get started on a string of solitary errands.  Not this weekend.  I didn't wake up until 8:30 when children were jumping on me. 

    So I got up, and Mark made coffee, and I made waffles and topped them with my stealthily-purchased, carefully-hdden half-pint of fresh blueberries.  As I munched on my waffles, I pondered the lovely feeling of having slept until late in the morning.  Over the waffles I made a deal with Mark that we would go to Mass at five o'clock and then we would sleep in on Sunday, which meant that I had to run my errands (and go to the gym, and have lunch) in a space of about four hours.  

    He agreed, and offered to do the quarterly big-box discount-store dry-goods shopping while I was gone.  Now that's a good husband.

    I ran some errands (library, office supply store), went to the gym and ran three miles, and then took myself out for a Vietnamese iced coffee and a killer bowl of bún bò Huế  for a late lunch at Quang.  It had to be done.  

    (Man, if I ever move away from this town, one thing I'm going to miss are the Vietnamese restaurants.  Never lived in a town that had so many good ones, unless you count Lyon — and back then I was distracted by other food.  Vietnamese restaurants are so well-integrated here that it's not terribly unusual to see bánh mì sandwiches on lunch menus among the reubens and bacon cheeseburgers.)

    I made it back home in time to help put the paper towels and dish soap and toothbrush family-packs away, and then we went to Mass in time to send those who wanted to go into Confession first, and then it was back home for a late supper of falafel-from-a-box and coleslaw.  Mark and I split a big Belgian-style ale*** and stayed up late.  

    And that —  letting the dinner dishes sit and the children run away to play video games while the two of us kill a bottle together — is about as good as domestic bliss gets around here.

    + + +

    Sunday was for sleeping in.  I sent a child to fetch bacon from the basement freezer, and we made enough so that everyone could have LOTS (three whole strips!), plus I baked a batch of cinnamon drop biscuits — read, ordinary drop biscuits with extra sugar and cinnamon added, and more sprinkled on top, so that no one felt the need to drown them in honey.  I don't think we had breakfast till 10:15, which is CRAZY.  

     I sat around in my pajamas and read stories to kids.  Mark wandered around in a bathrobe with a cup of coffee and occasionally moved pieces around on the chessboard, which was spread out among the breakfast dishes.  After a while we wandered downstairs (I dragged a blanket with me to wrap myself in) and sat amongst the junk in our kid-cave, discussing plans for it.

    See, we have a basement that's a sort of half-hearted kid-cave.  We've already hit the maximum finished square footage we are allowed by the city to have in our house, so we can't "finish the basement" (well, we could, but we'd be breaking the law).  There's some drywall up to separate the space into a pantry, a shop, and a kid-cave, and there's a big carpet scrap on the floor, and a pile of mattresses under a dozen or so climbing holds that Mark bolted to the wall, and a 10-year-old TV/DVD combo (with a cathode ray tube in it!)  and a bunch of shelves that are supposed to store toys but generally stand empty.

    Our new project is to transform the basement into a better kid cave — and here's the key — without actually "finishing" it. In the legal sense.

    So we made some plans — drew them in pencil on the wall, because you can do that when your basement is unfinished — for more climbing holds and a real climbing-wall mat and such — and then we went upstairs and bought a flat-screen TV with a tilting wall mount, so we can get rid of the old TV and the shelves right away.  At least as soon as it gets here.

    + + +

    Somewhere in there we ate cereal and crackers and canned kippers for lunch.  And then I did my school planning while everyone else cleaned up the kitchen.  And then we went out for cheeseburgers and fries so we wouldn't have to clean the kitchen again. and I ATE A WHOLE PLATTER OF CHEESEBURGER AND FRIES BECAUSE I DO THAT SOMETIMES AND IT WAS GOOD.  It was Surly Sunday at the cheeseburger place (think Five-Guys style, only locally owned and with local beer) and so I split a Furious with Mark and leaned back and felt the mild buzz and felt full of cheeseburger and beer and listened to the kids chattering about Mario Kart and DAMMIT I was happy.

    And then we came back to my clean house and played board games with the kids until bedtime.

    And I swear it does not get better than this, forever and ever amen.

     

     

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    Footnotes:

    *recipe here, except I didn't have any potatoes and used a can of hominy instead, and it turned out great

    **My first superpower is the ability to decide, just in the nick of time, that I really need to check on the kids.  Once I found my two-year-old, and H.'s, having just dumped a 5-lb sack of sugar on the driveway, on their hands and knees just about to start licking it up.  

    ***technically, brewed by Samuel Adams, but it tasted fine with falafel-from-a-box

     

     

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  • Bun bo hue, three bites in – @ Quang.

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  • I am hiding in my room to write this post.

    Man, do I hate the first couple of days back at school after a long break.

    Yesterday we had our “reading day” to wean them off the steady diet of video games and TV they enjoyed during our extended stay at the g-parents’. No screen time except for the hour after lunch (the usual amount), but they could play or read or go outside — whatever — while I got my schoolroom back together and figured out what I needed to do next. That went fine.

    Today I sat across the table from my 6- and 9-year-olds and watched — exhorted — declaimed — pulled my hair out as each of them took TWO HOURS to do a math lesson that should have been about half an houris (20 minutes, tops, for the 6-yo). My 9-yo has just started a new 4th-grade book that eases into things, and the first section of his lesson was simply to write out eleven different numbers, some given in digits to be spelled out in words, some spelled out to be written in digits. He was given a chart with all the necessary words spelled out, and a list of the hyphenation rules to refer to.

    Readers, this is not a child with a learning disability. Readers, it took me more than an hour to exhort him to finish this lesson-part, occasionally having to run after him and bring him back to his desk (“Oh, yeah! I have to do my math!”), and he STILL miscopied “ninty” for “ninety” AND left out all the hyphens.

    And let’s not talk about the 6-yo. Things weren’t so different for her.

    You know, I am never tempted to send the children to school. Really, I am not. For one thing, I have never done it, so I have no memories of a golden age when I got several hours of quiet time every day, or a chance to work for wages at a job among grownups. For another thing, I am perfectly aware that problems I can see happening before my own eyes might well slip under the radar of an instructor, however gifted, in a classroom of twenty-five children. For a third thing, I am quite intellectually convinced of the adequacy of homeschooling and of the reasons it is the best choice for our family.

    But I am tempted to raid the pile of Christmas chocolates at tea-snack time and then hide upstairs under the guise of taking a loooooooong shower. Also to spend the day shrieking things like, “Do you KNOW how RIDICULOUS this is? Do you know you could have been done with this NINETY MINUTES AGO? What is going on? No, it isn’t because you are bad at math, it is because you are CHOOSING not to SIT in your chair and DO it!”

    Something about there being two children instead of one who are both pulling the same thing, right in front of me, is crazy-making. I can only “make” one of them work at a time. When I turn to one, the other twirls her chair, sneaks jawbreakers out of her desk and wanders off to look for scissors to open them with; when I notice she is gone and go after her, the first one starts drawing ninjas in the corner of his paper.

    I hope this is a passing phase related to the “first week back” phenomenon. Because while I am not exactly tempted to quit, I am sorely tempted to cast about wildly for something, anything, that will “work,” whether that is concomitant with my long-term goals and values or not.

    Or just to give up and start drawing ninjas myself. Pass the chocolate.

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    6 comments on I am hiding in my room to write this post.

  • Resolutions, federal and personal.

    We're having a "reading day" today:

    •   I am catching up on organizing my schoolroom, planning the schedule, and knocking items off my to-do list.  
    • The children are permitted to do whatever they like as long as it doesn't involve the computer, video games, or TV.
    • Except after lunch, when we'll all have our usual "break time" including the possibility of movies.

    It's my way of easing back into the schedule.  I hope to school them tomorrow.

    + + +

    Right now one child is still asleep (I suspect him of having stayed up late reading) and the other three are outside in the snow, with Vaseline on their faces to protect them from chapping; it's about ten degrees out.  I don't know how much time I have to write before I have to start guiltily up from the computer (it's a reading day, remember?  I'm trying to set a good example).

    + + +

    Did you know that the federal government has helpfully suggested some New Year's Resolutions for you?  If that isn't an argument for subsidiarity, I don't know what is.  Let's use them as a starting point for discussion. 

    Drink less alcohol.   Sorry, government.  I resolve to drink more alcohol.  One "standard" drink per day is good for most women and I don't measure up, even if you correct downward for my surprising petiteness.

    Eat healthy food.  Sounds great, except that the link goes to the government's nth attempt to revise the food pyramid/plate/whatever, which although somewhat improved in recent years is still unreasonably authoritative about nutritional issues that are still unsettled.  Anyway, I don't make food-related resolutions as they're bad for my mental health.

    Get a better education.  I resolve to do the opposite:  give a better education.

    Get a better job.  Impossible for me.  

    (And goodness me, considering the unemployment rate, I rather think it rude to be suggesting this as a "resolution.")

    Get fit.  Well, I suppose I can't argue with that one.  Not many downsides to it, if you can find the time.  

    Lose weight.  I encourage people who are unhappy with their body mass to set goals not based on the body mass itself, which is out of direct control, but instead based on behavior, which is under direct control.   I would substitute this:

    "Discover behaviors which improve weight, and turn them into habits."

    Manage debt.  Interesting verb, coming from the federal government.  

    Manage stress.   There's that verb again.  

    Quit smoking.  Never started, myself, so I can't really comment.   Seems like it would be a good idea.  I wonder if cigarette sales drop every January?  (UPDATE:  January and February are indeed "low" season for cigarette sales.  The fact that it's cold and many people have to go outside to smoke is probably part of it.)

    Reduce, Reuse and Recycle.  Truth is, our family could probably stand to "reduce" a bit.   One of these days I might do the Squawkfox Food Waste Diary.  But I'm not likely to make it a New Year's resolution; more likely, a science project for one or another kid.

    Save Money.  In our household, oddly enough, we'll be trying to figure out the best way to spend a bit more this year.  And giving more away, I hope.

    Take a trip.  Well, that's a nice thought, actually.  I don't need a resolution for that, but maybe some folks do.

    Volunteer to help others.  Also a good idea.  

    + + +

    If I was feeling more smart-alecky or political this morning, I would suggest some resolutions from this citizen for the government to take on, but I'm not, really.

    I don't have any particular resolution in mind this year.  I think I will put that sort of thing off till Lent.  I am not well-suited to resolutions, precisely because they appeal to me so much; I tend toward the control-freak, the inflexible, the planning and planning and planning.   It would be better for me to resolve to live in the moment more, but I'm not sure it's helpful to do that in a solemn declaration of how I will spend the next 365 days.

    UPDATE.  Check out Monday's xkcd, which I just got around to reading today, and remember to read the mouseover text.  He's playing it for laughs, but I agree.

     

     

     

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    1 comment on Resolutions, federal and personal.

  • Just like a movie.

    Q.  What do these two films have in common?

    + + +

    BridesheadFirst:  The 1981 miniseries adaptation of Evelyn Waugh's classic novel Brideshead Revisited:  The Sacred & Profane Memories of Captain Charles Ryder.   This British production ran for 11 episodes and starred Jeremy Irons  as the somewhat awestruck protagonist of "no family or money" who becomes entangled in the intense family drama surrounding wealthy and eccentric school-chum Lord Sebastian Flyte.  Themes of aristocracy, addiction, decadence, and redemption dominate.  The series won several prestigious awards, including BAFTA television awards for best drama series, best costume design, and best actor, and numerous Golden Globes and Primetime Emmy awards in the U. S.

     

     

    + + +

     
    TropicthunderSecond:   Tropic Thunder, a 2008 movie directed by Ben Stiller, in which Robert Downey, Jr. appears in blackface. 

     

     

     

     

     

     

    + + +

    If you guessed, "These are the  two movies personally recommended to the author of this blog by the authors of DarwinCatholic Blog during a jambalaya-fueled, nine-children-strong sleepover, complete with a midnight power outage that necessitated burning their Advent wreath down to waxy nubbins so we could see well enough not to spill our drinks," well, then, you win.

    Somewhat improbably, I suppose.

    + + +

    "This is great, Dad!  It's just like a movie!" exclaimed my twelve-year-old when Darwin and Mark brought some candles up to the bedroom that my two oldest boys were sharing with us.

    "Yeah!  And now's when the monster should come and get us!" chimed in my nine-year-old. 

    No monsters, sad to say, but I think it will have been memorable nonetheless.

    + + +

    Despite never going to any official convention-type gatherings, I have been lucky enough to meet several other bloggers (or mail-list colleagues) in person by now.  Blogging is an exhiliarating hobby for a semi-recluse like me; to myself I seem more expressive in writing than in person, certainly more comfortable.   I love getting to know other people through text, and it's always a little intimidating meeting them in person — because I know that sometimes there are surprises, wow-your-voice-doesn't-sound-anything-like-I-imagined-it moments.

    Not always, mind you.  Some of the people I've met have meshed seamlessly with the picture in my head created by their online persona.  But there are enough discrepancies to be jarring, and that makes me wonder what kind of impression I produce when I am "finally" met face to face.

    Having met the Darwins, kids and all, for two multi-hour visits (about a year apart) now, I have discovered something:  Time resolves these discrepancies.

     Having gotten to know their online personae pretty well in years of blogreading, I had  had a real "wow, you're different from how I imagined you" moment on that first visit.  The second time, though, the dual images before us —- the real people who welcomed us into their big old house and let our kids pack down the snow in the driveway with their sleds, and the husband-and-wife blogging team we know from the combox — seemed to me to waver and cross, to come together and make more sense.  Maybe it was me loosening up (like I said, I'm intimidated by these first-time meetings), or maybe it was the chance to read Darwin Catholic Blog for a year while hearing the real voices of the narrators in my head, or maybe it is just the effects of a few hours' conversation.

    I wonder if it's related to an odd thing I noticed:  When you're heading out to meet a blogger in person for the first time, and you're on the road with your cell phone and you've got their number, and you need to say "hey, I'll be just a couple minutes late, you'll know me because I'm wearing a red hat"— doesn't it seem like it would be wrong, a major faux pas, to call them on their cell and make them answer it and listen to their voice?  You send a text or an instant message, don't you?  Doesn't it feel impossible to do anything else?  Am I right?

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  • Brief story about the adoption of teenagers.

    Here is a short, hope-affirming story about the adoption of teenagers in Minnesota. Some of the metrics have improved a lot in the state, perhaps brought about by these changes:

    Some of the state’s progress has to do with its diversion programs, which keep families intact and children out of foster care. But state officials believe the adoption process is quicker and more aggressive as well. In two years, the state has halved the number of kids seeking adoptions who reach age 18 without parents. And over the past decade, the state has reduced the time it takes to move children from state guardianships to finalized adoptions from 24 months to 16 months.

    County workers now ask older foster children about influential relatives, teachers or other adults in their past and follow up with those adults to see if they’d consider adoption. Private agencies, hired by the state, assist counties in finding matches for adoptive children, and recruiting families even if they had stopped pursuing adoption. Pre-adoption classes emphasize the needs of teens and dispel myths that they don’t benefit from adoption as much.

    The article highlights one adoptive family, headed by a widowed mother of a younger teenager.

    I almost can’t imagine the difficulty of welcoming an older child with a troubled, loss-filled past into my family. The article left me wanting to know more about the families who are making it work, and the ones who are struggling, in my state. And it left me wondering about the outcomes — those that can be measured and counted, and those that can’t — for adults who were adopted as teens.

     

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    1 comment on Brief story about the adoption of teenagers.

  • Some closure in Indianapolis.

    Because I have an unhealthy interest in the investigations that follow upon things that blow up, I have been following the story from Indianapolis about the house that exploded — in an extraordinarily, unusually powerful natural gas explosion — on November 10. (It’s been on Twitter under the hashtag #indyboom since thirty seconds after the explosion, later supplemented by the somewhat less gauche #indyexplosion after it became clear that people had likely died.)

    Arson and murder charges were filed a couple of days ago against the homeowner, her live-in boyfriend, and the boyfriend’s brother, who apparently blew up the house in order to split the insurance money.

    This lengthy article from the Indianapolis Star details what has to be one of the most boneheaded criminal scheme (in the sense of the criminals’ almost guaranteeing that they’d be caught) ever. It would be laughable, if it weren’t for the fact that two neighbors lost their lives, other neighbors were injured, 31 houses were destroyed or condemned, and about 60 more houses were damaged.

    The piece seems to be a pretty good example of in-depth reporting, assuming that the facts as reported are accurate. I hope the affected families will feel one step closer to justice by Christmastime. Spare the young daughter of the homeowner a thought or prayer if you can; she will have a tough Christmas.

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  • The semiannual retrospective, part IV: sticking to it through the ups and downs. ALSO comparison to nicotine.

    Intro to this series. Part I. Part II. Part III.

    Sometimes I forget, but most mornings I still weigh myself. I keep a homemade Excel chart on the bathroom counter (next to the other chart); I pencil in a little dot. Each graph lasts a calendar month. At the end of each month I file away each graph in a three-ring binder.

    It is hard for me to let go of data.

    Despite that, I try to maintain a certain distance from the numbers. The numbers aren’t my target; behaviors that keep me mentally and physically healthy, and non-gluttonous, are my target. The numbers only serve as a signal that my habits and behaviors are working — and only in one particular way. I know this intellectually, but I have to work at it to believe it.

    + + +

    So let’s say that I have observed my weight creeping up. (Hypothetically, ahem.) That’s the wake-up call to deal with habits that I already know have been slipping. Gluttony creeping back in:

    • second servings just because I can,
    • eating the children’s leavings,
    • joining in on bedtime snacks just because everyone else is,
    • feeling full and still going because there’s still some pleasure to be had on the plate.

    I start paying attention to all these, keeping a pack of gum in my pocket and leaving the serving dishes in the kitchen and so forth, and invariably the weight dips back down the first couple of days while I am focused.

    What happens next is kind of funny.

    If I stay focused, and the weight keeps going down, a little voice in my head urges me to make an Akron U-turn. “Look how great I am doing! I guess I don’t really have to change my habits after all! My numbers are lovely! I can go back to big portions and extra chocolate at bedtime!”

    (As I wrote on the Akron U-Turn post, this is certifiably insane. X causes Y, therefore Y is inevitable.)

    If I don’t stay quite as focused, and the weight pops back up — maybe not as far up as it had been, but not dropping quite so fast — a little voice in my head urges me to give up since “it isn’t working anyway.” This is also certifiably insane, and is in fact the exact opposite argument being made by the Akron U-Turn voice.

    Picture on my shoulders — not the angel and the demon, but a skinny demon and a fat demon. They take turns. The skinny demon’s line is “You’re doing great! You can afford to be a little gluttonous!” The fat demon’s line is “Give it up! You might as well be a glutton for all the good this is doing you!”

    I am telling you, there is part of my brain that will try anything, including the complete suspension of logic, in order to get more cake.

    + + +

    I guess there are two counter-thoughts I could be having here.

    When the number on the scale makes me happy, I can think: “What I am doing is working well. Keep it up.”

    When the number on the scale makes me worried, I can think: “I know what I need to do. I have done it before.”

    So I am working on that.

    One thing that is definitely getting better is the long-term view. I keep coming back to that. Because this is a rest-of-my-life thing, it is okay if the trends are really, really slow and slight. I don’t really care about getting quickly back to my target. I only care about not getting farther away and making course corrections that nudge me back to where I am going.

    + + +

    As an almost but not entirely unrelated matter: there was a thread on the front page of reddit today about smoking cessation. The question went like this:

    Ex-smokers of reddit, what was your motivation and/or technique for giving up?

    First, I think this person was right to post the question to /r/askreddit (which is a general-interest subreddit) and specifically asking “ex-smokers,” rather than posting to /r/stopsmoking and getting answers from a lot of people who are still struggling with their addiction.

    And I thought to myself — where would people struggling with nicotine addiction be if mostly they just turned for advice to people who haven’t (yet) successfully quit, or to people who never had an addiction in the first place? It seems pretty obvious that while they are not the only source of useful advice for would-be quitters (the medical profession probably has at least some), those who’ve been addicted and managed to quit would be a good population to turn to. Learn from the proven.

    The same thing could be said for the battle against gluttony and sloth (and by extension, excess adiposity). It is really surprising how much of the popular narrative is devoted to pointing out that few people succeed permanently, without rounding up a bunch of successful losers and trying to learn from them.

    That being said, I noticed as I was lurking on the reddit “how did you quit?” question that there was a great deal of variety in the answers. One swore by antidepressants, another warned against them. Many said that cold-turkey was the only way, others thought that cold-turkey approaches were doomed to fail and advised keeping a pack of cigarettes around to ease the really bad cravings. E-cigarettes and patches were common tools, but some didn’t find them helpful at all. For some, a “wake-up call” was all they needed (becoming a father, coughing up a wad of black stuff, counting up the yearly cost) and for others, mental effort alone wasn’t enough.

    I have never been addicted to nicotine (never smoked a cigarette in my life, in fact), so I can’t directly compare the two experiences of kicking nicotine and kicking gluttony.* However, I was struck by the similarities evident in the list. Highly personalized approach; the necessity of learning to deal with physical suffering; the way it gets slowly better with time, even though relapse is always a sobering possibility; the knowledge that even though it is hard, some people do succeed, every year.

    [Editing note.  Years and years later, I wish I’d done a better job distinguishing gluttony from other problems with food, like clinical eating disorders and other kinds of compulsiveness.  

    I want to emphasize that, whereas I identified some behaviors in myself that probably qualified as self-centered gluttony in the technical sense, I am not and never have been qualified to make that distinction for anyone else.

    I hope to add some commentary to all the posts that have this problem as I find the time to review them.  Here’s a more recent post where I acknowledge some of the problematic material I wrote and set new ground rules for myself going forward.]

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  • In praise of banal little posts.

    I've not stopped posting on Facebook* (and occasionally on Twitter) even though my blog is really anemic right now.  I seem only to have little, short things to say.

    Facebook is derided for good reason because it's full of people announcing ordinary things.  I daresay that a large number of the FB posts I see fall into the following categories:

    • I just got off work!  Or I will soon.  Or I won't for a while, poor me.
    • I'm having an alcoholic beverage!
    • I'm about to eat something!  Here is a picture of it.
    • Can you believe this interaction I just had with another human being in the real world? 
    • I have children.
    • I saw something in the news, and I have an opinion about it.

    You know, I don't mind this.  Banal small talk is much of what our loose networks of relationships are built on; some more strongly, some less, and you don't find out the strength until, out of necessity, something more than banal is called for.

    But you know what?  It's like that in real life even with normal, three-dimensional relationships.  The more you see someone, the smaller the talk can be sometimes.  

    I have been co-schooling with H. for years and years now, and a lot of our conversations are about something she cooked for dinner two days ago, or what small thing is driving me crazy, or our plans for the weekend.  Occasionally we get to sit down and plot out next year's literature class or troubleshoot one another's battle against chaos, but mostly it's the little updates.  Staying in touch with each other and each other's children.

    I have been married for fourteen years now, a good marriage if I may say so myself, and some weeks it seems as if the exact same exchanges happen across the breakfast table day after day after day.  They are for the most part happy, loving exchanges that reinforce the essential goodness of the phenomenon that is us.  Some of them involve inquiries about when the minivan will be taken in for service and whether our daughter was given her medication on time yesterday.  

    Internet friends, it's okay if the only post of substance you made this week was to explain the new recipe you tried.  (Even better if you said what you did for side dishes and how you got your kids to eat it without complaining.) I'm paying attention.  

    Sometimes the mommyblogs can get you down, what with all the exuberant bragging about things that went well.  FB seems to be more populated with the wry wisecracks about normal life.  I kind of like that. 

    Once I visited the home of someone I knew well from the Internet, someone whom I thought of as kind of an amazing person, a superstar in the crunchy homeschooling breastfeeding homebirthing world.   It was the first time I'd met her in real life, and she had invited me and my kids for lunch while I was in town.  I was a little bit in awe, to tell you the truth, as I knocked on her door.

    She welcomed us in and performed an act of generous hospitality for us for which I will forever be grateful:  she served us boxed macaroni and cheese.

    ("Annie's Naturals," of course.  But still.)

    And that business being out of the way, we sat down and had a great conversation, getting on with the business of knowing and getting to know.  Which is about not worrying whether your presentation is perfect or your wit sparkling:  it's jumping off from the points that present themselves in your ordinary life, seeing where they can take you.

     

     

     

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    *I intentionally keep my friend list pared down on FB, and regularly prune it.  I am unlikely to approve a friend request from a blog reader unless we have met in real life or otherwise Go Way Back (or unless I am a squealy fan of your own blog, a category specially created for Simcha Fisher).  It's nothing personal; that's just what I use it for.  You're welcome to follow me on Twitter where my handle is my real first and last name, no spaces, but I'm not very active there as of yet.

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    3 comments on In praise of banal little posts.

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