30 September 2013

I Deserve a Medal or Something

First off, I have to admit to screaming my head off this morning.  There was this HUGE spider with wickedly long arms right in the middle of the curtain that separates our downstairs from our family room.  It had to die.  And I couldn't see any way to kill it.  And I had a child sleeping downstairs.

I got "air freshener" out and prepared myself.  If it jumped straight up, it would be able to attack my face only two feet away!  But I was brave.  I took a big breath, braced myself, and sprayed all over the spider's face.  The spider hid in the folds of my curtains and it the whole room really stank now.  I eventually, with much screaming and jumping, was able to corner it and kill it.  The long and grabbing arms were all splayed out everywhere.  I was too scared to pick it up!

Lots more screaming and yelling.  I made my children pick it up and throw it out because, I reasoned, I killed it and did my part. 

My throat is still sore from all the howling I did.  And I wrenched my elbow somehow in all the spider-killing heroics.  I'm feeling all twitchy and creepy and checking everywhere for spiders constantly.

29 September 2013

Old People in Love

"Til death do us part – Nilles figure that's at least another six years." 

Oh wow.  What a sweet article about a pair of older folks who recently married at the Cock-a-doodle Doughnut shop. 

27 September 2013

What Do Librarians Do Again?

Library Director Marie Gandron publicly stated that the kid who won the Hudson Falls summer reading award for five straight years was a "hog" earlier this year.  The library adopted a new way to count awards and prizes.  But another librarian dared speak up for the kid and stated that in her opinion, awards ought be given out by merit.  Hum.  Oh, budget cut, bla bla, staff reconfiguration, whatever.  She's canned.

I could see limiting a major prize win to once per child.  Or even reconfiguring prizes.  I mean, really... who cares.  But calling a kid a "hog" for the media is uncalled for.  So is firing someone for disagreeing over a stupid library award.  Wow.

23 September 2013

Woodjie Update!

Woodjie is in first grade now!  He can read a few words.  He can write the letters of his first name somewhat legibly in mostly capital letters.  He would rather you read to him, especially from his Pokemon book. 

Every week, his class does some sort of writing exercise called "Weekend News!"  There's a little space for a picture to be drawn and a few big lines for kindergarten-spaced writing underneath.  Woodjie's para always faithfully transcribes such exciting happenings as, "I watched Curious George.  I ate Cheerios." 

Do you see his sideways tooth in the front?  G is constantly offering to pull it out for him.  It has been pretty stuck for weeks now as it has an odd shape.  When the big tooth comes in a bit further, I am sure it will come out.

Woodjie wants to tell me all about his day when he comes home.  After I commented that there was a TON of dirt in my bathtub when I drained the water, Woodjie discussed how he built "mud castles" at school.  Oh, great!  He also let me know about a girl at school.  Her name is S "and she have yellow hair and a blue eye like a baby!  Like me!"  Apparently she is also "woddaful" and "beautiful" and "a princess."

I thought we had a few more years to wait before this happened, but I guess not.

22 September 2013

Girls With Short Hair

Here's Rose after I chopped a good five inches of hair off her head.  I think she looks very pretty with short hair.  Unless I let her hair grow out long, it's hard to take care of.  When it's long, it tends to fall out in patches.  So this is about the best I can do.

Hairstyle-wise, though, she's in good company.  This is a picture of my grandmother in 1917.  I couldn't quite bring myself to get that brave with the scissors.  It's an adorable look, though, especially with the gigantic bow.  Given the pictures of my Grandma Max fishing, riding horses and generally running all over the place, I don't think this was her "everyday look."

Oh, Wow.

Over 58,000 pounds of school lunch beef was recalled because of "customer complaints" about plastic in the food.   Brilliant. 

Not mentioned in a recent news article?  How many children ate this stuff, what particular kind of plastic it was, how big the pieces of plastic were (were they ground with the beef and most pieces not noticeable?), and whether each and every consumer's family were informed of what took place.

There are, of course, no reported injuries or illness due to eating this meat.  Notice they never said how many children actually ate meat with bits of plastic in them.

Haven't we learned from our friends in India that school lunches are dangerous?

20 September 2013

A Note From My Inbox

 The sender has given me permission to share this with you:

We all can agree harming another human being because of a diagnosis of autism is wrong and certainly illegal in our society. During this month, we have seen on discussion boards, Facebook, and media reports, many folks saying they can understand the stress and pressure of the parent which may suggest justification for the harm done. The Autism Society, self advocates, and others, have said there can never be any justification or toleration of harming a person living with autism or any disability in our society. 

We believe one of the solutions would be to provide more responsive crisis supports for parents, caretakers and individuals living with autism so they can receive help to deal with day-to-day challenges. Society must do a much better job of being there to help the person in crisis and be there to protect the person who may be harmed. 

The Autism Society has a seven day a week Contact Center that can help anyone feeling overwhelmed, hopeless and in need of support. If anyone reading this needs help, please call us at

1-800-3-AUTISM (Spanish support provided)

We will always advocate against any effort of harming of a person simply because the individual has autism.  Remember, we are here to help those living with autism and their families, please call!

19 September 2013

18 September 2013

Homeschool Update!

Rose can read many things, and is starting to learn to write a little.  She understands the concept of addition with simple numbers, but hasn't memorized any math facts yet.  I told her if she learns just a little bit every day, she will be a big person who can do almost anything in just a few years. 

17 September 2013

Problems in Lee's Summit

The following is a copy/paste facebook status from a good friend I "met" almost six years ago on the blogs.  She hasn't blogged in a long time, but we've kept in contact and shared our ups and downs over the years.  This is definitely a down. I have her permission to share this with you:

My friends in Lee's Summit need to be aware of something that happened to me yesterday. I met my C25K friends at Lowenstein Park off Chipman & Pryor at 7:30am, took out my phone and my key and put my purse on the backseat floor and we took off as usual, though this is only the third time we had used this park as opposed to the middle school track. There were several people already out, it wasn't by any means a deserted park.

We weren't gone but a few minutes when I looked across the park and noticed what I thought was my window down and a car leaving the upper parking lot where it was. I still didn't connect the dots. When we jogged by my car, I realized it was broken. The person leaving the lot had been somewhere watching, probably on the lower lot, knowing that I was not going to take my purse with me. As soon as we were far enough away not to get there in time, he jumped into action. Creepy stuff.

That in itself is annoying and will cost financially to replace the window, not to mention the tons of things I now have to replace from my wallet. But what I want you, Lee's Summit friends, to know is that the police said this happens at this park EVERY DAY. Every.stinking.day. They have, I'm told, asked that a sign be posted warning unsuspecting people that their belongings are not safe locked in their own cars. But the city of Lee's Summit doesn't think this would look good--after all, this is a nice little park with a jogging trail, playground, waterfall, all the good stuff! Why would they want to inform the hundreds of daily users that there is a VERY REAL POSSIBILITY THEY WILL BE ROBBED at this park and allow its citizens to make choices that would minimize or eliminate the possibility in the first place? It's not their stolen money and time, after all. If they KNOW there is an issue, then they are responsible for fixing that issue and that would include not only signs posted at both parking lots but also the installation of security cameras. EVERY DAY this happens at this park. Now, in afterthought, I GET why the Parks & Rec truck happened upon that parking lot just a few minutes after they arrived--they know the routine and they know they need to get the miniscule amount of glass that did NOT fall into my car cleaned up.

What if a young mother unknowingly happens upon this crime in progress? This could quite likely happen, given that this crime occurs here every single day. At Lowenstein Park. And a very real danger to the well-being of the citizens who believe this is a wonderful family park. It's an easy target for criminals, quick access to highways and a busy shopping center. And lined with trees so anyone driving by would never know something was up without pulling into the parking lot.

I just thought you should know, because apparently the City of Lee's Summit does not.

16 September 2013

Goodyyyy! New Home Learning Association!

My social networks, email and ohh, everything are just buzzing with talk of a new, national homeschooling association!  I have to say they've done a great job, PR-wise, on getting the word out.

It's headed by some J. Allen Weston, who has practically zero internet history.  So either he's known by his first name and just decided to use his middle name for the business, or there's something going on there.

That's the first thing.

Next, I decided to take a peek at the place and see what they're about.  Yeah, yeah, lots of exciting talk about helping homeschoolers, national center, massive discounts with the free membership and bla bla bla.  But get this:  they want to "certify" homeschool teachers.  (Just buy these five DVDs.) They also want member families to be "able to earn money by marketing products of HLF affiliated companies such as the Homeland Preservation Supply Depot and Natures Favorite Foods." Article.

This is just the kind of crap I want to get away from by homeschooling!  If I wanted a certified teacher, I could enroll my daughter tomorrow.  And fundraising?  Who really wants to do that?  Bah.

It does show that maybe there's a lot of money to be made from insecure homeschoolers today.

14 September 2013

20 Athletes That Died Before Their Career Was Over

I read the headline, "20 Athletes That Died Before Their Career Was Over" and thought that here were some truly spectacular sports players.  It takes a lot of physical fitness and stamina to continue playing a sport at a professional level after death.  That, or whatever illegal drug they're taking to boost their performance?  I want that.

Turns out when I clicked over to the actual story, that it was really more like a "20 athletes that died before they were over 45 and tore up every ligament in their bodies" sort of story.  Which, meh, is not as exciting.

13 September 2013

Politicians As Teachers

So, goody.  Mike Huckabee and Ron Paul are each hawking their own homeschool curriculum!  You know, I like these guys just fine, but no way I'm buying a politician's curriculum.  You've gotta be kidding.  I don't even allow our nation's president five minutes of my children's time when they're at school, so no way I'm going to be loaning six hours of my child's time to you every weekday.

Really.  Conservatives are buying this?

11 September 2013

Elf Was Worried About Me Today

He noticed that I had some "Aromatherapy" shampoo in the bathroom and was wondering what was wrong.  Yep.  I'm feeling much better now.

10 September 2013

The SLIME Returns!

You thought it was gone after the huge fight last year.  You thought wrong.

Seven states are ordering Pink Slime (tm) for school lunches.  This is important stuff, folks, because the school market?  Is a captive market.  Sure, I can pack lunches for my children.  But I'm not poor.  My kids aren't relying on the school as a source of nutrition and health.

We can debate all day about how wrong it is for families to rely on schools to feed their kids, and you'd be right if you said parents should feed their own kids.  But the fact of the matter is that these are the very people who are least able to fight this sort of thing from being foisted on their children.   The way the "system" is set up, poor people are less likely to be able to get away from public school.  There simply isn't enough money to feed them well on food stamps, and the school lunches are an incentive for them to show up each day.

This is all sorts of wrong, people.  And yes, I know that at $2/lunch you're not going to get organic foo-foo ingredients.  I'm ok with the greasy pizza and the fries.  That's a normal American diet and frankly?  I would want the lunches I'm helping to pay for actually be eaten.  It doesn't have to be the finest cuts of meat, but Pink Slime (tm)?  Is a step too far.

A brief description of what this stuff really is from a recent news article:
 
Considered by the beef industry to be an impressive innovation, lean finely textured beef is made from the remnant scraps of cattle carcasses that were once deemed too fatty to go into human food. The scraps are heated and centrifuged to reclaim bits of muscle and then the product is treated with ammonium hydroxide to kill bacteria like Salmonella and E. coli before being mixed into ground beef."

*barf*

The School is Watching You

All the whining about "not enough money being spent on public education" is an absolute lie.  California (allegedly) had some serious, horrible cuts to its education budget recently and yet still, one school district has so much cash that it can afford $40,000 a year to spy on its students.  The program is supposed to "catch instances of bullying or even depression before they get out of control and cause actual physical or emotional harm to the students."

I have so many problems with this, I don't know where to start.  Now, if someone were being bullied online after school by name and brought it to the attention of the teachers, they might be able to speak with the other student and solve things behind the scenes.  The internet just adds another layer to the usual teen drama/ hormones/ gossip.

But monitoring everyone?  For no reason?  And spending $40,000 to do it?  That is more than the annual income of a lot of hard-working people.  That is obscene, to spend that kind of money to peek at teen Instagram/cleavage shots.

Students are starting a "Remove Your School" facebook page to inform everyone that your public posts are tracked.  And by removing your school from your profile and/or setting your profile to "private," you are no longer being tracked by Big Brother.

I have another idea.  If millions of us "out there" set our profile to "Crescenta Valley Senior High," this program would be impossible to implement.  Another fun idea would be to use weird pseudonyms.  I think about every teen uses a pseudonym on facebook. 
Geo Listening out of Hermosa Beach, which will eavesdrop on public social media sites like Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram. The goal of the monitoring is to catch instances of bullying or even depression before they get out of control and cause actual physical or emotional harm to the students. - See more at: http://www.educationnews.org/technology/glendale-to-monitor-all-students-public-social-media-posts/#sthash.jLq2YkWR.dpuf
Geo Listening out of Hermosa Beach, which will eavesdrop on public social media sites like Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram. The goal of the monitoring is to catch instances of bullying or even depression before they get out of control and cause actual physical or emotional harm to the students. - See more at: http://www.educationnews.org/technology/glendale-to-monitor-all-students-public-social-media-posts/#sthash.jLq2YkWR.dpuf
Geo Listening out of Hermosa Beach, which will eavesdrop on public social media sites like Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram. The goal of the monitoring is to catch instances of bullying or even depression before they get out of control and cause actual physical or emotional harm to the students. - See more at: http://www.educationnews.org/technology/glendale-to-monitor-all-students-public-social-media-posts/#sthash.jLq2YkWR.dpuf

09 September 2013

Is Anyone REALLY Turned On by This??

Maybe don't answer that.

This Miley Cyrus person, of course I have to hear all about her despite not watching halftime at the football game, MTV awards, and so on.  She looks gross.  Most of the girls at the trailer park are way classier so I don't get why anyone is watching her.  I gather she is a musician of some sort (?).

Apparently "twerking" is the new thing and thankfully, it's not something that ladies will be able to do in the nursing home all too terribly well without throwing out their backs.  It is slightly better fashion than the "look at my underwear because I have my $200 jeans around my ankles" look, but that is not saying much.

08 September 2013

How is This "Racist?"

A politician is accused of running a racist campaign because he's getting a black family to star in TV ads and fliers.  It's terrible that this politician dares to say that New York City is really "two cities" because of great divisions of class and wealth. 

It's just wrong to use a family like that as props in a political campaign.  Mayor Bloomberg thinks it's wrong even though the family in question is actually that of his opponent.  "It's comparable to me pointing out I'm Jewish in attracting the Jewish vote," Bloomberg said recently.

Golly, my, but 1. I'd have a great deal of difficulty discerning that BloomBERG was Jewish unless he told me; and 2. Heaven forbid a man actually uses pictures of his own family when running for office.  Because that's never been done before, right?

Want to hear something really racist?  Whites only as church greeters.  You see, we want the "best of the best" out front and your black face just doesn't cut it.

Irony?  This is a mostly black church.  I don't know whether I should be sad that the self-hate of some of these folks goes so deep, or just PO'd that anyone would sit under that sort of ministry, and let their children grow up hearing that kind of stuff and absorbing it. 

07 September 2013

Let's Not Bomb Syria, K?

  I find myself opposed even to so-called "conservatives" who are willing to spend American money and risk American lives for... what?  People on all sides of the conflict hating us?  I don't think I've heard of something so stupid and pointless since Vietnam.

05 September 2013

We'll PAY You Not to Send Your Child to School

Imagine your local school district offering you $86,000 not to send your child to school ever again or sue for services. 

$86,000.  Your "child" is 21, and public school services can only last until he's 22.  I don't know about you, but I'd take the money and run.  This mom is standing up and saying no, it is his right to a public education, and I don't have the right to take that from him and neither does the school.  Well, good for her!  I just wouldn't be so moral, personally.  Maybe that's my bad.

But I think she's right.  Imagine if schools broadened this out a little and lots of us special needs parents got "offers" we couldn't refuse.  What if you were poor and making rent were a struggle?  Just say yes to never sending your kid to school again, and the money is yours.  I dunno, it just wouldn't make for a very just society, putting incentives out there like that.

What if the cops started bartering with citizens when it came to doing their jobs?  Just give me $50, and I won't write that ticket.  Or hey, that guy?  I know he's the loser who robbed you at gunpoint last week, but I'm gonna need $200 for "paperwork." 

I'm really really really really (really really) pro-homeschooling, but it saddens me when people are forced into it because schools act badly.  I'm not even sure if this offer is legal, but given the media coverage, it appears to be.

04 September 2013

School Pictures

Can you tell Emperor isn't very excited about the prospect of sharing these with you?  I think they're pretty good, though.

Why Are You Homeschooling?

So what is it, are you a religious nut, moral nut, or is something wrong with your kid?  Or does he just have a mental problem?  These were pretty much the only choices offered in a recent survey of  US Department of Education's National Center for Education Statistics (NCES).

That's right!  Our government collected and correlated data from tens of thousands of people, just to find out why we homeschoolers didn't cram our kids in the nearest local school.  Of course they didn't pester the public school parents, demanding to hear their rationale for their life choices.  (See Table 8 of their report.)

These brightbulbs also found that people with more money and more education are just plain old happier with their kids' schools.  I think I'd be pretty happy, too, if I could just blow $20,000-odd per year, per child on "tuition" alone at some of these places.  If I were having a bad day or my socks didn't match, people would start making me happy pretty quick at that price.

Hey, here's some more useful information: did you know poor people were statistically less likely to participate in school fundraising?  Here I thought the welfare mommas were the major benefactors of our local school because they have so much extra money to throw around.  SNAP benefits top out at $150/month and with that kind of cash, they're eating steaks every night and just waiting for me to show up at their door so they can give me $30/roll for gift wrap. 

Eesh.  I wonder how much money was spent on this survey.





Bringing Garbage Home

Some people up the street were throwing this table away. It was in pretty bad shape and one of the legs was off. I've glued the leg back...