Monday, July 21, 2008

weekend snippets

We fetched LT home from camp on Saturday. Originally we were not going to have to drive any boys other than our own, but then one of the other drivers had car trouble so we ended up making the trip in my parents' van and coming home with it stuffed full of sweaty, dirty boys -- some of whom were sweatier and dirtier than others, for example my son, who took the opportunity of a week away to avoid showering for six solid days. (Really, he just smelled like camping, as far as I could tell.) (Also, this was his first encounter with group showers -- "just-- showers in a room with no stalls, Mom" -- and his reaction to this encounter was a resounding I DON'T THINK SO.) Anyway, he had a good time, and the boys were perfectly friendly to him, and he branched out in some new ways (ghost stories! Wilderness survival merit badge! Archery!), and he's looking forward to next year when maybe his Dad can go.

It's really providential when you think about it that the van waited through that 240-mile drive before it died, completely and irreversibly, a quarter-mile (a downhill quarter-mile, no less!) from the chapel where the boys were to be collected by their parents. Sigh. My poor parents. I think that's the fourth or fifth time the fuel pump has gone belly-up in their (11-year-old, 180K-mile) van.

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Sunday we had the third meeting of our new fellowship in town, and I really liked it, even better than the first one. (I wasn't at the second; see above re: driving Scouts to camp.) Afterward we headed to my parents' place for the first time in a shamefully long amount of time, where the major excitement of the day was the search for my cousin's 7-year-old daughter. She and her dad are visiting from out of state, and she got lost while she was out for a walk. My dad and brother and cousin headed in one direction in trucks, while C and I and our dog and my parents' dog and my two nephews went the other direction on foot. My nephews had never met the little girl, and C had, which played into her sense of the dramatic nicely since she could fill them in: "She's SEVEN. She is ONE YEAR YOUNGER THAN ME. She is JUST A LITTLE GIRL and she DOESN'T KNOW HER WAY AROUND HERE VERY WELL. She may have been SNAKEBITTEN or KIDNAPPED. Mom, how can you be so CALM?" We found her, safe and sound and thirsty and footsore, after a passing motorist told us she'd seen a lost little girl wandering in the same direction we were but that the little girl (understandably) would not get into a car with a stranger.

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But my prolapsing mitral valve, which had not been happy all morning yesterday, protested loudly against all the jogging I did along the road during the Very Dramatic Search Effort, and I have been maddeningly annoyed by a symptom flare-up ever since.

This drives me bananas. I am SO not the invalid type. And I hate going to the cardiologist, which is why I haven't been to see one in a couple of years, and I don't want to start going again now so just GET BETTER ALREADY.

(I have a sneaking suspicion that the fact that my pants don't fit so well anymore and the fact that my stupid heart is grumpy with me may be mysteriously related to one another. Must investigate. But not too closely. Speaking of which, anyone have any chocolate?)

Monday, July 14, 2008

ok, so this is so pitiful.

Yesterday I drove a little over three hours each way in a borrowed van to drop off eight boys ages 12-16 at Scout camp. You know, I have to wonder: why don't they put Scout camps in nice, accessible places? I mean, come on, I live in the mountains and have for my whole life; I know that there are plenty of private, secluded places that aren't separated from civilization by twenty or thirty miles of harrowing, mostly-single-lane switchbacks going down cliffs into a ravine to a river and then back up the other side. It was funny, actually, because when my brother recruited me to do the driving -- out of desperation, mind you, since the person who was going to drive was ill and T had a prior commitment -- I made a rawther large stink about how I would prefer not to go via this one locally notorious bendy grade, but wanted to take the very slightly longer but much straighter (and more scenic, because the bendy grade is also very ugly, in a scrub-brush-and-bare-dirt kind of way) route through the valley. And then the last hour of the trip, unavoidable no matter what route we took, was like something you'd see in a cartoon involving a camp trailer and Daisy Duck, much more nerve-wracking and nausea-inducing (which turned out not to be an issue for any of the boys in my care, praise the Lord) than anything little old Bagby Grade could dish out. My brother was highly amused at the irony of the situation, I assure you.

Really, the drive was fun and interesting and the vanload of boys were pleasantly conversant in all kinds of topics ranging from film adaptations of books to the absence of transitional forms in the fossil record to the cyclical nature of global climate change. On the way back I was by myself, and I listened to three hours of Elizabeth Von Arnim's The Enchanted April (excellent Librivox recording here), which made the time go faster, but didn't alleviate the sadness of the fact that my boy is going to be gone for an entire week. I've been mentally preparing myself for this for months. I'm mostly past worrying that he'll be excluded by the other boys and have a terrible time (this is my own issues talking, mostly, and I realize that), and I'm OK with the fact that he'll probably get homesick at first because this is just something that people have to go through sometime, and I've never been really concerned that he'll get lost or anything frightening like that, because he's very cautious and deliberate by nature. Now I'm just faced with the reality of his absence for seven long days. This may sound silly (after all, hello, he's TWELVE; he's not exactly a needy little preschooler), but he's never been away from home for more than two nights, and we're all feeling it. He had better brace himself for a substantial onslaught of hugs when he gets home whether he wants them or not.

Tuesday, July 08, 2008

Two more books

I remembered today at the library that I'd read these, and they were really good so I wanted to mention them. Besides, what else am I going to blog about? "IT IS HOT. GARDEN IS GOOD. EATING OWN ZUCCHINI."

Oh, and "I CAN DRIVE STICK SHIFT." I haven't stalled the new car in ages. Or, OK, ten or twelve days.

Anyway. Shut up Rachel, on with the books.

The first one I saw sitting there on the New Books shelf looking all hurt because I'd forgotten to blog about it was Belong To Me by Marisa De Los Santos. (I actually think I wrote a twitter post mentioning this book, but that doesn't count, now does it.) This is a sequel to her first novel, Love Walked In, and I liked it very, very much. It picks up about five years after the previous book left off, as Cornelia and her husband (whose name I have, I'm ashamed to admit, forgotten) are moving to the suburbs. I was afraid at first that it was going to be yet another annoying "suburbs are eeeevil" novel, but it wasn't. It's a very busy novel, with a lot of things happening to a lot of people. I had a paragraph-long synopsis typed here, but I've just deleted it because the story is all the more delicious for being allowed to unfold a page at a time in front of you. I heartily recommend this book. Kat, thanks so much for pointing this author out to me.

Then I saw Run sitting there with the Ann Patchett books and realized that I hadn't blogged about it either. I think I may have even read that one before... Christmas? Can I have, possibly? I'm trying to picture myself reading it -- was it here, or at my parents'? Hmm. ANyway. Run was not as... shoot, how to describe it, as -- ethereal? beautifully unlikely? as the other Patchett books I've read. There's no deceased gay magician whose female assistant was in love with him; there's no opera diva taken hostage at a party. There's just a little girl who loves to run, and a pair of motherless college-aged brothers whose father is a Kennedy-ish politician, and a car accident in the snow, and a bit of a mystery as to how all these elements fit together. Patchett, as usual, writes a vivid and memorable story, and if it's not so brilliant a gem as Bel Canto, it's still very, very good and well worth the reading.

Wednesday, July 02, 2008

books for -- ah, heck, nevermind.

I am SO SO FAR BEHIND on books posts. I do feel bad about this. In April I actually reviewed two books right after I read them, and had the reviews (but only those two reviews) all ready to post in a "Books for April" post that never materialized, but since then I've just kind of given up and dealt with the guilt.

Maybe I'll try to do better for the second half of the year. But don't hold your breath. I'll rack my brain a bit, and dig around in my Library Elf emails, and pull out those two reviews from April, and overall just see if I can remember the more noteworthy books I've read in the past few months.

On vacation last week, I read The Book of Joe by Jonathan Tropper. Tropper is, like Nick Hornby, kind of a male Marian Keyes -- he writes about issues that are not-so-light, with a light touch and a lot of humor. On that score, The Book of Joe did not disappoint. It's about a man who has to go back to his New England hometown when his father has a stroke, which wouldn't be so bad except that the guy had, after shaking the small-town dust from his feet, written a bestselling novel that seriously trashed the people in it. They deserved it, mostly, but the author did a great job of having the reader and the character realize together that he could have handled the whole thing a leetle bit more maturely. Also, the story is structured carefully and well, with explanatory flashbacks getting closer and closer to the crux of the matter that caused the main character to feel so very bitter about the town where he grew up. However, this book did come VERY near to becoming a Very Special Episode about homosexuality and homophobia. Subject matter aside, Very Special Episodes bother me. A lot. Very well-written, and there's certainly a lot more to the story than that, so if you think you might like it anyway, dig in. (Also, that whole scene at the end? Was kind of freaky. You'll know which one I mean. Like a snowflake on his tongue? Eew.)

Sometime back in there I read The No. 1 Ladies Detective Agency, which was not at all what I expected it to be, but it was really readable and I liked it. It concerned a culture about which I knew almost nothing at all, so it was interesting from that perspective as well. I recommend it.

Oh, I also read Amsterdam by Ian McEwan. I actually don't remember a whole lot of detail about this novella, just that it was an enjoyable read with a moderately annoying (but not too surprising) dark twist at the end. I don't even remember what the source of the characters' conflict was. Oh, now that I make a serious effort it's beginning to come back, but still not completely. Whether that says more about my Swiss-cheese memory or about the quality of the story is anyone's guess. If you like McEwan, give this one a try.

Oh. I read a really strange -- but also memorable -- novel called His Illegal Self, which I picked up purely on the strength of the cover photograph and the title. It was set mostly in a commune in Australia. I liked the main character (a little boy, the son of permanently absent Communist revolutionary hippie types who is sort of accidentally abducted by another Communist revolutionary hippie type who he thinks is his mother) a lot, but I didn't like much else about the book, and the pretentiously unorthodox punctuation -- or, more specifically, the lack of it around quotations -- drove me bananas.

Hmm. Also in the Strange category -- Jenn, this is the book whose title I couldn't think of the other day, when we were talking about memoirs of people with crazy mothers or something like that -- was Her Last Death by Susannah Sonnenberg. Here's the review I put on Visual Bookshelf (which I no longer update, by the way) for that one: "Left me feeling dirty, somehow, and very glad for my ordinary humdrum wonderful relationship with my normal mother. Very well-written, but I still kind of wish I hadn't read it."

Aaaand back in April I read The Pajama Girls of Lambert Square, by Rosina Lippi. Lippi's writing and dialogue always crackle, and her characters are fresh and interesting as always. Maybe a little too fresh and interesting -- I found the agoraphobic, constantly pajama-clad female lead just that little bit too unrealistic for my suspension of disbelief to take (especially when someone so careful about her privacy hops into bed with the new guy in town practically the second she sees him. But then I guess in today's moral climate that's not unrealistic. Ahem.). Still, it's worth a read for the excellent writing, as Lippi's/Donati's books always are.

Here's the other of my April reviews -- I even formatted this one!

1. Conversations with the Fat Girl -- Liza Palmer -- 4
   
   • I liked this so much more than I thought I might. Maggie and Olivia have been best friends since they were the two designated Fat Girls in their class at school, but as the newly-thin Olivia's wedding approaches, the problems with their relationship are becoming increasingly apparent. Meanwhile, Maggie's been evicted and has a master's degree, a dead-end job, and a crush on a man she thinks is unapproachable. At first glance this seems like a typical fluffy best-friends-gone-wrong, girl-with-issues-meets-boy story, but there's a lot more to the book than that. For one thing, the writing is terrific, with believable dialogue, a steadily moving plot, and frequent sly little zingers of humor that catch you off-guard; even the chapter titles are clever. Also, in a rawther Marian-Keyesish fashion, there are some Deep Issues here, and they're deftly handled without the slightest bit of treacle or preaching or any tired clichés. The supporting cast, Maggie's mother and sister especially, crackle with life; Maggie herself is a woman who makes me root for her. The only way I could bring myself to put this down and stop reading long enough to get anything done for the past two days was to remind myself that I didn't really want to get to the end and have no more to look forward to. (So it's not perfect -- the best-friend's Bridezilla tendencies are a bit over-the-top at times. But it's still very, very good.)

OK. I know I read other stuff (besides all the reading I was doing for school up until mid-May) but that's all I'll torture you with. Now here's a meme. I keep seeing it around and hoping someone will tag me with it, but nobody has, so I'm just going to do it anyway. (Blog-tagging reminds me of waiting to be picked for teams in junior high.)

1. Do you remember how you developed a love of reading?
I just remember being really enthusiastic about the fact that letters made words and words made stories and stories made pictures in my head -- that, in short, all it took was the alphabet correctly arranged to create entire worlds out of nothing. (Although I wouldn't put it into those words until I was considerably older. I may have been an avid reader at three but I wasn't that precocious.) Also, my brother taught me to read, or at least I remember him teaching me the sounds the letters made -- I was stung by the injustice that while C could make a K sound, K couldn't make a C sound. And anything my big brother did had to be just wonderful.

2. What are some books you loved as a child?
The first ones I remember reading independently were the Frog and Toad books, and I still love those. Also, I was nuts about the Little House books, and Narnia, and the Oz books and Beverly Cleary and Doris Gates, and Trixie Belden and the Hardy Boys (not so much Nancy Drew although I read a lot of those books the way you eat a lot of gummy bears, without thinking much), and books of horse stories. As an older child I especially loved the Anne series. I enjoyed anything I could check out of the library and devour non-stop, really, but these were a few special favorites.

3. What is your favorite genre?
Overall, probably classic fiction. But it's hard to choose.

4. Do you have a favorite novel?
Talk about hard to choose! Maybe Persuasion. Maybe Jane Eyre. Maybe Anne of Green Gables. I love a lot of modern novels too (Never Let Me Go, A Thread of Grace, Into the Wilderness). Man, I hate this question. I could go on all day with answers. Moving on.

5. Where do you usually read?
These days, in bed. I read elsewhere too, but I always have so much else to do during the day -- school in season, working in the garden, house stuff, cooking, cleaning, hanging laundry -- that I just don't have the leisure to sit down without guilt as often as I used to, and when I do, I usually end up knitting because, I reason, I can read in bed at night, but knitting doesn't lend itself as well to that, and I have projects I actually want to finish before I die.

6. When do you usually read?
I think I just answered that pretty well.

7. Do you usually have more than one book you are reading at a time?
Yes. Usually I'll go through several lighter fiction books in the amount of time it takes me to finish a more serious classic (usually a reread), although sometimes I get so caught up in one book that I don't read anything else until that one is done.

8. Do you read nonfiction in a different way or place than you read fiction?
As much as I wish I were the type of person who read a lot of nonfiction -- seems so much steadier and more important than preferring novels -- I probably read maybe one or two nonfiction books per year outside of school requirements. I do like a good biography every now and then, and I'll check out nonfiction that sounds interesting when I hear about it, but I frequently turn those books in without reading them all the way through. Now you know my deep dark secret: I'm terribly shallow. I hope you can still be my friend.

9. Do you buy most of the books you read, or borrow them, or check them out of the library? Mostly I check them out of the library. Classics I'll buy.

10. Do you keep most of the books you buy?
Yes, the vast majority of them, because I almost never buy a book unless I know I want to own it for one reason or another. (One exception is library book sales, where I'll sometimes be less discriminate and end up with stuff I'll never read, which I then give away.)

11. If you have children, what are some of the favorite books you have shared with them?
Mostly, it's the list of books in question 2. But add a few: Mike Mulligan and His Steam Shovel, the inevitable Goodnight Moon. My daughter is just now flying through the Little House books, and it gives me so much pleasure to discuss them with her. My son's rereading the Narnia series (actually, he'd only listened to those really good audiobooks of most of them before), so that's fun too. Both my kids loved Beverly Cleary and read just about everything she wrote for young children. One of the greatest joys of being a parent is sharing books with my kids.

12. What are you reading now?
I just finished North and South -- the Elizabeth Gaskell novel, not the one about the American Civil War. I'd listened to the Librivox version before -- back when I was doing the painting in our house, actually, so it was funny to be reading along and then suddenly flash to the mental vision of myself covered with yellow paint standing in what is now my living room painting cupboard doors. Now I'm slowly going through The Mill on the Floss -- is it just me, or is most Eliot not as accessible as Silas Marner? -- and also reading While I Was Gone by Sue Miller. Funny about this book: As I was reading along, parts of the story started sounding creepily familiar to me, but other parts were (and are) not familiar at all. I'm still not sure if I've read this book before, or if I read part of it, or if I read something else that bore a lot of similarity to parts of the story.

13. Do you keep a To Be Read list?
Not really.

14. What’s next?
I'm having a hankering to read some Gabaldon and Donati. Also some Dickens, and I'm going to try to make myself strike out and read something new of his, rather than falling back on David Copperfield. Again.

15. What books would you like to reread?
I reread so, so many books.

16. Who are your favorite authors?
YOU CAN'T MAKE ME CHOOSE. Seriously, if you've read this blog for five minutes you could probably come up with a pretty accurate list.

Whew! And that's all. Wow, that got long. Now I don't have to post for a long time, right?

Thursday, June 26, 2008

photo mosaic meme

photo mosaic meme

lifted from Breda.

It's that meme thing where you -- well, here are the instructions.

How it's done:

* Answer each of the questions below.
* Surf over to Flickr (set up an account if you don’t have one — it's quick and easy) and type your answers (one at a time) into the search bar.
* From the choice of pictures shown only on the front page, click on the one that moves you.
* Once the page with your picture opens, copy the URL.
* Surf over to the Mosaic Maker, set up your mosaic, and paste your URLs.
* Click “Create!”

Here are the questions:

1. What is your first name?
2. What is your favorite food?
3. What high school did you attend?
4. What is your favorite color?
5. Who is your celebrity crush?
6. What is your favorite drink?
7. Where would you go on your dream vacation?
8. What is your favorite dessert?
9. What do you want to be when you grow up?
10. What do you love most in life?
11. Choose one word to describe you.
12. Your Flickr name?

Photo credits:
1. Rachel and the Lake, 2. fruit salad, 3. Respirators, 4. Gizmo, 5. Buying a Nikon doesn't make you a photographer. It makes you a Nikon owner., 6. ...As Long As You Water Them, 7. Borrowdale, Lake District, 8. Chocolate Ice Cream, 9. nurse 1, 10. Raccoon Family, 11. Tee-hee, 12. mrs rachel lynde is surprised

Wednesday, June 25, 2008

home again, home again

I'm feeling very boring and unwitty and generally not like blogging. Just to warn you. I just wanted people to know I was still alive.

We came home today from a short four-plus day stay in Morro Bay. Usually we stay longer, but this year with the garden and our general lack of funds, we decided to make it a short stay. But we had a fantastic time, even including Scout who turns out to be a great traveler and who adjusted fine to camping life (and who never once pottied in the tent). (Yay for the Caliber, too. Thirty-two MPG there and back = way way better than twelve.) Not long after we left, we had a lightning storm here at home that started a few majorish fires, the most worrisome of which is very near my brother and SIL's house. They've not been evacuated, but they were told to be ready to evacuate just in case. It's very smoky here.

The garden is fine. On my dad's advice, I started watering it less often a few weeks ago and it has been LOVING it. Who knew that I could take TOO good care of something green? This mean, happily, that we only had to ask friends to water it once while we were gone. We now have a whole bunch of little bitty green tomatoes and some peapods and some tiny baby zucchini and carrots that are edible small carrots (not ready to harvest, though. I just thin one every now and then.) As soon as I get my pictures sorted, there will be photos of the garden (including last week's, which I took but didn't upload) and of our vacation at Flickr. (Look out for the very cool sand castle. The Ts have once more surpassed themselves.)

And I think thatisall. More later, maybe, if my brain comes back.

Wednesday, June 11, 2008

garden update and (cue Johnny Olson) A NEW CAR.

In case you don't follow the RSS feed for my Flickr photos (all the cool kids do) (*snort*), I should mention that every Tuesday (or thereabouts) I upload new pictures of the garden. I have a general garden set and a weekly garden photo set. The garden is getting really exciting. Something I planted actually has blossoms on it! Although we have had our first casualty. One of the "extra" tomato plants we put out (more seedlings than we had room for in the beds) was swiped by some gophers -- gophers with a death wish -- night before last. It's just gone, like it was never there. Granted, it was right next to the fence and it wasn't exactly thriving, but if the same thing starts happening to my squash plants I am going to sit out there all night myself with the .22. That actually sounds like a fabulous idea! We even have a spotlight. A diet Coke, a .22, the full moon, and thou ("thou" being a stupid little rodent who apparently doesn't know who he's messing with here).

Also, we're picking up a new car tonight; we signed papers for it on Sunday. I swear it's the frugal thing to do. The best mileage we can get on any of our classic Mopar daily drivers is 12mpg. TWELVE. That's highway MPG. At the current price ($4.50/gallon the last time I looked, but it may have gone up a dime), we can save almost the entire payment on our new (black, strippy model except for A/C because hello this IS California) Dodge Caliber in gas costs, especially since we get 500 gallons per year for three years at $2.99/gallon as part of that schmancy promotion thing that Dodge is doing. And from all accounts, gas prices are only going up. So it makes a lot of sense, right? Doesn't explain why I am having a total freakout about it. Well, not total. That was yesterday. Today it's only the occasional very small freakout.

Actually, it's seeming kind of... fun. I have never owned a new car before. And we got a really killer warranty, so that our usual main objection to new cars (things inevitably go wrong eventually, and they cost so much to fix, and T can't usually do it, and even if he could the parts are also outrageously expensive) is a moot point.

(Firefox thinks "freakout" isn't a word. Silly Firefox.)

Monday, June 09, 2008

syntactic felicity

You don't want to make C mad. Here is a brief sampling of the hail of impromptu insults she flung at her brother in the space of about ten seconds after he beat her rather unkindly at Waterworks (there were more, but we can't remember them):

You are a pecan with two arms and two legs that can talk!
You are a pecan chopped up in a pecan pie!
You drowning little fishie!
You flabbergasting baboon!

and the pièce de résistance:

You are a boiled baloney and baboon sandwich!

It's hard to reprimand her when I'm laughing like that.

Wednesday, June 04, 2008

little updates and miscellanea

Still not the big post. I really, really thought about sitting here and fleshing out my notes and coming up with an articulate post about something that really matters to me, but that felt too much like school and darnit, I'm on vacation. So it's snippety updates instead. For now.

The garden is going like gangbusters (that is, if gangbusters go in a green, thriving, and surprisingly not-dead manner). We had our first little mini-harvest from it this weekend, when we ate spinach on our hamburgers, which is surprisingly good. There's more spinach ready (begging) to be picked but there's not enough to freeze and I don't have lettuce on hand to make a salad and we've never been cooked-spinach-as-a-side-dish people, although we may have to start or else the spinach will rot on the plants and that would be a shame. The only puzzling thing about the garden (other than the fact that I have personally touched, breathed on, and handled every plant in it and yet none have died) is that I'm getting these little mounds, like gopher mounds but with no holes and no plant damage, here and there in the garden. Do toads do this? We've recently transplanted some toads to the garden to help keep the eeeevil grasshoppers at bay. I will have to research this.

Hey, remember that couch-to-5K thing? I'm pretty much still on the couch. Well, on the computer chair, anyway. The fact is, I did it twice, on a Friday and a Sunday when T was home to ride herd on the kids, and then what with him working and all of our evening commitments, I couldn't find a way (barring getting up with T at 4:30: not happening) to squeeze in the third weekly workout. Now, however, we only have one weeknight commitment per week, and I am determined to start afresh (oh, this is killing me: what Austen adaptation is that from? or am I delusional? it would kind of defeat the purpose here if I were to sit and watch all of them this afternoon). So last night I stayed up until 2 AM making the obviously very necessary iTunes playlists for the first week. See, the thing about C25K is that you start out doing 60 seconds of running and then 90 seconds of walking, repeated for 20 minutes, which means that you either:

• a) fumble with the buttons on your daughter's watch trying to make the timer function work, something that's increasingly hard to do as my eyes get older buttons and labels and stuff keep getting smaller
  
• b) clip your kitchen timer to your shorts, which also entails much fumbling and also possible battery loss
  
• c) hire a trainer or your former PE teacher to run alongside you with a watch and a whistle -- too expensive, not to mention, hello, embarrassing, but really, we didn't know how lucky we were, being forced to do PE for free every day, did we? or
  
• d) spend a huge amount of time creating 90- or 60-second snippets of appropriately-paced songs and compiling them into a playlist that will not only motivate you to run EVERY SINGLE DAY but also magically melt fat off your thighs while you just sit there and listen to them.

The choice is obvious, no? (Actually, for the walking portions for the first week I used Librivox recordings, except that then I realized that I would have to make three daily playlists instead of one weekly one, unless I wanted to listen to the same story every day. Oops.)

I don't think I ever posted about the end of school. It ended. The end. OK, OK, seriously, I really enjoyed both my classes this semester, and my grades were good (easy when you're taking six units! I'm telling you, people, this is the way to go!). However, I don't see how I'm going to make it through next semester, when my two classes are both online to save on gas (and because there's nothing offered locally that will do me any good), so I'll only have one classroom meeting per month, and both of the classes sound a little... boring. Especially Principles of Interpersonal Communication. The description sounds like it'll involve a whole bunch of I-statements-instead-of-you-statements kind of stuff. I wanted to take Fundamentals of Speech for that requirement instead, because for all my talkativeness I really get nervous when it's time to do any public speaking and I could use the practice, but that class meets every week, and every trip to the main campus costs $40 at current gas prices. I just couldn't bring myself to do it.

Also, good news: T finally got the promotion he's deserved for the past seven years, so that he is now actually being paid for the job he does (I know, what a novel concept!). Not that we get to go have a fun time with that money, or, you know, pay extra on our mortgage or buy yarn or anything, since it will juuuust allow us enough breathing room to be able to pay our gas bill if we're very careful and maybe put a tiny bit in savings. It's definitely a welcome help, though.

In all other areas of life, there's nothing new to report, really. I mean, there's little stuff, like how I managed to spill a pint of very messy, sticky stir-fry sauce all over the counter while I was cooking dinner the other night, or how I mistakenly poured a quart or so of nasty used deep-frying oil into the quarter-full (big) container of new, clean oil instead of into the OLD OIL container kept below the sink -- a mistake I didn't discover until I went to stir-fry the abovementioned dinner -- or how Scout got our hopes all up by not barking/growling at T once all last weekend, but then apparently once more mistook him for an intruder with Evil Intentions when he came home from work on Monday. Or -- ooh -- how I actually finished two knitting projects last week. Two! Finished! Knitting! Including [fanfare] THE ELEPHANT!

But that's all. Really.

Tuesday, June 03, 2008

ten ways the world has changed

I am plotting (I even have notes) a longish, serious blog post. Meanwhile, it's been a really long time since I've done a meme, and Michael presented me with one that was hard to resist.

Ten ways the world has changed since I was in school:

1. Number one would have to be the Internet. I mean, it definitely existed in 1993, but almost nobody had it in their homes and I don't think our school even had it in the library yet when I graduated (although it might have). Now everyone from my three-year-old nephew to my eighty-one-year-old grandmother knows how to use it. And this extends to the proliferation of computers in general. Kids in some schools get laptops issued to them like textbooks. As far as I know there was no such thing as a laptop in 1993, and I was really excited to pay ONLY $425 for a used 386 with TWO WHOLE MEG OF RAM. I honestly do not remember the hard drive size. T, a little help?

2. The outsourcing of labor to overseas markets. This has caused a major shift in the American employment scene (granted, not so much around here), with factories closing and companies moving their production to Asia, where the labor is cheaper. It's also caused the prices of computers, components, and other electronics to plummet. I'll never forget going to buy our second inkjet printer. We bought our first one at Staples in 1997 or so for $300. We used that one until it died, and then a friend gave us his old one when he got a new one and we used that one until it died (or until it ticked us off so much with its utter inability to pick up paper that we shot it full of holes, one of the two), and then we went to price new printers and see what we were in for. This was maybe 2001. We were braced to have to save up $250 or $300; imagine our surprise when the most expensive printer on the shelf was under $100, and the models comparable to the ones we were used to were $40. (They still didn't pick up paper.)

3. We're teetering on the brink of another depression. (That's pretty recent. Does it count?)

4. I think gas was around $1.25/gallon when I graduated. And weren't we all mad to see it over a dollar!

5. When I started high school, I had never seen anybody except really out-there punk rockers with unnatural hair colors. While I was in high school, a few cutting-edge alternative types dyed their hair "eggplant". Now ten-year-old boys go around with spiked blue hair and nobody thinks anything of it. (Or was that five years ago? I lose track easily.)

6. Fashions, obviously. When I was in high school, I would have been laughed off campus if I'd worn flare-leg jeans and the strappy little tank tops that are de rigueur now. Also, we still believed in tucking in our shirts -- at least the shirt that we wore under the baggy flannel one.

7. I think in 1993, the children and teens who called their elders by their first names were still the exception, offspring of hippies who never got over being countercultural. Now my children are the freaks because they're actually polite and deferential to people who could be their great-great grandparents. Go figure.

8. Homeschooling was not quite under the radar when I finished school, but it was definitely not the near-mainstream movement that it is today. Everyone's heard of it now, and most people know someone who's doing it.

9. In 1993, if I remember correctly, homosexuality was out of the closet but still stigmatized. Nowadays, schools have "coming-out days" and teenage girls experiment with bisexuality because it's cool.

10. Sexual mores: It took the culture of the 90's to make sex on the second or third date something that was almost expected, instead of something that only the easy girls did. And when I was a teen, I would probably estimate that people who lived together before marriage were still (barely) outnumbered by those who didn't. I sincerely doubt that's the case anymore -- living together is done so casually that even the phrase "before marriage" has pretty much been dropped.
    

Looking back over my list, it's mostly negative stuff, which I didn't really mean it to be. Life's good now, too. :) Just... different. (And hey, I've found that even mid-rise jeans aren't so bad.)