That Venus And Mars Thing

Sometimes I am strongly reminded that male and female brains work very differently. Yesterday was one of those days.

As a male friend and I were pulling into a parking spot at a convenience store, a woman came out of the store and got into the car in the adjacent spot.  She was too close for both of us not to register her presence. She was a larger woman with a very unusual hairstyle and a ring in her nose, all of which I noted casually to myself as she walked by.  The only thing my friend noticed was that she was wearing a Penguins sweatshirt!  He is a big hockey fan and hates Pittsburgh because Crosby is a punk.

XX versus XY for you in a nutshell, ladies and gents.

Success

I believe I mentioned here recently that one of my (more tongue-in-cheek) goals in life is not to fit any of the conventional stereotypes.  To that end, I have recently taken up knitting since it SO would not ordinarily go along with my black belt in taekwondo and semi-extreme geocaching habit.  Gives me something to do with my hands other than mindlessly surf the Net, too, and I like crafty stuff.  Win-win.

The needle variety of knitting seems more complicated than I am ready to handle without personal assistance, but I bought a set of those round plastic loom things on a whim a couple of weeks ago.  With the help of the accompanying booklet and a few YouTube videos, I am happy to say that I have so far successfully managed to produce one scarf, four hats and three double-takes from friends.  :)

finished scarf

close-up of end of scarf

beginning of hat on loom

middle of hat on loom, brim complete at bottom

four completed hats, two brim styles. top left hat has two different-colored strands of wool woven in, top right hat switched between two colors  

Another Planet Heard From

Or at least part of this one that is far, far away.

Walked into my laundry room to run a load of wash today and discovered this on the floor between the washer and dryer.

In case you can't see it clearly, it's an Aruban 10-cent piece.   We've never been to Aruba.  Somewhere, an alien is is either laughing at my confusion or annoyed that it dropped a coin into a wormhole.

And if there IS a wormhole in my laundry room, that would explain a lot about all the missing socks. Maybe the aliens have them.  :)

Happy Easter!

There have always been two schools of thought in the Christian churchgoing community regarding those folks who only attend services on Christmas and Easter (lovingly referred to by some as "C and E-ers.")  The one school says that twice a year is better than never.  The other holds that people who don't attend services any other week of the year shouldn't be taking up valuable seat space in the packed churches of major-religious-occasion-time, which could otherwise be occupied by more regular churchgoers.  

I have to admit that I do see both sides of the argument.  I'd also like to add for the record that some of the most "Christian" (as in behavior, not in name) people I know are galloping atheists who also happen to believe in the Golden Rule and act accordingly, so as far as I'm concerned, church attendance is not necessarily connected in any way with whether or not people are decent human beings.  I would say, however, that if you do consider yourself a believer and it ain't important enough for you to be at services any of the other 50 weeks a year, well...not sure it would make that much difference to any deity I'd care to believe in whether or not your butt was in a seat for one of the big 2 Sundays.  At that point, I'd think you might as well continue being whatever kind of human you are the other 50 weeks a year wherever you normally go about doing it without worrying too much about putting on a bonnet and pastels, but maybe that's just me.

One final observation, however: any person with the most casual and nodding acquaintance with religion knows that churches fill up quickly on Christmas and Easter mornings.  If you show up ten minutes LATE for one of those services, expect both full pews and incredulous stares when you wander in and start looking for a seat.

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We had our traditional Easter morning of o-dark-thirty wakeup (well, 0630, but that's still early enough) followed by Easter basket hunting.  Even the resident teenaged boy still gets into it, surprisingly.  Taking a leaf from my parents' book while I was growing up, we put together individual treasure hunts for each kid's basket, complete with codes and puzzles.  Petunia had cryptograms to solve, each leading her to the next plastic egg and clue.  Thing Two's code was a lettershift cipher that resulted in words with scrambled letters, so his was slightly more complicated than Petunia's.  He got stuck on a word or two, but in general breezed through his series of eggs to his basket just as she did.

I changed things up a bit for Thing One, however.   Yesterday, while watching Petunia scrambling for eggs at our town's Easter Egg Hunt, he looked wistfully at me and observed that he wished he could participate too (the cutoff is fifth grade, so it was even the last year for her.)  On the spot I decided that I was going to redo things for him this year so that he had to find all of his eggs first and then figure out what to do with them, as opposed to having one egg lead him to the next as we've usually done.  And I recalled with glee that I had the PERFECT eggs for him on hand already.

        
So, this morning, one of these little beauties was waiting for him outside his bedroom door. I told him there were seven more just like it hidden downstairs and to get busy looking.  As a side note, the best place to hide these was six inches over his head on doorframes.  Absolutely priceless how long it took him to find those.  :)

Each egg was numbered and contained the names of two professional soccer players.  The puzzle involved figuring out the country of origin of each player and knowing its capital city, thus combining his loves of soccer and geography into one puzzle.  He got his egg hunt after all, he had a lot of fun doing it, and he found his basket.  I call that a win, especially for a nearly fifteen year-old boy!

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Whatever you are celebrating today, enjoy: Easter, Passover or just a quiet Sunday morning.  There's enough room in the world for all three.  




 

Straight From The Ten Year-Old

Sometimes Petunia just cracks me up.  Yesterday, she described a pair of her male classmates as “the two musketeers of annoying.”  Today, while discussing her suspicion that a third male classmate likes an exceptionally dramatic and high-maintenance female classmate, she told me that if it’s true, she “will lose all faith in his ability to make good decisions.”

Never a dull moment with that one.

Ribbit

Sounding a lot like a frog these days.  I have a bad head cold that I initially thought was some sort of allergies but isn't.  Ugh.  Finally at the stage where I'm starting to feel a little better but I'm hoarse as heck.  It's a good thing I'm feeling better at least since we are galloping headlong into travel soccer tryout season, starting next week!  Thing One is definitely staying put where he is.  Petunia is the big wild card: she's most likely either moving up a year or out to another club, tryouts will dictate which.  Thing Two will stay put if his team stays together at his current club, otherwise he will move to one of the two other clubs at which Petunia is trying out.  If those two both move, they will have to move together for the sake of my sanity; two clubs is bad enough, can't even imagine trying to juggle three. Plus HS soccer in the fall, should Thing One manage to make the JV team.

Anyhoo.  Had some stressful stuff going on here lately.  Terrible weather, plus a really ugly situation with the school board.  Specifically, with the ongoing teacher contract negotiations.  Not sure they are negotiating in good faith, actually pretty sure they aren't.  I've hit the point where I can't wait to get my kids the hell out of this school, which is a real shame since this is the 10th straight year I've had a kid there and I have three more yet to go.  I've already decided that this will be my last term on the Board of Education.  Petunia will be halfway through eighth grade by the time I would run for reelection (it's a K-8 school) and I will have served close to ten years by then.  Enough is enough.  I'm *really* fricking tired of being the bad guy because we observe the rules and the teacher's union representatives don't.

In other news, a dear friend more than likely has cancer, and may have something else going on as well.  He's having terrible fevers, which may or may not be related to the mass they just found in his lung.  I am absolutely beside myself about that right now, and it really gives me perspective on the ticky-tack shit the union is pulling.  I don't have the energy to deal with them right now.

Sorry this is such a downer post.  Not feeling the whole unicorns and rainbows thing right now.  On the bright side, I've recently taken up knitting (on one of those circular loom things, not knitting needles) and am about 3/4 done with a scarf, which actually looks half decent.  Proud of myself for that.  My guy friends are giving me grief about it, but no matter what stereotype anyone comes up with, pretty sure I won't fit it!  That's something at least.





  

Notes From The Nor’easter

One lesson we have learned over and over and OVER again: anytime a storm is forecast, fill some kitchen pitchers and a few 20 gallon tubs with water, lay in a supply of non perishable food and batteries, and do all the laundry there is before it hits.

In our very rural area, the only public utility is electricity.  Water comes from wells and homes have septic tanks, not a public sewer hookup.  No natural gas lines come out this far, either: home furnaces are fueled from individual fuel oil or propane tanks that are refilled periodically by tanker trucks.  Storms equal rain (or snow) and wind, which bring down trees or branches, which land on power lines, and that’s all she wrote.  Our homes run exclusively on electricity, which means that no power equals no water since the well pumps run on electricity.  There’s also no heat, no cooking (except in the fireplace, since no gas stoves) and no light.  Gets ugly quickly.  If you’re prepared with water, battery-operated lamps, food, firewood and heavy clothing, you can get through a winter storm, but the key is being prepared.

On the bright side, this community is awesome.  The social networks get buzzing immediately: whomever has power has everyone else over to shower and get warm and do laundry and charge devices.  

And the best part has everything to do with dumb luck, since we didn’t know enough about rural life when we bought our home to have chosen its location on purpose.  Quite the opposite, actually: the fact that it is on a main road actually concerned me when we purchased it, mostly because I was worried that the kids would run into the road when they were younger.  However, it quickly became obvious to us that “main road” equals “good” out here in the boonies.  The municipal garage is just up the road, so ours is the first road plowed (assuming we can get down the driveway to it!)  But what proved to be the definitive advantage to our location is that both the police station and the fire station are near that garage. All three of those key municipal facilities are on the same power grid, which (by that dumb luck I mentioned) we also happen to share by proximity.  Which means that every time the power goes out around here, the first priority for the power company is this town is our grid.  Which means that right now, while literally 97% of our town is currently without power according to the power company's online outage report map, I am typing this in my warm kitchen under a light that is not battery-operated.  Am I lucky?  Yes.  Am I grateful for it?  Hell yes.  Am I ready for spring?  More than you can even imagine.