Today at lunch, the Things and I (Sweetie) started talking about wars in which the United States is currently involved. Hobbes was confused about which war was which... He knew the two countries involved were Afghanistan and Iraq, but not the rationale behind why we invaded each of these countries. I explained the different situations to him and reassured him that this was a common source of confusion in the minds of many people, not only nine-year old boys, but also those who should know better.
We talked about the attacks of September 11, 2001 and who was responsible and why we invaded Afghanistan in response to those attacks. I showed them the pages from my scrapbook that included newspaper clippings and my personal account of that day and the days that followed. Both Things were surprised by the ferocity of the terrorist attacks and wondered why anyone would do such a thing. This led to a discussion of repressive religions and how they prey on the poor, disenfranchised, and uneducated members of their society, creating an environment in which flying airplanes into buildings seems like a reasonable way to get one's point across. Both boys were amazed to learn that education was forbidden most people in the Taliban-led Afghanistan, including boys, but especially girls. I was so proud when Hobbes pronounced this "Stupid." The Things asked why the Taliban attacked us and I said that they thought that the Americans were bad people and that the United States was bad. Calvin piped up with a gem: "Dude! Don't they know? We've won, like, a thousand soccer games." [Eds note: That's my boy!]
Tuesday, August 25, 2009
Friday, August 21, 2009
Ms. Frizzle is a girl!
So, this is the first post by me, Sweetie. Mr. Life in TH says that I can post anytime I want, but I've noticed that he hasn't given me the password to his blogspot account... I think he's planning to maintain editorial control of this blog.
Anyway, I wanted to share a funny story about one of the Things and his view on gender:
Calvin came home from kindergarten one day and we were sitting on the couch in the living room, watching something on TV. He turned to me and said, “Mom, can boys turn into girls?” I was a bit startled by his questions -- I really wasn’t sure about where this was going! But I have learned not to panic at off-the-wall questions, but first to find out what they really want to know… I answered, “Well, not really.” Transgendered folks out there might balk at my response, but, you know, he was five years old. I didn’t think he was ready for a conversation about how sometimes one’s gender and anatomy don’t match. He looked at me, satisfied, and said, “I thought so. So Ms. Frizzle is a girl.” (Ms. Frizzle was his kindergarten teacher.) I made some noise about how, yes, Ms. Frizzle is a girl. Calvin continued, “She just has short hair.”
Anyway, I wanted to share a funny story about one of the Things and his view on gender:
Calvin came home from kindergarten one day and we were sitting on the couch in the living room, watching something on TV. He turned to me and said, “Mom, can boys turn into girls?” I was a bit startled by his questions -- I really wasn’t sure about where this was going! But I have learned not to panic at off-the-wall questions, but first to find out what they really want to know… I answered, “Well, not really.” Transgendered folks out there might balk at my response, but, you know, he was five years old. I didn’t think he was ready for a conversation about how sometimes one’s gender and anatomy don’t match. He looked at me, satisfied, and said, “I thought so. So Ms. Frizzle is a girl.” (Ms. Frizzle was his kindergarten teacher.) I made some noise about how, yes, Ms. Frizzle is a girl. Calvin continued, “She just has short hair.”
Monday, August 10, 2009
Peculiarities of living in Two Harbors
I've got two little things to relate today. One is a hazard of living in Two Harbors, the other is just local color.
Last night, Hobbes and Calvin and I went down to the General Store for some ice cream for dessert (Sweetie is teaching right now, so she was still at the lab). As we sat at a picnic table and ate it, a pair of young boys started playing a game at the volleyball court - not volleyball, of course, but one in which the older boy was making up the rules to the younger boy's detriment. When my boys finished, I suggested that they go see if the other boys wanted to play a bit, since we don't have much chance to play with kids around here. This lead to me meeting the mothers of the children. Now this is a common occurrence around here. Having a lot of visitors, you meet a lot of people in passing, and many of them are very friendly and interested in the fact that you live on the island, etc. One of the women was very talkative. She was a middle school teacher from somewhere in the LA area. We talked about sharks - she's terrified of them having witnessed a shark attack when she was younger (a girl lost her leg), so she was trying to overcome her fear of the ocean by coming out to Catalina on her friends' sailboat with her kids. She also said she wanted to instill in her boys a sense of an adventurous life. Apparently, she used to do adventurous things with her dad when she was a kid, and now she was trying to pass that on. We talked for quite a while until it was nearly dark. The boys didn't mind; they were playing in the sand (oblivious to the other children about). I guess there's no real point to this anecdote (in my fraternity, they referred to these as "Cheese stories", since my nickname was Cheese), just that this happens all the time and is a nice benefit of living in a tourist destination. (Well, this tourist destination, anyway.)
On our way back to the house, we saw the local insane cat sleeping in the middle of the road. For some reason, this cat likes to curl up in a little ball on the dusty, hard-packed road surface. Usually, it's just off to the side, where it's only about 10% likely to be run over, but on this evening, with the light fading, it was dead smack in the middle of the road. The first time I saw it, I thought it was one of the feral cats that are all over town, but this one, despite its matted coat and odd behavior, has a collar with a tag. The owners have even gone so far as to put out a traffic cone with a sign that reads "Caution Lazy Cat". I've got to get a picture.
Life in the TH, baby.
Last night, Hobbes and Calvin and I went down to the General Store for some ice cream for dessert (Sweetie is teaching right now, so she was still at the lab). As we sat at a picnic table and ate it, a pair of young boys started playing a game at the volleyball court - not volleyball, of course, but one in which the older boy was making up the rules to the younger boy's detriment. When my boys finished, I suggested that they go see if the other boys wanted to play a bit, since we don't have much chance to play with kids around here. This lead to me meeting the mothers of the children. Now this is a common occurrence around here. Having a lot of visitors, you meet a lot of people in passing, and many of them are very friendly and interested in the fact that you live on the island, etc. One of the women was very talkative. She was a middle school teacher from somewhere in the LA area. We talked about sharks - she's terrified of them having witnessed a shark attack when she was younger (a girl lost her leg), so she was trying to overcome her fear of the ocean by coming out to Catalina on her friends' sailboat with her kids. She also said she wanted to instill in her boys a sense of an adventurous life. Apparently, she used to do adventurous things with her dad when she was a kid, and now she was trying to pass that on. We talked for quite a while until it was nearly dark. The boys didn't mind; they were playing in the sand (oblivious to the other children about). I guess there's no real point to this anecdote (in my fraternity, they referred to these as "Cheese stories", since my nickname was Cheese), just that this happens all the time and is a nice benefit of living in a tourist destination. (Well, this tourist destination, anyway.)
On our way back to the house, we saw the local insane cat sleeping in the middle of the road. For some reason, this cat likes to curl up in a little ball on the dusty, hard-packed road surface. Usually, it's just off to the side, where it's only about 10% likely to be run over, but on this evening, with the light fading, it was dead smack in the middle of the road. The first time I saw it, I thought it was one of the feral cats that are all over town, but this one, despite its matted coat and odd behavior, has a collar with a tag. The owners have even gone so far as to put out a traffic cone with a sign that reads "Caution Lazy Cat". I've got to get a picture.
Life in the TH, baby.
Sunday, August 2, 2009
Exhausting weekends
I've recently decided that my weekends were too restful, and I needed to really start over-exerting myself. So I've had a variety of weekend activities over the past few weeks (since we got back from vacation). Last weekend was digging out the backyard slope for a retaining wall (we're slowly trying to get our backyard to not be a dust/mud bath), and hiking out to Ben Weston. This weekend it was dive class Saturday morning, more digging for the retaining wall Saturday afternoon, bike maintenance this morning, cleaning the house in the afternoon, and more bike maintenance.
The dive class was pretty fun. The waterfront officer at WMSC occasionally offers an open water (basic) dive class. This go 'round I decided to sign up. (Of course, then we went on vacation and I missed half the classes.) Having finally got my physical, I was allowed in the water this weekend, but I had to stay at the surface since my blood work isn't done yet. I'm not exactly sure what they might see in the blood work that would suggest imminent danger that wasn't apparent in the EKG or chest x-ray, but whatever. So we learned how to examine and handle an air tank, how to attach it to a BC (that's buoyancy controller), how to attach the regulator and test it and how to inflate and deflate the BC. Curiously, when you're diving and you have all that gear on, you still need weights to actually achieve negative buoyancy in the water, so we got weight belts and trundled down to the water. We learned how to gear up, how to enter the water, how to breathe through the regulator (all pretty basic stuff, yeah?). Then we got into some of the basic emergency stuff: what do you do if your regulator falls (or is pulled) out of your mouth, how do you clear your mask of water, what do you do if you lose your mask, and finally what to do if you run out of air. The other person in my group then got to practice all this at a depth of about 10 feet, but I had to stay at the surface. :( All that took about 4 hours, so it was lunchtime when I returned to the house.
Having "wasted" the morning, I thought I should work on one of my house jobs in the afternoon. I attempted to finish the kitty cage - this will go on top of the shed, with an entrance from the bathroom window so our indoor kitties can enjoy the outside. This was a no go because the shop at the lab was locked, and I couldn't find any scrap 2x4s. So I returned home thwarted. This meant I had to go back to work on the retaining wall. Sigh. Nothing like digging in the brick-hard clay to make you appreciate a desk job. I did manage to get the last of the digging done, though, and I moved all the stones we have (about 1/3 of what we need) into the yard and build part of the wall. Even unfinished, we can see how much better the yard will look with it.
The Sunday bike maintenance was prompted by my troubles with my front derailleur. I ended up breaking out my new bike tools (thank you Hobbes and Calvin), and pulling and cleaning the chains from my bike, Sweetie's bike and an old bike of Hobbes' that Calvin is inheriting. Calvin's bike has been sitting for a while, so it needed some work. I swapped the seat with Calvin's current bike because this one was cracked and didn't hold its angle. Then I had to try to loosen up one of the pedals - not sure we have a permanent solution there; we may need new pedals. And then I removed the cable to the front brake since one of the connectors was bent. This bike has the pedal-backwards friction braking, so the hand brakes are redundant. Now it was time to tackle the derailleur. I watched a few videos on YouTube before I started to increase the chance I was doing this correctly and then got to work. After fiddling around with it for about an hour and a half, I can now get the bike to go into low gear (which it wasn't doing before) and into middle gear, but it can't quite get into high gear. I'm not sure what the problem is. Could it be related to chain stretching? Maybe I need a new chain.
Tomorrow: work! A day to rest. (Actually I have a grant that's due, so I'll spend the day collecting paperwork and editing the proposal. Sigh.)
The dive class was pretty fun. The waterfront officer at WMSC occasionally offers an open water (basic) dive class. This go 'round I decided to sign up. (Of course, then we went on vacation and I missed half the classes.) Having finally got my physical, I was allowed in the water this weekend, but I had to stay at the surface since my blood work isn't done yet. I'm not exactly sure what they might see in the blood work that would suggest imminent danger that wasn't apparent in the EKG or chest x-ray, but whatever. So we learned how to examine and handle an air tank, how to attach it to a BC (that's buoyancy controller), how to attach the regulator and test it and how to inflate and deflate the BC. Curiously, when you're diving and you have all that gear on, you still need weights to actually achieve negative buoyancy in the water, so we got weight belts and trundled down to the water. We learned how to gear up, how to enter the water, how to breathe through the regulator (all pretty basic stuff, yeah?). Then we got into some of the basic emergency stuff: what do you do if your regulator falls (or is pulled) out of your mouth, how do you clear your mask of water, what do you do if you lose your mask, and finally what to do if you run out of air. The other person in my group then got to practice all this at a depth of about 10 feet, but I had to stay at the surface. :( All that took about 4 hours, so it was lunchtime when I returned to the house.
Having "wasted" the morning, I thought I should work on one of my house jobs in the afternoon. I attempted to finish the kitty cage - this will go on top of the shed, with an entrance from the bathroom window so our indoor kitties can enjoy the outside. This was a no go because the shop at the lab was locked, and I couldn't find any scrap 2x4s. So I returned home thwarted. This meant I had to go back to work on the retaining wall. Sigh. Nothing like digging in the brick-hard clay to make you appreciate a desk job. I did manage to get the last of the digging done, though, and I moved all the stones we have (about 1/3 of what we need) into the yard and build part of the wall. Even unfinished, we can see how much better the yard will look with it.
The Sunday bike maintenance was prompted by my troubles with my front derailleur. I ended up breaking out my new bike tools (thank you Hobbes and Calvin), and pulling and cleaning the chains from my bike, Sweetie's bike and an old bike of Hobbes' that Calvin is inheriting. Calvin's bike has been sitting for a while, so it needed some work. I swapped the seat with Calvin's current bike because this one was cracked and didn't hold its angle. Then I had to try to loosen up one of the pedals - not sure we have a permanent solution there; we may need new pedals. And then I removed the cable to the front brake since one of the connectors was bent. This bike has the pedal-backwards friction braking, so the hand brakes are redundant. Now it was time to tackle the derailleur. I watched a few videos on YouTube before I started to increase the chance I was doing this correctly and then got to work. After fiddling around with it for about an hour and a half, I can now get the bike to go into low gear (which it wasn't doing before) and into middle gear, but it can't quite get into high gear. I'm not sure what the problem is. Could it be related to chain stretching? Maybe I need a new chain.
Tomorrow: work! A day to rest. (Actually I have a grant that's due, so I'll spend the day collecting paperwork and editing the proposal. Sigh.)
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