Transplanting a Seattleite

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dunno what to make of this
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/06/magazine/06marriage-t.html

It's 10 pages, so it's hard to recommend it.

Two writers who have been married for most of a decade and produced two daughters, decide to engage in some self-help with respect to their marriage. They recognize some of the risks inherent in this activity, so kudos for that. And it's written by the woman, so we don't really know what he thinks of all this. Also, it's hard not to immediately think NPD MUCH!!! more or less every time he's mentioned. Predictably, she's clearly got some boundary issues. The fact that she's concerned about the pulling-away, as opposed to the, good lord you spend _how many_ hours a day together issues, was sort of the red flag on that.

It's a train wreck in progress, but I think I primarily would like to point out this error in judgment.

"Shortly after our first child, Hannah, was born, Dan and I started having the same conversation every night: do you want to cook dinner or look after the kid? He always picked cook, I always picked kid, and now, seven years later, Dan was an excellent, compulsive and profligate chef. We spent far more money on food than we did on our mortgage."

Both parties are responsible for this set of interactions and its predictable outcome. The problem was a simple one: they did not require that Dan participate in the life of the children. This could have been done in any number of ways, but mostly, these two idiots needed to quit thinking in terms of "what do I want right now" and think more in terms of "how is this going to develop over time". If you give one parent all the kid-time, the other parent will, utterly predictably, feel left out of the family and will get creepy and weird and dominating in an effort to compensate.

Arguably, Dan's that way by nature. I wouldn't know. But this set of choices would absolutely contribute, and there's plenty of evidence later in the article that they got exactly the outcome one would expect. Altho I will note that Dan and his checklist approach to cookbooks may be creepy enough to count towards some sort of diagnosis.

Besides. What a fucking cliche. The hands-down most creative and applause generating part of everything to do with the house and/or family is cooking (a limited case can be made for decorating -- but it is limited). Guys have been taking over the cooking and turning it into some huge task that prevents them from doing anything else around the house ever since women started making enough money to insist that they do something around the house. This couple doesn't need psychotherapy. They need consciousness raising. Because this is _not_ an equal relationship. And the woman needs to start kicking that guy's ass. I don't know if his ass needs kicking, but she clearly needs to start kicking.

Today's activities include: TJ Maxx, Roche Bros, Quill and Press, school
No B. today as she was ill. I took A. in the new stroller (Maclaren Quest Mod, and honestly, I'm still thinking I should have used the jogger; there was a lot of crap on the sidewalk) on some errands. We returned an outfit to TJ Maxx which we had bought yesterday. We used the van on the Sunday outing, which had as primary goals stocking hangers (fail), a reindeer car kit (fail) and a santa hat big enough to fit over a bike helmet (fail), and a secondary goal of 24 months clothes for A, since she has decided to stretch her plump little baby fat body onto a slender, willowy toddler frame. One of the outfits had a 24 months jacket and pants but when I started taking it off the hanger to put it in the laundry I discovered it had a 12 months shirt.

A. pitched a fit for unknown reasons (possibly because she was tired, but the crap on the sidewalk was jostling her too much to fall asleep in the stroller) that was a full on tantrum by the time we got to the store. When we were done there, we went to Roche Bros to get some turkey for T.'s lunch to drop off at the school along with his updated list of vaccinations to date. While there, I bought some binkies, which helped A. be much, much happier for the next leg of our outing.

She was happier enough that I took a gamble on Quill and Press, a stationers shop I've ridden past dozens of time but never stopped in. I figured I'd try to buy some journals -- ideally reader's journals -- for small Christmas presents. I cleaned out there book-related stock and filled in with a gardening journal and a couple just plain journals. That made up for the tantrum, and went a ways to making up for not having B. today.

We dropped off the turkey and paperwork at the school, where once again I had no idea how to answer what was probably a completely reasonable question. The list of things T. is willing to eat is _really_ short; getting him to eat a slice of deli turkey is pretty amazing. But if you hand over a baggie of deli turkey, and someone asks, does he have what he needs for a sandwich, well, what do you say? No is probably not going to satisfy someone who asks a question like that (especially after specifying it's going to Room #1, with all that entails), but I'm not sure I'm interested in sharing what it would take to satisfy someone who asks a question like that. I'd vastly prefer it if someone else at the school laid it out for her if she really needs to know.

Whatever.

I watched the mid-season finale of Stargate Universe yesterday and I am now glad I've stuck with the series (mostly for Eli, fwiw, altho secondarily for the medic). Watching the Captain and Rush go at it was awesome. However, the commentary I've seen online seems to miss some obvious options available to Rush and/or the Captain and/or the show. Assuming Rush remembers the gate addresses of the planets they have previously visited, he should be able to get food (carefully) and water to survive indefinitely. If life isn't worth living, he can randomly dial a gate and try somewhere new. The Captain can, at the next stop, gate through to see if Rush has survived and possibly had a change of heart, rescuing him from the "rock slide". If Rush tells everyone what actually happened, as long as the Captain sticks to his story, no one is likely to believe Rush. If people _do_ believe Rush, the Captain has evidence to show just how untrustworthy Rush is. And the Captain can further point out that Rush got hit on the head pretty hard and it may have scrambled his brains -- he might really believe that what happened happened but that doesn't make it true. This isn't a straight-up case of Must Fix Alien Shuttle vs. the Captain Thinks He Murdered Rush. I would argue that the Captain made a decision that if Rush is the Hot Shit he thinks he is, he'll still be around later to be rescued -- hopefully after having had some time to realize what a jackass he's been, and the importance of Playing Well With Others. If Rush is so pathetic he can't stay alive on that planet, with a functioning gate on it, then Rush _really_ isn't needed aboard the Destiny and his proclivity for causing trouble is enough to legitimize leaving him somewhere to die as a result of his own incompetence.

I look forward to seeing how the show decides to play it: does the Captain go back, does the shuttle show up, if the Captain goes back (or someone else goes back to investigate the "rock slide" -- and if so, do they do this with or without the knowledge of the Captain, and who is it), what does he find, or, more relevantly, what doesn't he find.

I'm most of the way through _Alice_, which I enjoyed, partly because the casting is clearly an effort to mine popular science fiction shows for actors. The doc from Stargate SG-1 is Alice's mom, as an example.

Snow! You know what that means.
Shoveling!

The streets are clear; I may take the bike out.

ETA: I did not actually take the bike out. Haven't had a chance to get out without a kid, and don't feel like risking a kid on the first outing on questionable surface.

Today's activities include: phone calls and not a lot else
Of course there was a certain amount of playing with the garage door opener, because that's kinda unavoidable. R. took T. to Target to get some stuff. A. and I hung around and played with toys. Also, the coughing (from the cold) and the drooling (from the teething) and the snotfall (from the cold) continued. Lots of mopping up to do.

I. called and we chatted for about 45 minutes, which was fun, and R. called and we chatted for a little while, and that was also fun. I read a little. I made a big salad. But honestly, I got almost nothing to show for the day.

R. was going to trim his hair but gouged part of it down to the scalp so it's all gone for a while. He took a bath with A. -- that was cute, watching him have to stop her from doing annoying things like hair pulling. It's a whole lot funnier when it's happening to someone else. (Yes, his head hair was gone, but R. has a lot of hair all over, and to judge by his reactions, having one's chest hair yanked is No Fun At All.)

T. spent the day hanging out with B.

Unfortunately, A. went down for a second nap around 4:30 and is still asleep. This is a problem, because it means she has missed dinner, and who knows when she'll decide to wake up. I'm going to have to go to bed pretty soon, to either wake her up, or make sure that I get some sleep before she eventually wakes up ready to greet the day at some appalling hour.

Today's activities include: conservation land, idylwilde
My friends A. and L. came to visit, and while R. went in to work for a couple hours to make up for coming home early yesterday, B. did come over so I got to go walking with them without a stroller. After doing the usual loop through the neighborhood, I suggested we go check out the conservation land which is just down Prospect.

http://www.actontrails.org/MapGreatHill.htm

We came in on the left side of that map, took the loop left until we got to the access trail, took that up past the "summit", took a connector back to the loop, made a wrong turn which we noticed at the playing fields, and then took the loop back to where we started.

Of course the leaves are all off the trees, and it has rained recently so there was mud in the lower spots, but it's a great place to go for a hike. Like the parks that connect across the north end of Capitol Hill, I once again have access to a place to go on a walk in the woods without ever getting into my car.

After I got back, I went with R. to Not Your Average Joe's, where several of his coworkers were having lunch. I know almost all of them pretty well at this point, so that was really fun. Altho we learned today that A.C. who several of us had found on Facebook was _not_ the A.C. who we had lunch with. We don't know why that A.C. accepted our friends requests, but I have now corrected the problem on my end.

After that, I had my daily walk with M. and her dog P., which was fun. I'm working on getting A. to pet P. in a way that does not freak the poor Lhasa out. The crucial issue is that A. wants to touch eyes. Not good. We did get her to actually stroke P.'s back, so that's progress. M. is very tolerant of our efforts, which I appreciate.

I picked T. up on the bike, and after our afternoon play-with-the-garage-door-opener-until-it-freezes-up, we went out to Idylwilde on the bike, where I resisted the temptation to buy a small Christmas tree and bring it home in a pannier. The kids like Christmas trees a little too much, still, so I'm going to wait until we're a little further along in the choke-to-death-on-small-items phase. Maybe next year. In West Acton, I saw a van with plush reindeer antlers. I already have some battery operated LED lights on the bike (I just ordered a couple more strings, so I'll have one each in red, green, and white); I figure the reindeer antlers will be perfect. It would be even cooler if I could rig up a Rudolph's nose with a red light in it, but that sounds a bit craftier than I'm really up to. Maybe next year.

No, I did not steal the reindeer antlers off the van. I'm still trying to figure out where one buys that kind of thing. It's exactly the kind of thing I normally wouldn't be caught dead buying, which makes this a bit of a mystery for me.

And in good news, the kids seem to be thoroughly over whatever it was that was making them have not-so-good-looking poop. Unfortunately, T. may now have an ear infection. He was pulling at his ear today at school. After we got back from Idylwilde and played with the garage door some more (no, this is _not_ my idea of fun), I convinced him to walk down to Julie's Place with me and have some dinner. That went really well, and I got a burger and fries. I don't like eating out twice in one day, but I figured I probably got enough exercise to make it work out, and neither meal was that huge.

Pretty good day. It'll be even better when the kids have kicked their colds.

nice article about ccrc's over on the new old age
http://newoldage.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/11/06/ccrcs-the-bright-side/

Mysteriously, in comment number 4, a woman signing Karen Sadler asserts:

"With 4 in 10 of us projected to live to 120, new living options will continue to evolve so continue to check them out frequently and decide which is best for you."

Yeah, that can't be true, as a number of other commenters snuck up on.

The remaining question: is _anyone_ seriously asserting this, or is this a typo?

CCRC are "continuing care retirement communities". Generally speaking, you sell your house, use the proceeds to "buy in" to the community, and then depending on the setup, you pay some monthly cost which may be inflation adjusted but not change depending on which part of the community you are in (independent, assisted living or skilled nursing), or which may change depending on which part of the community you are in. For reasons that are complex, CCRC's have a limited constituency of cheerleaders, but it sounds like this may be beginning to change. In general, people have been attempting to make it to end of life in assisted living, which, honestly, Does Not Work past a certain point. CCRCs attempt to make the transition from assisted living to skilled nursing and/or unit-devoted-to-dementia-care less jarring, by having all the facilities on a campus, and by having the various parts of the facilities share some social/cafeteria/etc. stuff. CCRCs get slammed usually because they market the independent side, and the reality of the memory units creeps people out, and there is still a big wall between the levels in many CCRCs.

The comments thread is good, despite my drawing undue attention to the extremely wacky assertion in comment #4.

Today's activities include: zzzzz
I spent a chunk of the morning back in bed rereading a trashy novel because while I don't have horrible symptoms with this cold, I just did not feel like doing anything else at all.

I went on my walk anyway, and I seem to recall paying some bills. I didn't even ride the bike to pick up T.; B. got him and took him home to have french toast for dinner, where I eventually retrieved him from.

Today's UPS delivery included a bunch of Melissa & Doug art supplies I ordered from Amazon for T. The scissors and construction paper were a pretty good success. It is a pair of kid scissors, one zig zag (R. calls them pinking shears) and one ordinary. They claim to cut paper and only paper; here's hoping that bears some faint resemblance to reality. He can manage the pinking shears, because they sort of orient themselves; the straight scissors are more of a challenge. I gave him a sheet of construction paper to practice on.

The 12 piece jigsaw puzzle was not such a great success, but then the dolphin puzzle wasn't a big hit at first either, so you never know how that's going to turn out.

A. took a nap in her new stroller. She keeps climbing up in it, and today B. circled the island in the kitchen with her in the stroller and she zonked right out. This is actually good. She, too, has this cold so sleeping somewhat upright is a Very Good Thing.

The rereads of the last few days are all Lori Foster romances: I started with _Say No to Joe_, then read _Just a Hint, Clint_, am finishing up _The Winston Brothers_ collection of longish short stories and I already pulled up a Loretta Chase which will hopefully prevent me from rereading all the Visitation books out of order.

why not prescribe romance novels?
It'd be cheaper, and possibly more effective.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/29/magazine/29sex-t.html?pagewanted=1&em

Interesting article about research on low libido in women, sexual desire in women, sexology, and related ideas. I was really surprised by how good it was, while simultaneously completely stumped that you could actually write several pages on this subject without ever mentioning erotic romance fiction and the role it plays/has played in sustaining desire in long-running heterosexual relationships for, oh, dear goddess, decades at least.

Also, no mention of lesbian bed death. Okay, no _direct_ mention of lesbian bed death. Crept right up to it and then backed slowly away.

Amazon.com service now officially creepily fast
Yesterday, I ordered a couple Xmas/holiday songbooks (lyrics and piano arrangements). I'm pretty sure it was in the mid-late afternoon, because by the time the kids were in bed I was shopping for a filing cabinet.

Today, the songbooks arrived before 2 p.m.

I'm happy. It's just a little odd.

Other arrivals today: the stroller! I'm pretty happy about the stroller, altho interestingly, Maclaren has handled their little fingertip amputation problem on new strollers by just shipping the recall fix with the stroller; it still has to be applied.

"hospice for everyone"
A while back, I waxed venomous about a hospital administrator who raised as a specter the idea of "hospice for everyone", which might result from cost control, rationing, or whatever bogey had crawled up their ass the day they were interviewed.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/01/health/01brod.html

Jane Brody's recent column on hospice suggests that hospice for everyone isn't something that people actually experiencing hospice think is all that bad. And the numbers support the idea that the kind of care people receive in hospice helps them live longer -- and much more comfortably and happily -- than expensive, hospital based interventions (or even the other stream of care in nursing homes -- granted, nursing homes have hospice options as well). True, these are not just the sickest in our population: they are clearly and unequivocally dying (altho, honestly, we all are, every day, we just don't like to think about it that way), and hard cases make bad law.

Still. Worth a read.

Toadstool!
A. had a well baby checkup today, and I got there early. She woke up from her nap, so we jaunted over to Toadstool in Milford, NH, a bookstore I love and miss. We bought Sandra Boynton's book and DVD, _One Shoe Blues_, a dayplanner (a little one intended to live by the treadmill to monitor how that's going, but it is so pretty it may live in my purse instead) and a board book, Jan Brett's _The Twelve Days of Christmas_.

Of course this would turn out to be the "authoritative, traditional" version of the song, according to the wikipedia entry:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Twelve_Days_of_Christmas_%28song%29

Which means, among other things, that it is 4 colly birds, and the pictures support the idea the 5 gold rings refer to a type of bird. I promptly memorized it, and was singing it to A. (who is amazingly tolerant of this) when R. was getting T. ready to go run an errand. He heard me say "colly", corrected me to "calling", and (prior to having read the wiki entry), I promptly replied that calling was a modernization. Which it is.

You would think that I could manage to buy _not_ the definitive/traditional version of something when I'm buying a _board book_, but no. I'm just that kind of nerd.

Ah, the warm glow of achievement

To be fair, I cheated: I wrote autobiographical fiction that wasn't fiction (that is, a memoir). Technically, you could say it wasn't really a novel at all.

Weekend activities included: summoned to block party and other things
Wow, I'm having a lot of trouble even remembering what we did over the last two days. Must have done something, right?

There was a block party on Tuttle this afternoon. M., my walking partner, sent me two e-mails, but I wasn't reading e-mail so I didn't get them. She came by, tho, right when A. had pooped, but M. was patient and we walked over to the party together. That was nice. I fed A. part of one of M.'s father's cookies (also M., but obviously standing for something different). M. (walking partner) tells me that M. (her father) named a cat Gallium Arsenide, some time long enough before M. was born that the cat was gone before she was aware of it. M. (father) is even geekier than I had thought. I should have expected this; he works at Lincoln Labs.

You know, where they make Lincoln Logs. Not.

Anyway. What else?

T. is loving scribbling, so we've taken to buying him Even More Supplies, mostly pads of paper and crayons/markers/etc. It turns out that he is _so_ loving scribbling, that you can take him almost anywhere and do almost anything as long as he's got something to write with and something to write on. We went to Applebee's for an early dinner on Saturday and it went really great. Not just the best that a dinner-for-all-four-of-us has ever gone. Great on an absolute scale. Like, actual fun. This is promising.

Earlier in the day, I'd taken T. to Target in an effort to buy a jug of bubble juice. Fail! They don't seem to currently carry Gazillion Bubble Solution. But Amazon does! With prime shipping; I ordered a 64 ounce refill jug. That stuff is amazing, and lately T. has been fascinated with the bubble machine. While we were at Target, I bought him some more overalls, a laundry hamper (the X frame on his hamper broke in two different places), some ginger ale and a variety of other items already forgotten. Probably some of which were scribble supplies.

Today, since Sunday tends to be a wicked exhausting day for. R., I left A. with R. for an hourish, and took T. to McDonald's for some lunch, then Trader Joe's to get chocolate chips (no, none of this by bike), Staples to get a small sketch pad and some crayons, and then Willow Books, which is where I really, really, really wanted to go. I figured initially I'd take him into the kids books area and have him pick something out, but he was so focused on scribbling, we went back out to the new in hardcover and staff picks area and I parked him on a stool while I looked at books for a while. We both were ready to move on at about the same time, so I took him back to kids books where he picked out a Melissa and Doug construction vehicles stacking toy to buy. Overall, a very fun and expensive hourish.

I abandoned the Aronowitz book in favor of rereading _Say No to Joe?_. Very fun.

Considering we haven't had child care since last Tuesday, and were only around people who assisted a little bit with the kids on Wednesday and Thursday, we've been doing really well.

Oh, and T. has been playing with the brio trains lately, like, in the way they were designed to be played with. That's fun to watch. A. has been trying to play with them, but she keeps walking on the track.

more on mammograms
I don't get it. But hey, here's a good sense of the range of response. First, a fantastic display of innumeracy and failure to understand the true costs of treating as cancer something like LCIS or DCIS or whatever, with all the risks attendant on such treatment (which include death), when odds on, nothing was ever going to happen, except the person would eventually die of _something_.

It's from Lakoff:

http://www.alternet.org/reproductivejustice/144177/47,000_women_could_die_as_a_result_of_the_new_mammogram_guidelines

Second, a letters to the editor collection to the NYT in the wake of their pair of editorials (which were both excellent, and I bought and am reading Aronowitz' book as a result of the op-ed):

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/21/opinion/l21cancer.html

The range here is better than Lakoff's foolishness; Lakoff is saying what virtually everyone center and slightly left of center is saying ("But how could it _possibly_ be a bad idea to _find_ and _treat_ CANCER! My God What Is the Matter With You!!!"), and which is only very marginally more sensible than what the right wing is saying ("Rationing! Soon they will euthanize you!"). The stupidest idea in the lettercol is the idea that you can somehow say no to the cascade after you start it with the mammogram. In theory? Sure. In practice? Oh, wow. Like holding back the tide.

Other sensible points -- made by people in health policy and by doctors -- include the dangers of radiation, the crappitude that is mammography as an effective screening device, and so forth. Best of all is this one:

"What has not been adequately explained are the other consequences of these false positives. How many of those 1,000 women die, and how many suffer greatly, as a result of needless surgery and toxic therapy? This crucial information is missing from every account I have read."

Thank you, David H. Raulet, "professor of molecular and cell biology in the Cancer Research Lab, University of California, Berkeley", and thank you, New York Times for printing his letter.

I would add to Professor Raulet's remarks that cancer != cancer, and the horror of millenia bears the same vague resemblance to breast cancer today that the wasting disease that was diabetes bears to what we call diabetes today, and the lethal killer that was high blood pressure bears to what we call high blood pressure today and so on and so forth, ad nauseum, I mean, seriously, retching and vomiting with disgust at how we can spend endless amounts of fear and angst and put ourselves through untold evils because we -might- possibly, in the future, be at risk of something really worth getting our knickers in a twist over.

Don't let me get started on PSA tests. Seriously.

a modest insight
I was having a conversation with my stepfather-in-law on Wednesday regarding health insurance reform and he remarked that change happens when doing nothing is worse than doing something. I observed that a little more was required: doing nothing had to be perceived as unacceptable. My sister-in-law then popped in with, aren't those the same.

We didn't get into it in any great detail at the time, and I revisited it with R. today, and after about a half hour of trying to figure out which aspect of this Mattered To Me, it turns out that R. views my addition as a subset of "costs" and trivially obvious: yes, you always have to take those into consideration. We harbor a suspicion that that was not was his sister had in mind, but we didn't ask her so we don't know. I was actually making a comment based in behavioral economics: the natural human tendency is more towards not doing anything, or at any rate, not changing anything.

The policy debate on health insurance reform has been prodded recently by a variety of progressive talking points, one of which my stepfather-in-law repeated. Another is referring to the people who don't want to do anything collectively as the status-quo lobby (and believe me, that does not have a good connotation in this context). People like my friend W.M. are a tad mystified by all this, because he doesn't necessarily believe that the status-quo is All That Bad, calling into question other talking points like premature birth (a highly problematic statistic that should probably not be used to "prove" anything, and which should be replaced by either a well-defined perinatal mortality number and/or death before age 5, depending on what your goals are).

It turns out when I say, doing nothing has to be perceived as unacceptable, I'm trying to articulate a very central belief. You could mock it: call it "change is bad" or "don't fix it if it ain't broke" or being conservative, but none of these are quite right, at least not to me. I think it's a hell of a lot closer to old-school Stoicism, because it ties into a lot of my ideas about remembering how much is enough, and having some standard that doesn't constantly escalate lifestyle and/or expectations, and reminds me to ask what exactly am I putting on the line to get some increment of something.

Also, I don't like being carrotted right off a cliff.

ETA: In case previous posts haven't made it brutally obvious, despite the sausage-y nature of the process and the product, I'm still pro-health insurance reform. Even if it costs us a bundle just to get rid of pre-existing conditions (which is to say, you are guaranteed they will offer you a policy, even if it is 2x or 3x or even more than it would be without that pre-existing condition), and even if the affordability bits are totally inadequate and blah, blah, bleeping, blah, I think just requiring health insurance companies to write policies for all comers is worth a helluva lot.

For one thing, once that requirement is in place and we see what the premiums look like down the road a piece, we can mangle things further if/when we collectively decide it is worth the hassle.

T-update
We drove up to Albany on Wednesday after T. got out of school. We checked into the hotel, because we beat traffic and got there before we were expected. We got lucky, and there was a luggage cart where we were entering the hotel, and R. got everything (and I do mean everything) out of the van and onto the cart. Unfortunately, the humidifier leaped off the cart and cracked its reservoir, leading to an impromptu trip to Robinson's Hardware (which we would recommend, if you are looking for a hardware store in the Albany area) to buy a replacement. They had the exact same one we had just broken (also bought at an Ace affiliated hardware store), which means we can at minimum continue to use things like the filter and, if the Goop works to fix the crack, we might have two room sized humidifiers instead of just one. The humidifier is important as it is a component of the attempt-to-keep-T.'s-asthmatic-cough-under-control strategy.

In any event, we continued to R.'s sister's house in a nearby town for dinner and chatting with the substantial fraction of the crowd which arrived on Wednesday. The kids did sleep at the hotel (which was nice, if not tremendously conveniently located for our purposes), which was wonderful. Breakfast was a little dodgy and done in stages because for once, A. slept in until 8 a.m.

We were early arrivals back at R.'s sister's house where I got my breakfast and we continued to fail to successfully feed A. She ate some, but not enough. This was a theme. I'm really regretting that we didn't bring a high chair. R. took T. on a couple walks; we took both kids on a walk; I took T. on a fourth walk. There was a fair amount of scribbling in the scribble pad with the new markers (double sided crayolas; very exciting) and some other recreating. A. had a great deal of fun harassing the dogs (who were very tolerant), playing with a soccer ball, and hiding in the mud room with A Lot of Shoes. Turkey happened with all the fixings (I believe 20 people participated, but I only overheard the count, so I am not reliable.), and very shortly after dinner, T. decided it was Time To Go. He had attempted to leave the hotel at bedtime the night before in an effort to return to home (faux home being unsatisfactory, apparently, or at least not home). We knew T. wanted to go home, because he packed up all of his various items (scribble pad, markers, assorted toys, some clothing, spare shoes) in his bag, asked for help (not verbally) closing it, and then started rolling it out to the van. I stalled him a while by recruiting him to then collect everything else we had, Carlin-routine-style, distributed around the house and getting that out to the van and then I said he had to go in and say bye.

Here's the stunner of the evening: he _did_. He waved at the house, then ran in, found the crowd of relatives, said bye (!!!), waved, then turned around to depart. Despite being utterly flabbergasted (after all, both his parents, B., and a wide variety of professionals have been attempting to get him to exhibit this _exact_ behavior for weeks and we still hadn't seen it in action), I pointed out that he said bye and waved in an effort to catch everyone else up to T.'s warp speed departure routine. I asked him to kiss people bye, and he kissed grandma and aunt A., and that was that. We bid a hasty adieu and returned to the hotel to, continuing the Carlin theme, retrieve the rest of our stuff, check out and drive home.

We started the drive at 6ish, which was dicey, since A. had slept in the van on the drive back to the hotel and while I was loading up the (once again conveniently available) luggage rack. There was some crying. T. slept for a chunk of the ride. We visited some McDonald's drive thrus to get decaf coffees and fries. We changed diapers. Eventually, we returned home, where the once sad and/or crying children (T. was keeping it under control; he _knew_ he was getting what he wanted) were suddenly all woohoo! home! toys! They played briefly, and then went to bed without substantial further complaint.

Must remember to tell people at the school about the bye-wave-etc. thing.

zucchini bread
I _bought_ zucchini the last time I was at Idylwilde. That was weird; normally zucchini is something one resists, but I paid money for a bag of the stuff. I figured some could go in hash, and I could make bread, which might make for a somewhat healthier snack than the (dairy free!) danish that Roche Bros. has been carrying and that turn out to be very, very hard for me to resist.

I use the recipe out of Better Homes & Gardens cookbook. I am apparently unable to avoid modifying recipes, because I tried to type that I use it unmodified, then that I only made a single change, then only two changes. Then I gave up. Here's what I changed this time:

replaced the all purpose flour with a combination of whole grain hard red, soft white and spelt flours (yep, ran all of them through the mill. together)

left out the salt and the nuts

used a food processor to grate the zucchini, resulting in this case in a coarser grate than I would ordinary use

left out the nutmeg, increased the cinnamon and added some cardamom and ginger

Those are the changes I can think of offhand. And this is an example of me basically leaving a recipe alone.

It turned out well. The wonderful thing about BH&G recipes is you really can mangle them to almost unrecognizable and they still turn out great.

I put some zucchini in vegetable hash tonight, and that turned out well, too. I had been putting summer squash in, and it seemed like it wouldn't be that different and it was not.

Today's activities include: bubble machine, soaking in the tub, all the laundry in the house
T. spotted the bubble machine today on a top shelf in the garage. He bugged me until I got it down for him. Then we had to clean it, because it had sat on top of the cabinets in the kitchen at the previous house for months, collecting grease and dust. Yuck. Then we had to find a screwdriver to extract the batteries and replace them. And _then_ we could finally make bubbles. The design kinda sucks, since you have to return the handle which operates it all the way to the top to do another round of bubbles and this is apparently not obvious to T., even now. Also, we didn't have the bubbles that came with it, even tho I _think_ I saved the container, nor could I find any of the small funnels, so I had to refill it the hard way. But a fun toy.

Earlier, I read part of _Getting There: The Epic Struggle between Road and Rail in the American Century_ while soaking in the tub.

Picked T. up on the bike, even tho it was getting cold and starting to drizzle.

And did all the laundry I could find, then started packing for T-day.

Today's activities include: groceries by car, up too early, Applebee's
A. woke up before 7 a.m. I really hate when that happens. We had to go downstairs, because she was crawling and banging on the window and making trouble and we didn't want to wake up T. We went grocery shopping at 8 a.m., when Roche Bros. opened. We took the car, because I wanted to get a whole bunch of stuff and didn't think I could get it on either bike. Also, up before 7 a.m. on a Sunday is just demoralizing.

I took her for a walk in the stroller later and she took an hour nap, and then I took an hour or so nap with her later in the afternoon. We all went to dinner at Applebee's later on, which went a whole lot better than I expected it to.

Not a whole lot of excitement, otherwise. T. was reasonable on the horse, apparently.

remember crazy guy shot the cyclist?
http://www.thesunnews.com/news/local/story/1176408.html

Backstory: firefighter (not on the job) shoots at dad of a family out riding bicycles. The firefighter thought that the dad was endangering the son's life by his route choice. Firefighter shot at dad as dad was walking away; bullet hit helmet but did not hit dad's head.

Ex-firefighter has pled guilty to assault with a deadly weapon and is now Doing Time.

So the next time you're thinking, There Ain't No Justice, well, just this once, maybe there was a little.

ETA:

Slightly better coverage. 120 days. Grand jury wouldn't indict on attempted murder because it was impulsive.

http://www.examiner.com/x-7204-Tulsa-Alternative-Transportation-Examiner~y2009m11d19-Former-North-Carolina-fireman-pleads-guilty-to-shooting-at-cyclist

ETAYA:

http://www.citizen-times.com/article/20091119/NEWS01/91119061

That's much better coverage. Guy was out in 2 days on $200K bond, so maybe there isn't even a little justice. Here's hoping he stays unemployed a long, long time -- he was fired about 2 weeks after the incident.