The RedMolly Picayune-Democrat

How to tell if you're a bad homeschooler

Probably some of this just falls into the "you're a bad parent" camp as well.

1. Your kids yell "Five-oh! Five-oh!" when a police car drives by. (You taught this to them yourself, because you thought it would be funny.)

2. You wholeheartedly applaud the University of California's decision, recently upheld by the courts, to disallow religious curriculum from being used to fulfill science course requirements. Because "Goddidit" is not a scientific explanation. Also, since you used to work for  a UC campus' admissions department, you are fully aware that any homeschooled student admitted to UC is there as the result of an Admission by Exception decision, and so it seems silly to you for homeschoolers to care what sorts of curriculum UC will or won't accept anyway.

3. When people post to the homeschooling e-mail lists to which you subscribe with missives such as this:

Hi ,
I recently joined this group.I have a one 4.5 year old Son and 2 year
old daughter and fairly new to the HS world.My son recently started
writing and he would love to have penpal too.We are in NE .If anybody
is interested pl email me too.

you think to yourself, "Ought this person really to be in charge of the education of other people?"

Because a good homeschooler would think, "Wow, it's so great that this parent has decided to take responsibility for her own children's education, and she'll probably find that she learns just as much as they do in the process." And a bad homeschooler thinks that learning alongside your kids works great for things like the details of World War I aircraft or the plots of the thirty-eleven Shakespeare plays you haven't read yet or heck, even the basics of organic chemistry... but not so much for the essentials of freakin' English literacy.

4. Your intended curriculum for the first year of full-time two-kid homeschooling: math, phonics, grammar, art history, geography, vocabulary study, science science science. Your in-practice curriculum for the first year of full-time two-kid homeschooling: Legos, math when they show an interest in it, library books.

Your intended curriculum for the second year of full-time two-kid homeschooling: Legos, high school geometry when they show an interest in it, library books.

5. You have a nanny. What kind of homeschooler has a freakin' nanny?

6. Your nanny is a pierced, tattooed, Orange County-originating, horse-training lesbian who's majoring in mortuary studies. Your kids adore her and are sad when she's not around. (So are you. She's lots of fun.)

7. Your kids already have their first tattoo designs picked out. (Fisher's: a heart with "Mama Didn't Love Me" written across it--he picked this up from Raising Arizona. Rhys's: a unicorn with a skull impaled on its horn--he made this completely up out of his awesome little head.)

8. You let your kids watch "Metalocalypse," but only the episode where Nathan Explosion tries to get his GED and Murderface competes in the Celebrity Spelling Bee. Because it reinforces the importance of education.

9. Your kids have memorized multiple Eddie Izzard routines. Especially the Death Star Canteen one, which I know I've posted here before but is really worth revisiting. (N.B.: When reciting this one, Fisher voluntarily, and rather inexplicably, replaces all the swear words with "bleep." Rhys does no such thing.)

10. You've been putting off buying a very cool-sounding chemistry curriculum because it costs $30, but you saw an iPod boom box for $50 in the Target ad in today's newspaper and think that owning it would add immeasurably to your kids' lives.

11. Your kids are never, ever home. Right now they're driving with Grandma and Grandpa back from Colorado. They've been gone for almost two weeks. They were gone for two weeks earlier this summer. They were gone this spring, and just before Christmas, and you think last fall too. And every time they're gone, it sucks a little more. (Maybe there's a glimmering of hope for you after all. Maybe you could still turn into one of those good homeschooling parents whose children are never more than three feet from the shelter of her denim jumper.)

A question for the universe

So I've found that the best music for me to listen to when I'm writing is dramatic, symphonic, instrumental-type stuff. Kinda soundtracky, but not usually so heavily orchestrated, 'cause the Wall of Strings effect gives me hives. Stuff like Explosions in the Sky, Thee Silver Mt Zion, Godspeed you black emperor, Danny Elfman, Mogwai, Tortoise.

And I'm also on kind of a classic country kick. Merle Haggard, Tennessee Ernie Ford, Marty Robbins. And of course Miss Dolly Parton and Miss Loretta Lynn. (Don't come home a-drinkin' with lovin' on your mind, unless I was out a-drinkin' with you, in which case I've probably already got lovin' on my mind too.)

So what else is out there that I should be listening to? Ideas are welcome, but I must warn you that if you suggest Carrie Underwood, I will be forced to hunt you down and cut off your ears. 'Cause you obviously weren't using them anyway.

Doppelganger

Remember how ages and ages ago I pointed out how much Rhys looked like Beck?

He still does. More so, even:

For your reference:

D'you think I should ask for child support?

It's too hot to blog

...or work, or think, or anything, really.

I think it hit close to 100 here today and it's supposed to top out at 105 tomorrow. Wah. It's hoooot. I want a cold shower and some iced teee-ea. Wow, from my wussified response you'd never know I grew up in the Central Valley (home of ten-day hundred-plus temperature streaks), would you?

This evening, I've brought Jim's laptop down from our attic office (where it's currently at 102 according to our lovely portable weather station thingy) and created a satellite office on the dining room table, complete with labelmaker, external hard drive and gigantic box of fresh Uni-Ball pens. Oh, and an enormous box fan that hums like a helicopter engine. Ah, comfort restored!

Anyway... here's another political video for ya. But at least this one's funny.

Enjoy!

Pat Buchanan: "McCain will make Cheney look like Gandhi"

I hope this scares the crap out of you as much as it did me:

Pass it on... please.

Word up

Hey, look what I made:

If you have a blog or anything else with an RSS feed, you can generate a "collage" of words found on that page at wordle.net. It's free and it's fun, and you can adjust the color and font and all kinds of things. (I used a color palette found at Kuler, my favorite artsy online time-waster..)

Note: you'll need to screen-capture it (I recommend the very swell SnagIt) if you want to post it on your blog as a full-size image. Blah. (Of course, you can use Print Screen too, but SnagIt is seriously better & easier to use.)

It's like making art, but without all the tedious messiness and trial & error...

It's oh so quiet

Tuesday afternoon, we packed up the giant orange suitcase and the two crammed-full-of-books backpacks and the large stuffed cheetah (Schwarz) and the small stuffed jaguar?/leopard? (D.C.) and the seven-year-old blond kid and the nine-year-old brunet kid into the Land Rover and headed to the airport. And at about 6:03, roughly 13 minutes past the scheduled takeoff time, our boys lifted off... up, up and away for a week and a half in Colorado with Jim's parents.

That night was OK. We went to Ground Kontrol and played video games with our friends Howard and Suzanne. (Ground Kontrol is great... most of the video games are either vintage, e.g., Ms. Pac-Man and the thoroughly inexplicable Tempest, or hyper-violent; those are the only kinds I like.) It was Rock Band night, and Howard and Jim, performing as "Tri-X," nailed a Boston song (I can't remember which one it was; all Boston songs sound alike to me). I drank two Mike's Hard Lemonades (shut up and stop laughing), felt courageous and dragged Howard, Jim and some random drummer-type guy on stage to perform "Debaser." High point: a crowd of people I didn't know shouting "I am un CHIEN! ANDALUSIAN!" along with me. Then I was embarrassed and we left.

We went to Kelly's Olympian (best, and possibly noisiest, bar in Portland). We went to City Grill's late-night happy hour and ate delicious spring rolls and seared tombo tuna. Howard and Suzanne went home and Jim and I went and played Scrabble at Billy Ray's. A fine time was had by all.

And since then, it's been way.too.freakin.quiet.

No lengthy monologues on the merits of various WWI aircraft. No bickering over LEGOs. No one to eat dinner with. No one to play cards with. No one to read me "Little Bear" or to beg for just one more chapter of Redwall.

Today, I was out of bed by quarter 'til 8 (early enough, when you consider I was up 'til 2:30 again).  Jim had a day-long photo shoot and was gone half an hour later. I cleaned up our bedroom. I washed the dining room table, which stays much cleaner when no one is smearing yogurt and cereal detritus over it every morning. I took out the recycling and scrubbed out the garbage can. I made dinner (our Used Meat steak is happily braising away in the Crock-Pot). I washed two loads of laundry. I did a bunch of work stuff, re-tidied my already fairly tidy desk area and caught up on some friends' blogs. And all that was over an hour ago and I've done nothing worthwhile since.

It is too quiet. I can't concentrate.

But I'm a good daughter-in-law for sharing my little crazymakers regardless of the negative impact their absence has on my sanity, right? Right?

Oh, and here's the real Pixies performing the real "Debaser."

Mouths of babes

So at some point last week our nanny Eryn and her friends were messing about with a Ouija board, and I guess the boys were in the room when she was telling me about its mystical properties.*

Just now:

Rhys: Fisher, do you know what a Ouija board is?

Fisher: I think that it's a thing that you ask it a question, like "Who's smarter, Obama or Bush?" and it goes whir-whir-whir-BOING! and says "OBAMA."

Rhys: No, I think it's a thing that you ask it a question you don't already know. Like "Who's going to win this campaign?"

Fisher: You have to be more specific than that.

Rhys: OK, so like "Who's going to win this campaign, Obama or McCain, in 2008?"

Fisher: And then what does it say?

Rhys: I think that depends on who's using it.

Fisher: Whir-whir-whir-BOING.

Rhys: Sproing.

*N.B. The one and only time I ever played with a Ouija board was at Penny Wong's house when I was in the sixth grade, and the thing swore up and down I was going to marry Brian Pittman (not the Brian Pittman who was the bassist for Christian "rock" band Relient K). If I remember correctly, this caused some distress, as I was not the only one in our little gaggle who was planning on marrying Brian Pittman. But Brian did ask me to dance at the eighth-grade graduation gala, and that was pretty much the next best thing.

Used meat

Times have been a wee bit tough at the old Pic-Dem homestead lately. Portland's economy is as un-booming as anywhere else's--paying gigs are few and far between. And Jim's getting up to speed (and beyond!) at his day (er, night) job now, but we're coming off a series of darn lean months here.

So in the never-ending quest to save money while eating well and frequently, we've discovered the joys of the Used Meat counter. This is the out-of-the-way corner of the butcher section where the supermarket stashes all the meat that is a day or two before its sell-by date. This is where, last week, I picked up a pound of ground pork for 97 cents and two pounds of top sirloin steak for $4.05. We bring it home, rewrap it and freeze it... or, if we'll be using it in the next few days, we just leave it in the fridge as-is.

We've also been saving even the wee-est scraps of leftovers to eat later. The very useful Love Food Hate Waste offers all kinds of ways to re-use leftovers: check it out! For lunch today, we're having "cafeteria day": the random bits of zucchini-rice gratin, baked spaghetti and chicken with chile-cream sauce that need to get eaten up so we can have our refrigerator (and our plasticware) back.

Last night, I used our bargain ground pork with some leftover cooked rice and the tail end of our rolled oats and seasoned breadcrumbs to make a meatloaf Jim thought was the best he'd had in ages:

Odds & Ends Meatloaf
Combine in a large bowl:
3/4 c any combination of cooked rice, dried or fine fresh breadcrumbs, rolled oats--the lower the proportion of rice to other starches, the firmer the meatloaf will be
1 Tbsp ketchup
1 Tbsp mustard
1 egg
1 tomato, seeded and chopped small: this is a great place to use a tomato that's gone almost too soft to eat
1 small carrot or zucchini, grated (optional)
1/2 medium onion, chopped small
Seasonings: I like dried oregano, minced garlic and a pinch of red pepper flakes; but you can use whatever you like
Salt and pepper

Crumble over and mix well with hands:
1 pound ground meat: I used pork; you can use whatever

On a baking sheet sprayed with cooking spray, form into four to six individual loaves, depending on how hungry you are and how much other stuff you'll have with the meal. Bake at 350 for 30 minutes.

Brush loaves with a mixture of:
2 Tbsp ketchup
2 tsp Worcestershire sauce
2 tsp brown sugar

Return to the oven and bake for 15 more minutes. Yum yum, especially with mashed potatoes and steamed petite peas, which is how we had it.

Also: it was once again chicken-cooking day today. (Crap! I swear I blogged about this before, but I can't find the post. Anyway, chicken-cooking day involves cooking chicken all day in the Crock-Pot, then dicing it up and dividing it into 2-cup portions for future use in such things as chicken salad, chicken casseroles or (my personal favorite) just kind of eating it out of the refrigerator, 'cause it really comes out delicious.) I timed myself this time. It took less than 6 minutes 26 seconds (the length of the podcast I was listening to) to get out the Crock-Pot, slice the onion, mix the seasonings, put the chicken in the pot and toss it all together, wash the cutting board/knife/countertops and get the dishwasher started. Holla!

Update: I found the original chicken-cooking day post. Yay me.

Because it's been stuck in my head

For days. And days. And days.

"Sabotage": enjoy.

Spike Jonze certainly doesn't suck, doesn't he?

(Best part: "And Fred Kelly as Bunny.")