The great thing about low expectations

..is that one is very easily pleased! Eric came back from my parents' house yesterday with a "video game" which he thought was the best thing ever! What it actually was, was a talking calculator of the kind which my dad gets sent every so often because he donates to charities for the blind; when you push a button, a voice says the number as it appears on the display. Not only was his "video game" a calculator, but it was a broken one! Something had broken inside the liquid crystal display so it has a big dark blob on the low end. Nevertheless, Eric was absolutely thrilled with it.

It reminded me of the first birthday party invitation Faith got last year when she had just turned seven. "They're going to have lunch and cake and riding scooters!" she kept telling me, in a manner that suggested she couldn't imagine so many wonderful things all happening at once. And they both still get a thrill from riding the escalator at the mall. The world is an exciting place when one is not yet jaded.

On providence

Providence is wonderfully intricate. Ah! You want always to see through Providence, do you not? You never will, I assure you. You have not eyes good enough. You want to see what good that affliction was to you; you must believe it. You want to see how it can bring good to the soul; you may be enabled in a little time, but you cannot see it now; you must believe it.
-- Charles Haddon Spurgeon

Earth's crammed with heaven, and every common bush afire with God; but only he who sees takes off his shoes.
-- Elizabeth Barrett Browning

I read these two quotations in two different magazines this past week, but they want to go together.

The blogging gremlins are against me!

They'll do whatever they can to get me to break my resolution! Last week, it was the internet being down; now, I have a doctor's appointment in the morning to have a broken finger looked at.

I actually hurt it on Monday, but it wasn't that bad: painful to use, but it didn't swell up or bruise at all until the next morning, and just barely then. I'd been doing a good job of working around it (it's only my pinkie), and it seemed to be getting better. But then today I was digging a hole to plant a hydrangea in the backyard where I'd taken out some Texas sages that had overgrown the area, and my hand slipped on the shovel and twisted my hurt pinkie. If it was just fractured before, now it's definitely broke. It swelled up and bruised right away, and I came in the house and called my doctor just before the office closed for the day to get an appointment for tomorrow. (I've done the ER for a minor injury thing before and have neither the hours of waiting nor the multiple billings to spare.)

Scarlett as victim?

In case you've been living in a cave, it's the 150th anniversary of the beginning of the Civil War this month, and every drop of blood drawn by the sword must be paid by a drop of ink from the journalists' pen. This was the flagship article in the 18 April issue of Time magazine, which oddly describes Scarlett O'Hara as depicted as a plucky heroine and victim of the war.

Granted, I have a much better memory of the book than the movie, which admittedly cut out a good deal of her shenanigans, but Scarlett O'Hara is as much a "plucky heroine" as is Emma Bovary or Anna Karenina. Which is to say, not at all. What she is mostly, like the other two protagonists, is a strong-willed woman who destroys other people's lives and happiness to get what she wants, which then turns out not to make her happy after all. Granted, she ends the book still alive, unlike Emma and Anna (and thus available for an ill-conceived sequel), but I hardly think anyone takes her as a role model. Likeable? Yes, in spades, but you spend the whole book shouting at her, "You idiot! Don't do that!" And yet, she inevitably does. Plucky? Sure. Heroine? Meh. Victim? Only of herself.

Easter eggs

Here are Eric and Faith hunting for eggs in the backyard yesterday, our sadly deteriorating fence in the background. I'd really rather pay for the whole thing ourselves than enter into negotiations with all four neighbors who share parts of our backyard fence.

The elephant in the webpage

So I'm late to the whole GoDaddy elephant controversy. If there's anyone out there more out of touch than I am, their CEO filmed himself killing an elephant in a herd in Zimbabwe that was trampling the farmers' crops. Bad press has been rampant, and a competitor has apparently raised over $20,000 for Save the Elephants in a gimmick to get people to transfer from GoDaddy to their company.

On the one hand, anything that might lead to GoDaddy going out of business, or at least shutting down their marketing department, is to be applauded. I would very much like to never have to see Danica Patrick pretend like she's going to take off her clothes again. Any feminist cred she might have aimed for by being the first famous female race car driver is more than effaced by the fact that she squanders her "drives with the big boys" capital by cashing in on the male fantasy of seeing her strip and/or engage in "hot girl on girl" action. Other female pioneers in their field somehow managed not to feel the need to capitalize on their sexuality. Sandra Day O'Connor, Sally Ride, and Amelia Earhart were all the "first female" something without engaging in a strip tease.

On the other hand, now that I look into some of the available outrage, it's hard not to get annoyed at the overreaction out there. First, you have to get past the "*GRAPHIC CONTENT!*" warnings on the video, which apparently refers to the fact that they show the elephant skinned so it can be cut up for meat. Seriously, if you've been to the meat aisle in the supermarket, you've seen this. I thought they were going to show a close-up of the elephant in extreme slow motion at the point of impact, spurting blood and brain matter, from the way they hyperventilated over it. Then, you get copy like the prose in this article complaining that the CEO in question has gone back and edited out some of the more stupid aspects, such as his posing with the dead elephant, captions that give him personal credit for the kill, and an AC/DC soundtrack: "Also gone is the incredibly bizarre use of the AC/DC song Hell’s Bells, which used to play over top of footage of the villagers slaughtering the elephant’s corpse."

Really? "Slaughtering the elephant's corpse?" How exactly do you slaughter a corpse? Isn't a corpse already dead? No doubt they wanted the word "butcher," which still sounds like something out of a slasher movie but has the unfortunate side effect of reminding the reader that hungry people in Africa need to eat and that it's infinitely better, once the elephant in question is dead, for it to provide food for people who need it rather than left to rot in the sun or taken back to the US as a trophy.

(I can't really give GoDaddy a pass on the grammar front either, though. The captions in the video, which I assume are the original work of the CEO, are full of incomplete sentences.)

Honestly, I think it all goes back to Dumbo, the false image people who don't have to live with them have of elephants as cute and cuddly. They're always the good guys in Disney movies. If Disney movies are to be believed, the domestic housecat is the most evil animal in the world. Maybe the GoDaddy guy should have gone hunting one of those.

"It's not my fault!"

(with apologies to Lando Calrissian)

So, yeah, I missed a weekday, but it was due to circumstances beyond my control. Our area had an internet outage at about 6:30 last night. Everything was working yesterday afternoon; then I came back after dinner and had no access. Spent quite a bit on the phone with tech support.

Actually, I spent less and far less frustrating time with tech support than I did trying to get to tech support. First I had to fight one of those stupid voice-recognition systems that made me walk through everything step by step, complete with "Finish this trouble-shooting process you've already done because you're not a complete moron and actually know what you're doing, and then call me back!" I finally talked him down to where he had technical diffuculties and let me talk to a real person. That was much quicker.

As I expected, the problem turned out to be on their end, and all I could do was wait for them to fix it. Which they did sometime before this morning. I'll make a post tomorrow to make up for it.

Today was science day. I got a microscope for the kids, and we spent the afternoon finding things to look at through it. My parents got me one just like it when I was a kid myself, and it was in the upstairs hall closet up until they moved two and a half years ago. If I'd thought to have them hold on to it, I could have saved myself some money. This one has LEDs, though, which ought to be better than the little tiny light bulbs in my 1980s model.

Art gallery

Wednesday is art and music day. For the last 3 weeks, we've been working on animal sculptures based on this ancient blue Egyptian hippo. Eric, being unimaginative, made a hippo, and Faith made a cheetah. (Okay, technically, I did most of the shape work on these. They're clay over aluminum-foil-and-paper-clip frames.) But the kids chose their own colors and did their own painting. This is Eric working on his pickle-colored hippo and Faith with her cherry-colored cheetah.

The most famous person in the world

TIME magazine ran an online poll allowing voters to select the most influential person in the world. The results (which, thankfully, are not binding on the editors putting together a sane list) indicate that the person with the most influence on the global mind is ... a Koren pop star named, apparently, Rain. Which raises the question of whether one can be influenced by someone of whom one has never been aware before the poll.

The first person on the list I've even heard of, at number 3, is Susan Boyle. Who has a nice voice and a nicer story, but I fail to understand how she is "influential." Does anyone even know where she stands on issues of the day? And if so, are they influenced to agree with her?

Do people participating in polls on the internet know the definition of the word "influential?" Perhaps I should take a poll....

Sunday School picnic

Our Sunday School class had a picnic at a local park on Saturday evening, with a Easter egg hunt for the kids. Rather than pack a meal, we stopped at a Dairy Queen on the way for burgers, onions rings and Blizzards. The weather was beautiful, and the kids had a great time on the playground. Of course, I neglected to bring the camera, so I don't have any pictures; you'll just have to take my word for it.

Oddly enough, out of a little less than a dozen kids amongst the families from our class, there are only two girls; the rest are boys, most of them Eric's age or younger. Eric's 4-year-old Sunday School class is made up of about seven or eight boys with one or two girls who show up occasionally.

When your kids surprise you

Of course, Faith sitting through 12 hours of The Lord of the Rings over several days (although I'm fairly certain she could have done so all in one day, if the rest of us could have stood it) doesn't compare to Eric's feat.

When he was three, in the ramp-up to the release of Toy Story 3, Disney re-released Toy Stories 1 & 2 upconverted to 3D as a double feature. We all went to see it, but my best hope was that he would go to sleep during the movies and not force me to take him out to walk up and down the hall for hours. The ticket-seller actually let him in for free, even though he was old enough to pay for a child's ticket, because he was sure there was no way he'd sit through the whole thing.

And sit through the whole thing he did. Never moved from his seat and never complained. Glued to the screen. He's seen Tangled and Voyage of the Dawn Treader since then and been just as good an audience member. I didn't even try to take Faith to a movie until she was four. (Ratatouille was her first movie in the theater.)

One ring to rule them all, one ring to find them

We spent our evenings this week watching the special extended edition of The Lord of the Rings. The kids have seen the Veggie Tales parody many times; after they watched it this weekend, Tommy told Faith it was based on another story, and she insisted she wanted to watch it.

Considering it runs 12 hours with all the deleted scenes, I really didn't think she'd stick with it, but she loved it -- all the fighting and the battle scenes. When we finally got to the end of the 6th disk tonight, she wanted to start over with the first one again tomorrow! I got out my old copy of The Hobbit, and she's all excited to start reading it after she finishes Little House on the Prairie. I don't know if she can make it through all the small print and lack of pictures, but we'll see. She's already surprised me once.

When Science Attacks!

So last Friday, we put cress seeds on two wet paper towels in two petrie dishes and set one in the windowsill and one in a dark cupboard. The point of the exercise was supposed to be to demonstrate that plants need sunlight to sprout.

Only the sun coming through the window kept drying out the wet paper towel for the "good" petrie dish. I'd eventually remember it and rewet it, but the upshot is that the seed in the sunlight has done nothing, while the overachieving seed in the dark cupboard (where the paper towel stays damp much longer) is actually sprouting! (Pale albino sprouts, but still.)

So now the question is, do I switch the dishes to "prove" to Eric that yes, plants need sunlight to grow, or do I tell him that they really do despite the evidence of our little experiment?

"Clear away the barricades, and we're still there!"

The March 2011 issue of "Money" contains an article questioning whether 'my resume makes me look old.' The first tip includes the advice, "Multiple phone numbers make a resume look dated; you're a dinosaur if you list a fax!"

Like cockroaches and Twinkies after a nuclear war, I am gratified to discover that I have stubbornly outlived the fax machine without ever having one or learning how to use one. It gives me hope that I shall one day similarly read the obituary of Facebook. I recall a day a decade or so ago when a motel desk clerk was murdered and the photo printed by the local paper bore the caption "from the victim's MySpace page," which made me deal with the fact that a sixty-year-old motel desk clerk was more up to date than I was at the time -- or am now, for that matter, for all that MySpace has been eclipsed by Facebook. I'm willing to bet Facebook doesn't have as long a run as the fax machine did.

A belated photo

I missed midnight again, but here are Faith and Eric at the zoo today (or yesterday -- Monday, anyway).

Working for the weekend

Well, she must really be sick, because she acceded to sleeping in tomorrow morning and postponing the zoo trip until she was feeling better without even a whine or a tear. Maybe she learned her lesson from the day she insisted she felt well enough to go to the movies and then threw up all over Tommy 15 minutes into the show. (I know Tommy did!)

So, yay! Day off(ish) tomorrow!

Time off

Two 'high horse' posts in as many days! I need to get off and stop looking down my nose at people for a while.

I had a pleasant situation today, when both kids finished their reading and math before we met Tommy for lunch, and I had 3 free hours in the afternoon to get caught up on things. This is a rare occurrence. Between lessons and errands and laundry, my time is usually spoken for right up until I have to start cooking dinner. Just this morning, I was thinking that I was going to have to give the kids a week off just so I can get some things done around the house. I might still have to; there's all kinds of things that need taking care of out in the yard now that spring is here.

Today, during my free time, I wrote 2 birthday cards, only one of which was already late. I started working through my stacks of paper and backlog of mail I haven't gotten around to opening over the past several days. (I know there's bills in there that I need to get paid before due dates.) I should have gotten more of that kind of stuff done -- I owe all kinds of people e-mails -- but I didn't. Maybe this weekend. We're supposed to go to the zoo Saturday morning, but Faith is coming down with a cough. Is it wrong of me to hope she's too sick to go Saturday so I can have a day off?

Priorities

This is a very sad story about a little boy going blind. And yet, I can't help but pause at a certain passage of the article, which I will quote here:

"Die, everybody, die!" he said, jerking back and forth with control box in hand as he timed leaps and disposed of marauding opponents in a Star Wars video game one evening.

He stood at a slant next to a low-slung TV, his face barely a foot from the 55-inch screen, moving right to left to keep the action within his limited frame of reference.

Then, a more challenging game scenario emerged. "This is the part I really don't like," he said. "I get attacked by all these guys."

Said his father, Adam Thibodeaux of Addison: "We try to let him play. Because someday."

He looks away, unable to finish the sentence.

You always hear the old bromide, "No one ever wished on his death bed he had spent more time at the office." Do you think many people who have gone blind say, "Man, I wished I had played more video games when I could see them?"

All the things he could be seeing instead -- art, nature, what have you -- and instead he's standing a foot away from a TV screen slicing through pixelated storm troopers. Yeah, he said he wanted to see a giant redwood tree and the Statue of Liberty -- but the top of his list is a water park and only because it bears a name referenced in a cartoon episode that has nothing to do with it? Does there come a point where you say, "Fine, this is what you say you want, but you're eight, and in this case, we're going to spend our time and money on something you'll appreciate more later in life?" "When you're forty, you'd rather have memories of mountains and sunsets and things of great beauty than of lightsabres and Jedi on a flat screen?"

Heck, I could make a decent argument for watching the original Star Wars trilogy rather than spend what sighted days he has left playing video games.

Read more: http://www.star-telegram.com/2011/03/26/2951702/texas-boy-going-blind-remains.html#ixzz1InkOMOhO

Gharials!

Tommy stayed home when we went to zoo school this week. Normally, we all go together so we can go out to lunch afterwards, but Tommy and I had plans for the afternoon that meant we wouldn't have time for lunch.

The weather was much warmer than the last time we were there, when we huddled in the cafe to stay warm rather than wander the zoo, but I still went in the cafe first to sit down and read the newspaper inside where the pages wouldn't blow in the wind. That's where you can sit and watch the gharials through the window.

Two groups of people came in within less than ten minutes, both of whom insisted to each other that the gharials were not real but plastic! The second group, after one of the animals moved where it was basking in the sun, amended their opinion to, "Well, that one's real, but the rest are plastic." What the heck kind of zoo has plastic animals in its exhibits? (They also thought the water turtles were fake because they were sitting still next to the window under the water. If they had stuck around for a while, they would have seen a few swim up for air.)

The last zoo school of the spring

The kids had their last session of zoo school for the spring semester Saturday morning. Eric learned about flamingos. His teacher is obviously well-versed in all the possibilities of animal-related handprint art. (Even though it is midnight, I still have to wash the dishes from dinner, and I have laundry from Saturday that still needs to be folded. Where's my fairy godmother?!? :P)

Nothing to see here. Move along.

The internets seem to be a bastion of celebrating April Fool's Day. Not since elementary school have I seen so many people as determined to be funny on April 1st as most websites are.

Personally, I've never been much for the prank-pulling, even when I'm not tired from a week of lessons and chores. This blog is the lame hold-out of anti-hipness and un-with-it-itude: I don't even have the energy to attempt to be funny.

(I didn't wear green on St. Patrick's Day, either.)