Frenzied Daddy

Finished This Book is OverDue on the train recently. I liked what it had to say about librarians as being guides / technological sherpas even in this century. I like librarians; some of my best friends are librarians. And I learned that there are a bunch of niche research libraries, on small topics like “dogs.” — A library on Dogs (where it might be three shelves in your neighborhood library.

But something it touched a glancing blow on was education. Specifically, the chapter had to do with how this particular program in Rome is teaching third world people to be cyber librarians. In a long conversation about ALA formats and a site they recommend for storing your references so you can switch formats easily, and how these people from all these different countries were working together, was a passage that really made me think about something I worry about anyway.

What’s the point in making my kids learn to do graphing and visualizing a graph from an equation when we have great sites like wolfram alpha to do it for them? How can I repeat my father’s lessons of “you do it until you don’t need the calculator and then you can use the calculator?” (which I believe formed a lot of my personality), but in the 21st century? I do worry about this- why else would Miss B’s seven times math tables be so weak?

The glancing blow in this chapter was something along the lines of “If you imagine that teaching now is the teacher at the front of the room laying out information for the students to remember and regurgitate, you’ve already failed. Education these days revolves around collaboration and creation.” (paraphrased because I’ve taken the library book back to the library). This was very reassuring to me because I do imagine, especially with math, this older format of learning. I can totally see someone (maybe Miss B) doing five to seven parabola graphs, then a group of students doing 30 or 40 in wolframalpha of them to see if they can start recognizing patterns. And it’s reassuring to me that she ( and they ) could actually learn this way.

(why yes, that is an affiliate link for that book. Go to Amazon.com if you disagree). It was an interesting book but doesn’t really talk about this topic).

This Comic has me dwelling on a mistake I made. One of many, but I’m learning from them.

About a year and a half ago, I managed to get a US Bank account overdrawn to the tune of about $1000. Yeah, I was impressed too. It was my business account for Argh WebWorks. I went in to the branch where I had opened it in order to talk to someone about how to close it and pay it off. I didn’t get the “small business specialist’s” name but his advice was simple. “Ignore it,” he said, “and it will go through internal collections, they’ll knock a bunch of fees and then send you a bill for the remainder. I asked him how much I could expect to wind up paying; he said he didn’t know. I asked him why not just hook me up as if it were a $1000 loan, and I’d make monthly payments. He said he was trying to save me money and that they had no mechanism for that sort of thing. He couldn’t give me a number for “internal collections.” Nothing.

It wouldn’t stand up anywhere- “I went into the branch and they told me to let it go through collections. No, your honor, I don’t remember the guy’s name. No, I don’t have a record of our conversation. No, he didn’t promise anything.” Yeah, that’d go really well. And I can’t deny that I owed them the money, obviously I wrote some bad checks and then fees compounded on fees and one nasty situation rolled into another one. I just wanted to shine the light of the sun on it so the mold couldn’t grow any further. The mold stopped growing on it when I told them to close the account.

So, now it’s a year and a half later, and I’ve finally made the last payment on it. It was still about $1000. Nothing was taken off, not that I believed that would happen. “Internal US Bank Collections” didn’t even bother sending me a bill, they just sold it to a collection agency. The collection agency promises that they’ll have the CheckPoint systems block taken off my records so I can open up a new account (at the credit union, thank you for asking). I’ll be checking later this week.

So yeah, don’t hire lawyers that are barred from courtrooms and don’t listen to Small Business Consultants who can’t help you.

Why yes, I am a little bitter. But not enough to claim it’s not my fault.

Hey if I’m going to buy fruit juice for the girls for summer drinks, I just need to avoid high fructose corn syrup, right? Wrong! I need to print out that list, because an astonishing 125 out of 146 tested fruit products (juice and snacks) had lead in them!

Living in an older house, I worry about lead. And now to learn that 85% of those kids’ drinks and snacks had lead in them — just terrific. Everything from BeechNut to TreeTop and even Trader Joes had lead in it.

I’m going to have to buy a juicer. How do you make cran-grape out of cranberries and grapes? That’s a lot of juicing.

I don’t think any of us (us in the family, not us in the world), really appreciated Ms Plank until this year. Ms Plank is the band teacher who has been teaching Miss B the clarinet for the past three years. For Miss B, this has been a chore. For us, it’s been a chore of “making” Miss B practice, and a chore of going to concerts.

( She’s gotten a lot better. )

Now that we’ve decided to transfer Miss B to a school without a band program and to let her stop taking band, I’ve been looking at what Ms Plank does- she’s there from an hour before school to work with a group of Jazz students. She takes them to competitions (and they place HIGHLY). She goes to the elementary “feeder” schools (where Miss B met her) and teaches kids there. She organizes concerts.

There was a guest conductor at the last concert and he reminded us that Miss B’s schools is an oasis of music here in PPS. And with PPS’s changes, budget shortfalls and redesign, I’m kind of worried about music as taught to our kids in schools.

But Miss B is going to a new school where she won’t be taught music. And after looking over all the benefits of teaching kids music (everything from improved scores in general, to improved math scores, to team-building, to humility and devotion), I’m wondering if, if I want to keep this learning going (or have Miss K learn the same things), if I should consider finding a music tutor or if I should just trust church choir to teach them these things?

and of course, if I even should worry about it. I mean, music classes?

Took Perrin to the Vet today. He couldn’t make it in last night from the yard, and this morning didn’t want to go out again. His hips were hurting pretty badly; he wasn’t eating, couldn’t walk. I didn’t notice how much he was drooling or panting when I made him move; by the time we got to the vet his pain was obvious. And he couldn’t walk on their slippery floor. A couple of injections later he was pain free.

Hard to convince myself his pain wasn’t my fault. I could have taken better care of him.

But I’m trying to remember that we had a great 10, 12 years with him. He came from the humane society, and if we had taken him back it would have been his third strike. We always said he knew this, because all he wanted to do was please us.

Sorry, can’t type; eyeballs are all sweaty.

Miss K got herself signed up for little league this spring. Well, ok, we signed her up, she didn’t have much to do about it. She loved her soccer class last year (was it last year?) and we’ve been anxiously waiting for another chance for her to run around playing some sports.

She’s not totally convinced yet. We’ve had about five practices and two actual games. She’s playing T-ball. Both games. someone has run into her. She didn’t like having a collision. And she’s not happy about having to wrestle the other kids for the ball. I mean, one kid hits the ball, it goes wobbling and bouncing through the infield and seven of nine kids on the team run for the ball and dogpile on it.

Not big on playing their zones. That’s ok, I wasn’t either One of my biggest team-sports failings.

She gets a turn to hit the ball off the tee every inning of three innings. And then she gets to run around the bases, but she has a hard time remembering to pay attention and run around the bases when the other kids hit their ball.

The whole team, though, is funny. Like friday night, when the ball went into the outfield, and five kids all “fell over” and put their legs straight up while they were chasing it. And today, when one of the at-plate team members kept leaving his base and instead of running to the next base he tried to catch the ball (in the pack of little leaguers).

I don’t know if K is having fun, but I sure am.

Last Thursday and Friday, Ms B got to see my morning ritual. Wake up Miss K, try to put clothes on me while she screams at me and tries to stop me. It’d be funny if it wasn’t so tiring. This is why when there’s someone else home I try to get them to get K ready for school. I think she and I are sort of locked into the same story every morning. She’s trained to throw an unholy fit, I try to keep my balance and eventually just start yelling, as I’m trained to do.

Ms B’s response was “Wow. Miss B didn’t do that…” Uh, yes, honey, she did. Kindergarten for both the girls was a horrible “get out of bed” time. And isn’t really a whole lot better when Miss B’s in 7th grade. It’s why I started the rule of “If you want to be on the computer before school, you need to be dressed, washed, and ready to go.” I don’t know what I’ve done to make it so bad, but I hate getting them out of bed.

What I have done is offer to take them to school in their pyjamas. (“offer” isn’t a strong enough word… threaten.. is more like it.) I got as far as getting B buckled into the car one morning before she finally decided that I was serious.

I know that at least part of my problem is that I wake them up suddenly, then they get thrown into clothes and rushed out of the house without so much as a good morning. So that’s my goal at least this week; to give miss K some “wake up” time. Ms B sometimes wonders why I like it so much when they go to bed “early.” — I think that they don’t get enough sleep, which leads to this too.

On the plus side, I only have a few more years of dragging them kicking and screaming out of bed. We should make the most of it.

Hope all your Easters are great. We’re not celebrating this year; most years I try to get egg dying kits and get the girls some chocolate, then hide the eggs in the yard and they can go find them. We worked through this with Miss B and then a few years with Miss K.

But you know something? They don’t eat the eggs, the eggs just sit, lonely, in the fridge waiting for some delicious egg salad to be made. I eat the egg salad. And the eggs. And I’ll eat the chocolate. They don’t need me to buy more chocolate, there’s almost always more in the house. Every year, we’re appreciative of the grandparents who send/deliver easter baskets. And I try to live up to what I think I “should” be doing. Well, let me tell ya, I’m not doing that any more.

I don’t know what would fill the place in our hearts where the stone rolled away from the cave where Jesus lay. Maybe Shaun of the Dead? OR some other fun zombie movie (can’t be too scary, Miss K would throw a fit). And next week I’ll make sure to pick up some Easter Candy. I hear Ms B likes the malted milk eggs.

Have a great Sunday, and try to stay at least partly dry. And watch for the risen dead.

No game tomorrow. Well, with the rolling thunderstorms, hail storms, and buckets of rain, I’m sure you’re as shocked as I am. Oh, sure, it’s 40 degrees outside, and the rain is torrential, but surely my kid wants to get as muddy as the pro-ballers get.

Doesn’t she?

And don’t worry; I’ll be uploading photos as soon as I get some. Some great photos of her hitting a ball and running around in the mud.