Well, I just enrolled Ana in kindergarden.

( This is long )

Do raspberries grow well from cuttings?

How about seeds? How many berries would I need to pick, and when would I plant the seeds?

On the way home I was so happy that I stopped by the Indian Grocery

We desperately needed mustard seeds and mustard oil, and I'd noticed we were low on cumin seeds as well, so I re-upped all of that.

There's a big difference between an Indian corner store and a regular one, and that difference is that Indians really do eat better. They must, because the freezer section (to name just one example) was full of okra and corn, not ice cream and chocolate bars.

So I picked up my spices, endured the interrogation on "Do you really know how to cook these?" (the man behind the counter wasn't being mean, but normally that's the sort of thing that really irritates me. But I was JUST SO HAPPY that it didn't matter) and headed home.

Mustard oil. Just in time for us to cook that kale!

Incidentally, after filling out all that paperwork?

I start to understand why people get frustrated at pressing one for English.

After filling out form after form (after form), each of which asked me which language the father preferred to use (twice - once for written notices, once for speech) and the mother (twice again!) and the kid (only once, thank goodness), I was starting to get a little less enthralled with the whole process.

But what else can we do? This is a big city, and a lot of people live here, and they all speak different languages. I don't want to keep some kid from an education, keep his parents from understanding vital school information, just because I'm the one too lazy to fill out a form.

Of course, it would make sense if those forms had checkboxes for the three or four most common options (I'm guessing English, Spanish, Russian, and some form of Chinese), but that's asking a lot of bureaucrats.

So I just filled in the forms. And the other forms. And the OTHER forms.

(There really has to be a better way.)

Here's another picture book featuring oh-so-terrible-gay-folks

And the nice, reasoned reply from the librarian who has to deal with the public every day.

Of course, given that some people still aren't on board with the whole biracial families concept, I guess it's not so surprising that some of them aren't good with teh gay either.

GOSH I love "reality" shows.

Wife Swap, just saw an episode of that that I hadn't seen before.

They're great. All that snark, and sarcasm, and judgmentalism, and it's socially acceptable! I love it. (My first judgment is wondering what sort of person watches these shows and then up and decides it'll be really fun to go on one. Who does that?)

But I've been thinking.

They keep pairing opposites - a REALLY STRICT parent with a REALLY LAX one, say, or a VERY RELIGIOUS one with a NOT RELIGIOUS AT ALL one.

Or occasionally they go for "Really weird with really weird" where they *also* fit one of those dichotomies.

But you know what would be just as funny and equally interesting? If they paired less obvious opposites - a very religious Christian family with a very religious non-Christian family, or a family that follows a very strict homeschool curriculum with a group of unschoolers, that sort of thing.

That would just be funny as heck. Think about it.

Gotta give the neighborhood noisy teenagers some credit here

They've taken the hint from the last time we complained, and it's ten, and they've turned off their music.

Ten o'clock on the dot, mind, which is not what I consider ideal, but they did turn off their music without, to my knowledge, anybody having to go out and specifically tell them to knock it the fuck off.

They can learn.

Apparently.

My sympathies to my friends whose neighbors simply won't learn. I feel your pain.

So, my uncle set everybody into a tizzy yesterday.

Not the one I've been talking about. My *other* uncle, my *father's* brother, the one who does not speak his name. (Not that I blame him, really.)

How he managed to find her journal to comment on and not mine, I simply do not know.

At any rate, I read the comment. Reads a lot like a Nigerian letter, really, and there's not much pretense of, y'know, caring about either of our wellbeing. Wellbeings? Whatever. We were never overly invested in him as our family either, so that seems fair to me.

I wait with much interest to see how much drama this ultimately generates.