conuly | Entries tagged with ramblings

We'd take turns coming up with phrases like "wet water" and "Catholic nun" (well, until I learned about the Buddhist ones and trounced everybody with that fact) and so on. It wasn't until I was much older that I realized that the more common term for these is "redundant phrases", which just goes to show that by using a bigger word instead of a smaller one you're not actually making your children more knowledgeable. If they only know one word for a furry creature that purrs and says meow, far better for that word to be "cat" than the less specific "feline"!

But I digress.

This game, aside from leaving me with a vaguely defined distaste for the phrase "I saw it with my own eyes"! (that's a twofer!) has meant that I still, years later, am inclined to say something every time a new redundant cliche springs to my attention.

Some might say it's obnoxious of me to point out to people that, if there is no such thing as "a moment in space" or "a moment in Jello" or "a moment in momentariness" it's just a waste of breath to specify "a moment in time" every time you refer to moments. Those people are probably right, but, nevertheless this could all be avoided if people just agreed I'm right on this subject and they're wrong. (Or, maybe, if we'd just stuck to national capitals at mealtime. Knowing that Lisbon is the capital of Portugal may be totally worthless, but that's only because it comes up so rarely that I never feel the need to interject it into the conversation.)

Parents - don't do this to your kid! Sure, they tell you that stimulating dinner conversation leads to better grades, but at what cost? Better to raise somebody totally ignorant! (Also, books. Who needs 'em? All I've ever gotten from reading three books a day is people come up to me and say inane things like "You're always reading!" like I somehow missed this important fact about myself.)

Oh, and more importantly: A moment in time? Seriously? Stop doing that. It makes me twitchy.

Current Mood: cheerful

We had a pretty uninspiring haul this year - mostly because I cut trick-or-treating short so Evangeline could do her Star Student poster. Even so, though, it's all sucky candy! (On the other hand, we finally got boo'd this morning. Twice, in fact. Here I'd pretty much given up hope of anybody reciprocating, and instead we get outshone! I know exactly who did it, of course. Theoretically this is all a "you don't know who got you!" sorta thing, but in actuality I've taken to going up to people and warning them in advance. In extreme cases, I actually hand off the bags directly to the parent outside of school! (The one day I tried this whole "secret drop" thing with extra supplies I got caught every single time. It's amazing that anybody at all will listen to you when you're prowling around their porch, waving your arm, and screaming "NO! GO AWAY!" in a whisper.) Well, so long as the children are taken in, that's what matters, right?)

But you know, it was an early day for everybody! I know it's a weekend, but coming around at 3pm? Everybody off the streets by 7? We ran out of glow-sticks. I wasn't giving out candy this year, so I estimated we'd need somewhere around 110 of the things based upon historical trends. I got 150 because they're in packs of 50, and we ran out. (Well, we had ten left when I went inside. I just left them on the bottom step of the porch and assumed anybody coming along could figure it out for themselves.)

I saw somebody I knew from middle school*, who asked me "you still read a book a week?" Please. Vile calumny! I never read a book a week! I read a book a day, and I did back then too!

*In and of itself, nothing remarkable. This happens to me just about every time I drop by the supermarket. Nobody ever leaves this neighborhood. Except this guy, who did leave, went all the way to Virginia, and apparently decided that the thing to do was bring his kids back specifically to trick-or-treat in the Land of the Stairs.

Current Mood: calm

( I'm rambling )

Current Mood: cheerful

I *love* our supermarket. I picked up some cardamon seeds today. Not seedpods, not ground cardamon - just the seeds.

Of course, the evaporated goat milk only comes in 12 oz cans, and I need 5 ounces, as Lizziey may recall. *blush*

So, when we were in California I paid a teeny bit of attention in the supermarket. The supermarket was superficially huge - wide aisles, and more of them - but upon closer inspection they had less stuff. Or less of the sort of stuff I'm willing to get. I mean, they had an aisle and a half for water (and given their crappy water out there, I don't blame them), but... they had no beets! No kale! No eggplant! You could cook from your produce aisle, but nothing very interesting.

I'm sure other stores out there have more choices, but it was very frustrating.

Current Mood: pensieve!

When people caught on to the huge wait times between books (and now the series is ended, of course), they started publishing a whole heckuva lot of other kid and YA fantasy books, much of which is really good - and even the more obviously derivative (of HP, naturally) books are still pretty nifty.

You know what's bad about Harry Potter? All these books - especially the more obviously pandering ones - have titles along the lines of Namety Name and the Adjectivial Noun. As it's now been almost two years since DH was released, can we all move past that, guys?

(And can some of these books have Namety Name protagonists other than white guys? Seriously? I mean, I'm all for encouraging boys to read, and I know that society tends to discourage them from reading books about girls, cooties and all that, but really now!)

Current Mood: hyper

I already mentioned Duck, Duck, Bruce, of course.

Next month I intend to get playground equipment.

Now, the way I do this is as follows: I make a big list of everything I'd buy if I had lots and lots of cash, and then I whittle it down to reflect the fact that, in fact, I have no cash. I do most of my non-essential shopping like this, and it's about the only way I know to do that sort of budget. This sort of sudden death elimination helps me keep my priorities in order. If I *don't* do that I end up with a lot of regret after the fact, wondering if I forgot something.

(Tangent for a second, Ana and I have been playing jacks lately (must rescue my jacks from upstairs first thing in the morning!) I never actually played jacks as a child. I had jacks, certainly, and I played with them and had a vague understanding of how the game went, but I was too uncoordinated (and certainly saw myself as uncoordinated, which was a combination of reality and a self-fulfilling prophecy) to play the game itself so instead I just sorted my jacks by color and spun them around a lot. (And a lot and a lot and a lot. Evangeline came across me absentmindedly twirling a hanger on my finger the other day. "WOW. That's AWEsome. It's AMAZING, Connie! How do you DO that!") Ana's not very good at it lately and, every time she makes a mistake, says "I'll never get it!", with such pitch perfect inflection that I start to wonder if she's repeating something she heard elsewhere. Interesting fact, this backfires if she's in a serious snit, but if she's just a little peeved mimicking her is a great way to get her to be less melodramatic. She's a good little actress, really, and when you copy her and then ask her to do some other face she will often comply so fast she gets whiplash, as well as a bad case of the giggles. BACK ON TOPIC NOW RAR!)

Anyway, playground and gym equipment. I'm told they have nothing.

Now, I asked for help earlier and you all responded admirably, except those of you who didn't respond at all, of course, but you know what I mean. I have a tentative list, but it's very important that I get stuff as high quality as I can afford - it has to survive not just children, but little children. Ye gods!

Firstly, if anybody has any further suggestions, please make them.

Second, my list! Advice on the best, the cheapest, more resources?

( Read more... )

The school yard has a playground on street level, and then down a flight of stairs is the general playspace. It has two basketball hoops. Given that the oldest child in that school is 7, that's a bit WTF?, but there you go. The local teens have taken to sneaking in the yard at night to play basketball. Everybody knows about it and brings the subject up like they're worried, but then say in the same breath that it *must* be all right because they're not littering or being loud. Well, duh, I should hope it's all right! Nobody else is using them! And we're so bereft of sport areas (or playgrounds) in this area it's a travesty. It really is. Silver Lake is nice, but it's a hike up several hills and it's all greenery. I like greenery, but it'd be nice to have something else as well.

What they could really do with that space is set it up properly for handball. The way the school is, built into the hill like everything around us is, the wall around the yard goes up well above an adult's head, and then the backyard above it has a fence around it as well. Plenty of space on that blank concrete wall for a handball court, and if not there then on any of the *other* blank concrete walls. (I'm tempted to go there with some chalk one day and cover it with color, anything other than gray gray gray.)

When I was a kid I read a pretty forgettable book (I read a lot of those) that mentioned tetherball, which was the first I'd ever heard of it. I've never seen it in real life, which is strange. You'd think NYC would be all over this, as it sounds like it doesn't take much in the way of equipment or space to set up. I wonder if that would fly past the PTA and could get set up. Just to have something that the kids could do that's not basketball :) (Well, they'll grow, I guess. But the basketball hoops - and surely we didn't really need two of them for a full game, just one would suffice for pick-up games! - are smack in the middle of everything. Anybody's playing there and the rest of the yard will pretty much be useless to play in.)

Current Mood: cheerful

That's actually part of why I like language, because The Folk Process is (more or less) what gives us etymology.

So I skip around in some bizarre pattern from reading up on nursery rhymes (and no, Ring Around the Rosy does *not* mean what you think it does. I'm wary of hidden meanings in general, but that one's pretty provably wrong), then to children's songs (the ones written *by* children, meaning they're often alarmingly inappropriate) to jump rope rhymes, to chinese jump rope patterns (you see the thread there, right?), to hand clap rhymes, to folk songs and ballads, to etymology, to urban legends, to fairy tales, and somehow I inevitably end up with military cadences, no, I don't know why.

Right now Ana's into hand clapping, which is great except... uh... I was a bit of an outcast as a child. AND we didn't live near my school or anything, so it's not like I had much of an opportunity for forced socializing either. (I can't jump rope either.) I know precisely three handclaps from my childhood, and one of them is Quack-dilly-oso, and so it probably doesn't count. (Fun facts: 1. My sister and I spent a summer in Belgium teaching Quack-dilly-oso to other children, and if anybody in Wavre still plays it it is entirely because of us, thank you very much. 2. If the term "quack-dilly-oso doesn't make sense to you, try the name "Stella Ella Ola". Better?)

So here I am, dutifully trying to come up with a few more to teach her. (Evangeline is interested in them too, but she is really too young to quite get the mechanics of them. She has the words down pat, though. She has a remarkable memory for songs, tell the truth. It's amazing. All those games of "I'm going on a trip" must be sticking!)

It's easy enough to find sites and sites of people transcribing (with predictably poor spelling) the various rhymes they use, and the zillion and a half different variants known to mankind. Finding melodies (for those rhymes that have them) is a bit harder, and finding clear instructions is impossible. Most of them, the contributers didn't write instructions at all, and in the rest they're about as clear as mud.

There need to be vidoes, or, barring that, step by step photographs. Why nobody has done this yet, I don't know.

I can find a few on YouTube, but many of them go quickly, or aren't what I'm looking for. And anyway, they're *hard* to find on YouTube! YouTube isn't always as useful as one might hope :(

So, anybody willing to help me out here? Even scanty information is better than *no* information, really. (Information on chinese jump rope patterns, jump rope rhymes, the kind of songs kids sing but you wish they wouldn't, and - yes,

lizziey! - cadences are appreciated too. And in other languages! Go whole hog! I can whip up almost poetic variations if I have a literal translation.)

Oh, and since we're (loosely) on the subject of kids' pastimes - remember that first BSG of the season? Where a big(ish) thing was that bag of jacks so-and-so found in the-spoilery-place? Yeah. When's the last time you saw jacks like that being sold? Huge plastic ones, and they're hard to find too. Clearly, Earth is not of our Earth.

Current Mood: cheerful

(And before I started sounding like a crotchety grownup - when did that happen?!?)

Yeah, as I was saying, when I was a kid, a standard fall-back joke in the media was "Weathermen are always wrong". If they say it'll be sunny, bring your umbrella, if it's supposed to be hot, wear a coat.

And now we have seven-day forecasts, any surprise at the weather is met with "What, didn't you check the forecast before you left the house????", and meteorologists getting it wrong is actually considered newsworthy.

When the heck did this all happen?

(By the way, Monday was beautiful. I went outside, no jacket, sweater on Evangeline... and come to find that everybody *else* was picking up their various kidlets still in jackets, some barely less warm than their usual winter ones. "It's not *that* nice out!" they all chimed. Bah. Ana stepped out the door of her school, didn't even look at me, and declared it was "too hot". Told her that's just what I'd been saying! but nobody even noticed :( (And they all drive, too!)

(On the subject of driving, Evangeline's boots were misplaced the other day, so I put her up and walked... and was met with "You WALKED all the way here???" "Yeah. You know I only live three blocks away, right?" "But it's - oh." Hee, they all live much further from the school than we do, of course.)

Current Mood: bouncy

I've done it all my life
It makes the peas taste funny
But...
It keeps them on my knife!

I always thought this poem was strange as a kid - not because he eats his peas with a knife, but because if he's "done it all his life" surely he thinks that they taste normal that way?

Anyway, I have a poll:

[Poll #1211797]

See, I've had this recipe for watermelon salad with feta and mint floating in my mind for a while (and we always have plenty of mint), so I picked up some feta at the store today. But then, when I was googling to figure out how *much* feta goes in that salad with a whole or half a watermelon, I saw THIS recipe, and this one as well.

I grew up just grabbing a slice of (cold, refrigerated) watermelon and eating it on the fire escape in my room (did the same with gumbo. Everybody else ate in the kitchen, but for those meals I seem to remember eating them looking out over the backyard a lot, which normally I didn't do) and then coming back for more and more and more.

And in the comments to one of those recipes somebody posted that they normally eat watermelon with salt (SO not how I ever did it) like it's a normal thing, and I remember reading that in some areas, that *is* how one usually does it.

So - yeah, poll.

Current Mood: cheerful

I think I've found a new summer program for the kids!

Say, listen - while I'm already spamming myself. Does anybody have any ideas for quick craft-things that I might do (or other things I might do) with the niecelings in California? I have some ideas in my head already, of course.

Also, I'm pleased to announce that I now, officially, tolerate beets. They're not my favorite vegetable, but I can eat them. (Yay.) I need a new goal though. I think, after reading all these articles about oh-so-cool ways to tote children, that I need to learn to ride a bike. (I'm not, ever, spending good money on an expensive child-toting bike in NYC, that's insane, but a bike itself isn't too crazy, right?)

Mostly the nieces walk, though. They can both manage, easily, the trip from here to the boat, and that's about a mile and a half. And they can both do the trip from Stuy to the boat in Manhattan, and that's a little more. A few weeks ago somebody was giving me the Lecture about how They Couldn't Carry (wear) THEIR child like I do, and how the trip to the boat was just Too Long without a stroller - well, they said, pointing at Ana, "I guess she's big enough now". They said this as they strapped their own four-year-old kid in the bike carrier. I refrained from mentioning that Ana's been walking the length of Battery Park City (the whole mile-and-a-half-and-then-some I already mentioned) for the past two years... and that Evangeline's been doing it for one.

This isn't to disparage their kids, or anybody else's, but I wish they'd think! It's an easy trip for the nieces because they don't really have a choice but to make it, so they've adapted. (A while back I watched another kid for a day, and was horrified to find she couldn't walk nearly as long or as fast as Evangeline, who of course is only half her age. AND she whined. But, again, she's just not used to it. She's a perfectly wonderful child regardless.)

Current Mood: cheerful

Not the plantains that are like bananas, the plantains that are plantago and native to Eurasia.

Well, we've got right now some huge giant plantains - big enough that I didn't believe they were plantains before, I kept going "They look familiar, and I think they're edible..."!

Think they must be Greater Plantain. And if google is serving me well, they're not only edible, but extremely medicinal as well. Well, I dug most of 'em up (my god they have deep roots!) and I left one in to grow, because I knew before I googled, from reading, that the little plantains are valuable (much though people pull them up as weeds!), so I thought the big ones might be as well.

HUGE plants. Remember I told you about the giant milkweed of doom? Well, this is the giant plantain of doom. Those roots alone were as long as my arm from wrist to elbow, and they're only about half the height of the plant at the middle - and most of the leaves don't stand up, but flop over, and *they're* all about half to entirely as long as the root.

This is a weird year. We have a lot of birds, more than I think we've had. We've got a chickadee, and I know what it sounds like! Don't have any dragonflies. When we were in Brooklyn, we always had dragonflies in our yard, all the time, and lots of slugs. When we moved to Staten Island we ditched most of the slugs, but we don't seem to have any dragonflies! They have them in Battery Park City, even, and they have them over in Snug Harbor I think, but we don't have any near us where I live.

Used to have a lot of trees up and down our block, too. Lots on the sidewalk, and lots in our yard. We had our big maple, and the one in the corner that fell the year we moved in, and one in the OTHER corner that I think was a cherry, and in the middle of our yard we had our dwarf peach, and our crepe myrtle, and by the edge we had a... something, I think mimosa, though that doesn't make any sense this far north, does it? But when the big maple fell it took out everything, everything, EVERYTHING but the crepe myrtle (which plays dead every year until May), and for the past seven years or so we've been losing all the trees on the block. All the little ones anyway, the big ones, the maples there and the london planes? They're still standing.

So anyway, last month the city made a big push to get people to commit to having trees in front of their houses, which my mother refuses to do because it's the worst deal - you're liable for if the tree pushes up the sidewalk or drops branches on a car, but you can't trim without permission from the city! - and all around our block, in our neighborhood, every street has lots and lots of these little trees. And we lost three, four trees in the past year alone, and we didn't get any :) I think, after the tornado, people saw the sense in not having more excess foliage.

Current Mood: thoughtful

It's not a bad playground, really. It just scares me sometimes.

Of course, Ana thinks the world is her playground. I'm sure I've said before that in many ways, this is a city built on scaffolding. People like scaffolds. They keep the sun and rain away from your eyes.

Ana, of course, pictures them as the biggest, bestest jungle gym she's ever seen. Give her a second, and she's flipping up and climbing up and flipping AND climbing up. The other day, I showed her how to hang by her knees. She hasn't tried it again (I think she's a little scared. I got that idea when, right before laughing when she realized she wasn't falling, she went "I'm scared, I can't do it Connie! SPOT ME!"), but you know she wants to.

The child swings and flips and spins and climbs in her and her sister's hammocks all day long if I let her! She's really good, too. I have a friend, lamenting that both her children are climbers, and she can't get them to stop. I told her, listen, don't worry about getting them to stop. Teach them how to do it without falling and cracking their skulls, then you can sell them to the circus in a few years. (Actually, I said then they'll be safer, but you get the point.)

And really, worrying overmuch about safety is a bad thing, I see it myself. I'm so careful never to say "Don't do that, it'll hurt you" to Ana unless she's actually about to die or at least be seriously injured because I'm always proven wrong - if I say it too much, she doesn't listen. (Today, she had to listen, because hanging off the door of the fridge will cause the fridge to topple and kill her. She didn't try it again.) I've seen for myself that both nieces are more than capable of climbing to the top of various play structures without me hanging on to them. I see people holding on to their kids as they climb, saying "If I don't, he falls back!". Well, I learned myself that it was having my hand there that made Ana and Evangeline lean backwards and let go at weird times. Me hovering made them act unsafely and ultimately put them in danger.

But the rocks still scare me a little, even as I see dozens or more children go up and down and up and down and they don't get hurt.

Current Mood: baffled

I couldn't find the boughten play-doh, so we made our own. Scented it with a little bit of rose water. There's something viscerally good about seeing children playing with undyed play dough, and knowing that you did that yourself. It smells so... wholesome, it really does. Like the store bought kind, but moreso.

Play dough is really easy - just about two parts flour to one part water, and as much salt as you think it needs. I always have it too sticky like that, so I keep adding flour until it's right. Takes about five minutes of my life - less if I make the kids do it, and they think it's fun.

It's like cakes all over again. So many things we buy as a matter of course, we assume make our lives easier. And I guess they do, sorta - but it turns out that the homemade replacements aren't actually that difficult to make, or even that time-consuming.

I was reading a review on Amazon.com about a cookbook, and somebody commented that parts of it were "too time-consuming" because she's a mother of a pre-schooler, so she substitutes (this is her example) canned beans for dried. I didn't get it. From where I'm sitting, soaking the beans is the easiest part of cooking! Sure, it takes several hours, but you don't need to be there. You don't even need to be awake. Just put some water over the beans and go to bed, and by tomorrow they'll be ready to cook. They're healthier that way, and cheaper, too, and it's so easy. I suppose if you start cooking every day by looking in the fridge and seeing what you haven't run out of yet, it makes sense, but that costs more money and time to do, and stress as well.

I was inspired, after the play dough, to look up some recipes for glue, for paint. Why, it's easy to make glue, and not that hard to make paint that'll stand up to the needs of a very young child. (It's not like your very young child is Picasso and needs good quality art supplies just to make a mess on the table, right?)

I read just the other day an excerpt from an old cookbook, preaching frugality. It is the height of waste, I was told, to buy vinegar. One should buy some vinegar once, and then just keep topping it off with this and that - old cider, sour beer, whatever. It sounds so simple, but who makes their own vinegar now? Or stock - why do we buy stocks? What could be easier than dumping your vegetable garbage and bones in a pot and watching TV for a few hours?

Our garden last year was so simple, we didn't touch it, and we had fresh veggies all summer and into fall.

What else is there that's really just so easy to do, that people generally don't do? And why don't we? I appreciate that people don't know how, but why don't people know how, or think of it?

Edit: To be clear, since I don't think I was, I don't mean "This way is better than that way" except for tangible things - these things are easier than they're portrayed (even if they're not totally easy), and they do save money.

I mean, more along the lines of "Why don't people see these as options? Why don't they know these options exist?" It's one thing to know your choices and make an informed choice to do this or that because it's easier for you. It's totally different to make your choice because you think something is impossible for you when it's not, or to not even make your choice because you don't realize you have one.

So like, to be specific, planning meals in advance *is* cheaper. But if it can't work for you, or if it's not a priority, that's your business. This is me, totally not caring (except if you're my mom, in which case, I really wish you'd stop buying food that looks good now, but that never gets made and goes bad in the fridge or freezer) because it's not my concern at all.

*deep breath*

I'm running off now.

Current Mood: bouncy

The signs there are so bad, it's not even funny. Except that it is. I don't know what it is about that store, but they're completely unable to get anything right on their signs. Wanuts, indeed! (and that's hardly the worst of it)

So, I went to the Western Beef today, I laughed at their signs... and got to observe the following message at the nearby White Castle: "For Lent, Enjoy A Fish Fillet" (I'm not sure what fish-food they were advertising, so I just filled in a name)

I'm not sure if that ad is clever or sacriligious. Or possibly both - is one *supposed* to enjoy their substitute for whatever they're giving up on Lent? Isn't that the purpose of giving something up?

And here's a question. Recently, I was informed that most modern Catholics don't go into a little booth with a screen to confess. They just talk to a priest. Face to face. And then, when I exclaimed in (mock) shock over this, my mother told me that most Catholics don't use rosaries anymore! (What's next, they'll stop saying the Mass in Latin? :P)

Honestly, it's like the foundation of my world is crumbling all around me. But still, I persevere. Tell me truthfully: Do many/most/some Catholics (still) give up meat for Lent? I know it's not done on Fridays anymore (world, crumbling), but, not actually being Catholic (if infant baptism counts when done by people who are inherantly anti-organized religion counts, that'd be Jenn. And I suppose that makes me Episcopalian. Whatever *they* believe) I don't actually know. I'm kinda scared to ask my mom. Our conversations about religion always end with somebody making really sacriligious jokes, and then my mother getting scared for my safety and requesting that I move at least 50 feet away from her at all times....

Current Mood: bouncy

Evil things are very obsessive. If you scatter sand or grain across the path of some evil beings, they will be forced to stop and count it, allowing you ample time to get away. This has been used against both witches and vampires. Apparently, it even is possible to thwart vampires by stealing their socks. I thought that was a fictional joke.

If you are worried about attracting evil to you, you can trick it into thinking you are elsewhere by, for example, replying to your name with ritual phrases such as "are you speaking to me?" Or, to protect children, you can call roll by announcing that each child present is not, in fact, there. If you mention a stroke of good luck, you can convince evil that you didn't actually announce the good luck (and it therefore doesn't exist) simply by banging on a piece of wood. In extreme circumstances, simply announcing that you are about to bang on a piece of wood will convince the evil spirits to give up and go away.

Evil spirits do not wear goggles. Therefore, if you spill salt, you can deter the spirits behind you by throwing some into their eyes. If you sneeze, you can prevent evil spirits from entering your body by reciting a simple, short charm against them. They'll be wiping their snot-ridden eyes as you chant "blesyu".

In summation: Evil things are stupid. Very, very stupid. You shouldn't fear them, because they're stupid.

This post would've been better if I hadn't gotten distracted by the revelation that there actually are stories about vampire watermelons.