Not Inadequate

I had to pay bills the other day.

Gross.

I thought I’d take the opportunity to answer the thousands* of emails I get asking me how I’m hauling my stuff around on this adventure.

Here is my bill paying kit:

That’s it. A storage box and an file folder box thingy. It’s amazing, actually. I used to have a whole filing cabinet full of crap, but before we left I found a professional shredding service and got rid of a TON of useless paper. Convincing myself I could get by on fewer Sharpies was harder.

I love Sharpies, man.

Envelopes, Stapler, Checkbook, Calculator….

Also inside the box are MORE boxes!

‘Cause that’s how I roll. All the components of my life are neatly packed into little boxes, then those boxes are placed into bigger boxes, and then finally, into one last large heavy-duty plastic trunk.

Like a set of matryoshka dolls.

Except less pretty (which I say with complete insincerity, because to me organization IS beautiful).

Places for my beloved Sharpies, Scotch Tape, Pencils…

And little hockey pucks full of other random treats. I love the little hockey pucks. And little flag post-its. I buy them compulsively.

There you have it! An entire office in one little box.

The best part is that when I am finished with it, I get to put it away (in yet another box) and avoid thinking about it for a while.

What else would you like to know?

* thousands being the number of emails I get in the rich world of my imagination, wherein you are all absolutely burning with curiosity about the details of my life and I graciously bestow my wisdom, whilst remaining modest and awesome.

teeny-tiny, nickel-sized crab on my glove. 

…but somewhere in that murky period where unschooling takes place and I don’t actually cross anything off my schedule.

• Where we are staying in Washington, one of the primary industries is shell fishing. In fact, there are clam net thingamajigs on the beach right in front of this house. We were all quite curious about this, and have discovered that the main fishery here will give us a tour of their operation. We are going on Thursday, and I am already feeling smug that education will be happening next week.

• We spent a lot of time talking about mollusks. Big got up one day, said “I want to do some notebooking” and proceeded to unpack supplies. I was helpless in the face of this enthusiasm, and dutifully followed orders to find worksheets and printables and coloring pages.

We have diagrammed squid, talked about adductor muscles in clams and watched videos about geoduck farming. Big extracted a promise to take him to Pike Place Market so he can see a real geoduck in action.

Ah, the geoduck. For those of you unfamiliar, go ahead and google it. I’ll wait.

Uh-huh.

An entire day spent on that creature. AN ENTIRE DAY. Complete with his own diagrams and drawings and notebooking pages. I would post them here, but they would probably be blocked as Adult Content.

Right?

I mean, it’s not just me… is it?

I awarded myself sixteen thousand homeschool mom points for the geoduck. I kept a straight face all day, people. I deserve it.

• We also learned all about octopus, squid, and barnacles. It is surprisingly difficult to find a decent barnacle printable – if by surprisingly difficult I mean Big harangued me until I finally found two diagrams after over AN HOUR AND A HALF of searching. I also spent a lot of time cutting and pasting pictures and editing info into various word documents. Like, a LOT. Three thousand more homeschool mom points AND a junior biologist ribbon for me.

Unschooling isn’t for sissies, yo.

The Carolina Journal Online reports:

Preschooler’s Homemade Lunch Replaced with Cafeteria “Nuggets”

State agent inspects sack lunches, forces preschoolers to purchase cafeteria food instead

So a GOVERNMENT AGENT is inspecting lunches brought from home and deciding whether they are APPROPRIATE? Shouldn’t she be out, like, inspecting the size of holes in swiss cheese or something truly helpful?

The Division of Child Development and Early Education at the Department of Health and Human Services requires all lunches served in pre-kindergarten programs — including in-home day care centers — to meet USDA guidelines. That means lunches must consist of one serving of meat, one serving of milk, one serving of grain, and two servings of fruit or vegetables, even if the lunches are brought from home.

When home-packed lunches do not include all of the required items, child care providers must supplement them with the missing ones.

The girl’s mother — who said she wishes to remain anonymous to protect her daughter from retaliation — said she received a note from the school stating that students who did not bring a “healthy lunch” would be offered the missing portions, which could result in a fee from the cafeteria, in her case $1.25.

And the government sees no irony in deeming a sandwich brought from home as inadequate and instead providing chicken nuggets. AND THEN charging the mom for the priviledge of essentially being replaced as decision maker and provider for her child?

What in the HELL is going on in this country?

This story makes me want to weep.

**By the way, I don’t need any help deciding what kind of light bulbs to buy either.

Michigan House Education Committee, February 1, 2012.

Debbie Squires, Associate Director of the Michigan Elementary and Middle School Principals Association

Wow, they scrubbed all traces of the video! Huh. I can’t find it anywhere.

It was a hearing in which she is explaining why her organization opposes online schools or cyber-schools in Michigan. During her testimony, she says, “Educators go through education for a reason. They are the people who know best about how to serve children. That’s not necessarily true of an individual resident. I’m not saying they don’t want the best for their children, but they may not know what actually is best from an education standpoint.”

The quote that really got me though - and I can’t find it anywhere - is she said something along the lines of “if parents want a say in their children’s education, they can express that at the ballot box when they vote for their local board of education.”

So yeah. Just cast your ballot every few years and watch educational reform happen!

• I am at Heart of the Matter Online today, talking some more about Freezer Cooking. I am posting my amazing meatloaf/meatball recipe at the end of the article. I’d love to get enough questions to do a Q&A in a couple of weeks, so throw a girl a bone and ask me some freezer cooking questions in the comments over there.

You know, if you want. No pressure.

• My mother-in-law was here last week, so this will be brief and possibly lame as I struggle to recover.

• While I was getting ready so we could go pick her up at the airport, I was in the bathroom debating whether to wear makeup while Jim took a shower.

Me: staring in the mirror, fretting over wrinkles. “I can see the beginning of the old lady face. Look here, do you see this? I can see the bags of the future.”

Jim: “I can’t see anything….”

Me, thinking: AWwww!

Jim: “….I don’t have my glasses on”

• So far, everywhere we’ve stayed has ant problems. I am so sick of ants, I can’t even tell you. There was an exceedingly ugly incident wherein I thought I had an eyelash in my eye but when I looked in the mirror to get it out, IT WAS AN ANT.

I HAD AN ANT IN MY EYE.

MY EYE, PEOPLE.

It must have gotten on my hand when I was putting my contacts in.

There was screaming and then crying.

And maybe some cursing.

Anyhow, last week I was cruising around Pinterest and I saw a recipe for homemade ant poison.

That picture is disgusting, isn’t it? But I was encouraged by the comments that this stuff works, so I ordered some Boric Acid from Amazon (I love you, Amazon), and whipped up a batch.

It worked! I vanquished the ants! There were 3 or 4 ants milling around in the bathroom when I set the poison out. Pretty soon there was a whole line of ants, marching up and down the wall, taking the poison home to mummy. It was SO GROSS.

I may or may not have felt compelled to check on the ants every couple of hours and whisper “Die ants, DIE!” After about 24 hours, they were all gone!

I thought about getting a little ant carcass and hanging it in effigy to warn any future interlopers, but that seemed like a lot of trouble.

Nature needs to keep the heck out of my house.

• Happy Monday, y’all!

Okay, y’all KNOW how funny I think Handmade Ryan Gosling is.

I mean. That stuff is just FUNNY.

And now there is HOMESCHOOL RYAN which is EVEN BETTER, if that’s possible.

Come ON. That’s funny stuff, I don’t care who you are.

Except for one thing.

My husband doesn’t think it’s funny.

He doesn’t GET it.

This bothers me.

I’m starting to think he has something against poor Ryan Gosling.

Maybe he’d understand better if I turned the tables a little.

And so.

Without Further Ado…

I present to you……

The Hot Girl and The Geek:

• Last week, we moved from our VRBO in Oregon (that link is to the actual house we stayed in) to a new VRBO in Washington. I miss Oregon very much. I could probably stay on the beach forever and be happy.

A little closer to a Target than we were, but still.

• The new house is bigger, and has another bathroom. We have a very narrow strip of pebble-y beach outside the back door, and are on a calm bay. The kids have been tormenting the local crab population and watching birds.

Yep. I’ve been sucked in to more dratted bird watching. I ordered Birds of Washington State from Amazon. It should be here on Wednesday, so brace yourself for more insightful bird news. We even bought binoculars. I’m annoyed that I am now the person who hollers from the window, “YOU GUYS! There’re BIRDS out there! Come look!” I never in my life gave a hang about birds. Until now.

Homeschooling is ruining my lust for inactivity.

In fact, I interrupted writing this post to go watch the seagulls dig mussels or something out of the pebbles, then fly up high and drop them. This must break the shell open, for they fly back down again and dig something gross and slimy out of it.

• I had to fix the toilet paper holder in this house. I know I am just a renter, but it was upside down. And dudes, I can’t live like that.

• My mother-in-law is coming on Thursday for 3 days. She has never stayed in our house longer than 3 hours. I am very nervous. Pity me.

Now that I am the proud new owner of a Kindle, I am busy loading it up with books.

Generally, I am drawn to the literature genres known as Trash and Crap.

I like a little romance, knowing that it will end with happily ever after. I love mysteries, but nothing too gory. I shy away from anything that’ll make me sad or books that feel too much like Quality Literature.

Also – and get ready, this could change everything about our relationship – I hate animal stories. Especially if they are labeled as “heartwarming.”

Heartwarming = Gag

I have been known to go to the bookstore, settle in the coffee shop with a stack of celebrity biographies – Martha Stewart, Tori Spelling, and even (heaven help me) Kendra Wilkinson - and greedily gobble up the highlights; I am definitely not an elitist, but I can’t bring myself to pay money for swill.

Yummy, illicit, swill.

So I don’t usually have a lot to add to book conversations, lest I reveal the true shallowness of my preferences. The delicious, nutrient-free, candy-coated shallowness.

I have, on occasion, inadvertantly read more Important Books. Books that are sometimes thick and called novels. Here is what the word novel means to me: there is no happily ever after, and there is no murderer handed to the reader on a silver platter. Instead the story seems to stop when the author reaches his word limit.

Okay, not really. But you have to admit, novels rarely have a neat tidy ending. I am usually left thinking, “wait – what? that’s it? what happens next?” and feeling vaguely dissatisfied.

Here are a few of the real books that have stuck with me over the years:

The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake by Aimee Bender. About a girl who discovers she can literally taste the emotions of the person who prepares her food. Interesting premise, and I didn’t mind the odd writing style (there are no quotation marks in the whole book); but the ending left me going “wait – that’s it? I still don’t understand the chair…” Nevertheless, I quite liked it. It was lovely and weird.

We Need to Talk About Kevin by Lionel Shriver. Disturbing and brilliantly written in the form of letters from Kevin’s mother, Eva, to her husband. Kevin is in prison for killing his classmates in a Columbine-esque spree. The letters recount the entire story of the family as Eva tries to understand what went wrong. The ending is a complete surprise and absolutely shocking - as well as unrelated to the school shooting I was steeling myself for from the beginning. Haunting. I read it years ago and sometimes think of it even now.

Loving Frank by Nancy Horan. The story of Frank Lloyd Wright and Mamah Cheney, the woman he left his family for (and she left hers for him). Firstly, I was completely unaware that that Frank Lloyd Wright was a cheating bastard, and could not believe Mamah abandoned her young children to be with him. It was the end of the story, though, that kept me up until 3 in the morning, sobbing. I was not expecting such a shocking and horrifying ending. The book was sad all along, but the ending! I was heartbroken for days.

Ok – now you. What should I add to my Kindle? Bear in mind my affection for trash, so no pushing the classics at me, okay?

(oh, and no vampires! good grief, will all the vampires please DIE already? gah.)