Silent Week, Hectic Week

The day before Thanksgiving, David had taken the girls and Dario to Strong Museum:



The next day, we had a really good Thanksgiving dinner. David and Tony took Madison and Dario on an insane hike up the same waterfall we did at Conklin's Gully in October, only this time in very very cold and wet weather with wet leaves on the ground. They had a good time. I had a good time staying home and cooking in my nice warm kitchen. Tatiana had a nice time grading papers in my nice warm kitchen.

Then, of course, the squirrel ran over my cooling pumpkin pie outside my kitchen door:



But of course that could not keep us from eating around it. Tony said, "Hey, I'm Cuban. I'm honored to be eating the pie that was signed by an American squirrel." He probably wouldn't eat it if Castro signed it, though.

The bad news is that I did a taste test with two pies: using canned pumpkin, and using fresh pumpkin that I baked myself. The fresh one won hands-down. Too bad, because it's a lot more effort than opening up the $1.69 can from Libby's.

I discovered that there is nothing like having several people with discriminating taste buds tell you that the new Roasted Garlic Squash Soup you devised this year was the best thing at Thanksgiving dinner.

The next day was Madison's first of three days performing with the Bach Children's Chorus in The Nutcracker:



It was at the Eastman Theatre. It was beautiful. I cried. Of course. The administrative director of the BCC told me that parents of first-year participants cry a lot.

Before they left, Tony and Tata helped us totally rearrange the living room and the church room. We moved the TV into the church room, along with the black leather furniture. A definite improvement, and much more cozy to watch TV, especially with the space heater going.

This week, clients exploded all over me. AAAAGH! It's the holiday russh! every active and inactive client seemed to say. I NEED HER HELP NOW. The girls were happy to cede a lot of their school time to my clients. I was not happy to cede a lot of their school time to my clients. I felt guilty. But we got three cool science projects made today, all dealing with weather. We made a rain gauge that we think will work, a weathervane that definitely worked, and a wind meter that was too flimsy to work.

Today, just as I was finishing up my weekly KOA e-newsletter, Ella came in and told me that it was "raining" in the doorway of her room. Madison had just flushed the toilet right above said room. Ah, the joys of an old house. I emailed our real estate agent, who knows everyone around here,

If, hypothetically, you had a pipe burst under your attic-floor bathroom after your 8-year-old flushed the toilet, and you knew about it because the water started dripping down into your 6-year-old's room in the frame of her door and she came down and told you it was raining in her room, and you figured that the ceiling was going to have to be opened up to get at the issue...well, after you turned off the water to the toilet in question, who would you, personally, call?

She emailed me back:

Well, of course, speaking "hypothetically"...I'd go shopping & not come home until someone else had handled the problem! I'm thinking the Woodbury outlet downstate??

Then she gave me the names of a couple of plumbers. Sigh.

This weekend we have two hours of rehearsals tomorrow morning for the next concert, which is Sunday evening and (yay!) Tom and Susan will be joining us for it. Both Madison AND Ella are in this concert. Will post photos next week. We have Wigilia on Saturday afternoon, which is a traditional Polish Christmas Eve event that the Polish Society of Rochester puts on every year at the RMSC.

And now, the whole family is watching Ratatouille (that took me three tries to spell) in front of the TV with some Chinese food because I had absolutely no time to cook today. I'd better join them.

Happy Thanksgiving

The rolls are rising, the turkey is brining, Ella's tooth is loose, los Americanos are here, and my inbox has several email messages from KOA readers telling me they're thankful for my weekly newsletter. All is right with the world except for the flood in the basement from yesterday's rain, but even that can't dampen my spirits.

Happy Thanksgiving, everyone.

Patriots Crush Bills, 56-10, in our Presence

We went to our first professional football game last night, and it will probably be our last unless Patrick wants to go again in two years, for an afternoon game when it's reasonably warm out.

Even then, well, it was an experience that was fine to have, say, once.

We were with my colleague Steve and his two adult sons, one son's girlfriend, and my friend Patrick, who drove in from Cleveland for the occasion. All of us are Patriots fans, although we Rosses were really fans in an along-for-the-ride sort of way. They really get into it.

We were pretty amazed at the bad behavior of the Bills fans, and the way they shouted at our Patriots-gear-clad friends, despite the fact that we had little kids with us. We tailgated (also a new experience) for 3 (!) hours before the game. Steve brought the works: A grill, a tent, lots of food, a table, chairs, and a TV. It was a little windy, about 25-30 degrees, and a lot of people built fires in trash cans or out in the open. People were mostly drunk, very merry, and extremely messy. Steve said that the carnage left in the parking lot reminded him of third-world countries, minus actual open sewers. We reflected that we were happy that we worked with our brains, rather than being the people who were going to have to clean that up the next day. We hope they cleaned it up, that is. Pretty low-class.

The girls liked being at the game, they liked the hot chocolate, they liked talking about the rules of football, they liked meeting Patrick and interacting with Steve's family, they liked the fireworks at the beginning and singing The Star-Spangled Banner and seeing the Bills run out onto the field through a big blow-up tunnel. After that they were just pretty self-involved enduring the cold, so I think they were oblivious to all of the cursing going on around us. In our section, 339 (very high up), people were mostly merry, and so the cursing didn't have any bite to it. I think they would have noticed had people been angry. David took them home after the first quarter, which was the best thing for both him and them. There was a bit of endurance involved for him, too, and a great deal of detached gazing out at a very strange aspect of the subculture. I was amazed to discover that some people were still steadily drinking beer despite the temperature.

And then some magic happens...

Today, the girls and I went to see the Master's Thesis Defense of Hye Yon Yi, one of David's students who often babysits for the girls. Madison and Ella LOVE Hye Yon. They think she's the best babysitter EVER. David and I think she's a lovely young woman with a lot of potential, too. She invited us last week, so we went. Everyone there was much amused to see M & E there, and extremely complimentary afterward about how incredibly the girls behaved during the hour-long defense. Ella colored, but, to my surprise, Madison listened to the whole thing. She said afterward that she hadn't understood any of it, but she really was listening. I was proud.

Hye Yon's Master's Thesis was on "Turing Instabilities in a S-I-R Model." Don't know what that is? Neither did I, of course. Basically, her paper is a model of what happens mathematically in an epidemic. She took 10 cities from Mayan culture and proposed that each city has contact with exactly two other cities. Her work explored what happens mathematically to the population in terms of people susceptible to the disease but not yet sick, those sick, and those recovering from the disease. The aim was to determine under what conditions the cities are "stable" ("at equilibrium") in terms of what percentages of their populations fell into the three categories.

Here's the thing that's bothering me: I didn't get any of it. Well, ok, I got what I GOT (explained above) but I couldn't follow any of the math. Despite being married to a mathematician for lo these many years, and despite having "math awareness" above the average Jane, there was just no way in hell I was going to track with the equations on the PowerPoint slides. It occurred to me, to my chagrin, that I could probably make some sense out of a Master's Thesis in just about any subject BUT mathematics.

I really have the sense that learning math is different from learning just about anything else in our culture. And I think this is partly because most of us think this way: We understand math *up to a point*, and then, in higher math, SOME MAGIC HAPPENS that very few people understand. So they just decide not to bother.

It's the MAGIC quality of this all that is bothering me. I should know better than almost anyone that mathematics isn't magic at all, it's not confined to the realm of a few magic people who miraculously understand this stuff. It's a step-by-step acquisition of a bunch of knowledge that you have to focus on in a certain way to understand. I think that the accumulation of this knowledge is qualitatively different from most other knowledge, and that this is what makes people think it's magic. And, let me just say, it's hard.

It's worth repeating: It's hard. That's probably why I steered myself away from math and science and engineering (yes, no use trying to blame this on some kind of anti-woman culture, the fault was all mine) toward being an English major. Writing was just easier, and easier for me to be good at it. Yes, it was somewhat lazy, but it's not just that I was lazy; at the time, I didn't see anyone around me who had a good grasp of higher math, who could tell me that it really was possible to understand it with steady work. Even my father, who was a professor in the math department at one of the CUNY schools, couldn't explain calculus to me. (OK, he was actually more of an administrator, but STILL.) I imagined learning higher math not as the tortoise in Aesop's fable (which it really is), but as the hare--and, moreover, a hare who'd have to leap into a Star Trek transporter and be beamed over the finish line.

The MAGIC aspect of it all got me. I simply didn't see the path from where I was, Point A, to being a scientist. It wasn't Point B, it was Point Q. Plus, there is a cultural mystique about math that I bought into: the one about it being kind of impossible except for Superior Beings. My unstated attitude (and come on, admit it, it was yours too) was that only special people could survive being a math major, and that even for those people some magic must happen within those four years of college so that they could emerge knowing what Fourier Transforms are all about.

Living with David has of course taught me that it's not magic, that it's work, and that with good instruction anyone can learn it. This is what makes my experience this afternoon that much more frustrating. I should have been an engineer, there is no doubt about it. I would have loved it, ultimately. But I'm not an engineer, and while I COULD of course go back, that wouldn't make any sense; it would absolutely not be the best use of my time at the age of 38 when I have many other worthwhile things to accomplish.

On the other hand, I feel like I should know more math than I do, and this afternoon it was really bugging me. After living with David for so long and being fairly brainy myself, shouldn't I have picked up enough that Hye Yon's thesis defense should have made some kind of sense? The answer is easy: Duh, of course not, I haven't actually done the work. I have learned a fair amount of mathematics trivia, but not enough systematically to put it all together. And (interesting to me), I could kind of see where the gaps were in Hye Yon's presentation given what I know about math and science. But that didn't change my frustration this afternoon.

I would love to give a talk to teenagers called "And then some magic happens..." to try to bust through this mystique without giving the misimpression that higher math is easy. I want to explain that the magic is a myth, that young people shouldn't be intimidated or believe that they have to be somehow special to learn it. I want to explain that if anyone has done something, so can they, given interest and dedication to the effort of puzzling things out. Such a talk would be motivated by, but not degenerate into a wailing account of, my own having misled myself about this.

As you might guess, Madison and Ella will not be so misled. We certainly are not going to try to dictate what they end up doing as a profession--they will follow their own interests. But even if Ella becomes, say, a dancer, you can bet your life that Twinkle Toes will still know how to use a Gamma matrix.

You Can't Dry Yourself with a Wet Towel

Madison came up to me this morning and said,

"Hey, Mom, I've discovered a great new saying! At least I think it's a new saying. I've never heard it before. But I can't figure out where to use it:

"You can't dry yourself with a wet towel."

She's right! That would be a great saying!

So in what situations, my lovely literate readers, might one use the expression, "You can't dry yourself with a wet towel"? Get creative, here.

Southerners are most definitely welcome. I'll never forget Laura telling me, "Deb, your Northern-ness sticks to you like chewing gum to the cat."



In other news:

I've been a little quiet because we've had a little struggle and backtracking here at Mariposario in the last several days. David discovered over the weekend that Madison couldn't do multi-digit multiplication. She could, A YEAR ago! Damn it. I was embarrassed that I didn't know this, that we hadn't kept her up with it. (I know, if I'd been using Saxon math it wouldn't have happened, as that is so thorough and includes so much review.) And trying to get her to go back and do it has been like pulling teeth. It takes her an hour to do 6 problems, with a lot of wailing and gnashing of teeth and lack of focus. If she'd just focus, she'd be fine, but she isn't, and she protests that she is when she's not. Ugh. I haven't gotten that much work done, we're all still working at 2pm, which is unusual for us.

I've dropped the ball a bit on the WRTR, too.

I haven't been to the gym in 2 weeks. I'm a little behind on my work, though not much, it's slowed down a little.

I haven't delivered the Girl Scout cookies yet.

It's time to regroup. I have to plan ahead more. Maybe I have to change some of my methods.

After all, you can't dry yourself with a wet towel.

Snow

It's what we came back to Rochester for, isn't it?

It's snowing. It wouldn't quite be enough to cause mass panic in Charlottesville, Virginia, although they panic at the drop of a flurry, and of course it doesn't even raise an eyebrow here in Rochester.

But it is very cozy.

Quarterly reports

Madison had her Penfield Recreation performance of "Holka Polka" this evening, in which she played both "Splenda," the sweet, if somewhat artificial, Good Witch of the South, and the evil Fairy Godmother. It was one of those 20-minute grade-school performances about which you have low expectations and then enjoy yourself when it comes together all right. She did nicely, and is, if I may say, stunningly cute and glowingly happy up on stage. We then went out to vote, during which David discovered that he had not actually registered to vote. And then we went out to dinner to celebrate Madison's performance (she chose Chili's). And then we all fell asleep at 9pm. Which means that I woke up at 11:30 and couldn't sleep, so here I am writing quarterly reports for the girls' home schooling.

We in NYS have fairly rigorous requirements. We have to submit what is called an IHIP (pronounced eye-hip)--a detailed Individualized Home Instruction Plan--and then provide detailed reports each quarter on progress, plus an annual progress wrap-up at the end of the academic year...and then every other year starting in the fourth grade, a standardized test.

I submit an IHIP each year that details my educational philosophy and plan of action with plenty of I-am-not-the-person-you-want-to-mess-with-trust-me written between the lines. In my quarterly reports, I refuse--REFUSE, I tell you--to submit a subject-hour-by-subject-hour estimate of time spent; instead I do as most of the other home schoolers around here do, which is ignore that requirement and instead write "at least 225 hours" at the top of each quarterly report. The weird thing about New York is that you submit your stuff to the school district, which then applies the letter of the law to whatever extent they feel like. (In Virginia, this was not the case...although you do submit to the superintendent of your school district, there are fewer rules and everyone abides by them...plus there, no one has the right to approve or disapprove your curriculum or how well you have documented, as long as you do the minimal reporting you need to.) We homeschoolers know which districts are the power-hungry ones around here (city of Rochester, Spencerport, and Brockport) that are interested in micromanaging you. Fortunately, although we live in Brighton, we're so far to the northeast that we're in the Penfield school district, which is known as being a bit more relaxed. The District liason recognized me right away (she even submits events to the KOA calendar) both as a semi-public figure and as a brainy type, and so I'm pretty sure she will never question what I provide.

Anyway, here I am, wide awake, writing quarterly assessments, which is somewhat pleasurable for me as a person of easy words, quick typing skills, and myriad things I could document about engaged and bright children, but which I could see would be a teeth-grinding chore for a different type of person.

Thin Mints

Ach, they are evil.

Fall Back

I love Fall Back time, and the extra hour of sleep came at a good time for us. I had been letting the kids' bedtime migrate starting from the ALCS playoffs, which was handy for things like the shows and concerts we've been seeing and participating in, but was sort of bad for home schooling -- they'd get up later, David would get to work later, we'd get started later. But because the stuff we do in the afternoons is at fixed times, we'd have to shorten the school day, so we've been getting less done. With Fall Back having happened this weekend, I can easily now put the kids to bed at 8 instead of 9, which meant that Ella got up at 6:45 this morning and we woke Madison at 7:45. So we were at it by 8:30, which I love. Thank goodness for home schooling, I can't imagine how we could get all of this accomplished if I had to rush them out the door at 7:30. We'd have to cut back or they'd be exhausted. This way they can get 9 1/2 hours of sleep. I've been reading how even elementary kids' lives are so crammed lately that they're getting less than 8 hours. Ick, I can imagine how perpetually cranky Madison would be.

Other things are also settling down. I'd been preparing for the party last week, and on this past Saturday I exhibited KOA at the Rochester Children's Book Festival. I had about 750 6-year-old KOA printed purple balloons from when I first got them made when KOA started, and so I rented an insanely big (I learned -- I'll never do that again...I'll always get two smaller ones even though it's more costly) helium tank from Party City and spent 6 hours blowing up and giving away 300-400 balloons. The kids helped, in the afternoon, after they got out of choir. The balloons were really effective, even though it seems that latex has a definite half-life, and over 1/3 of them broke or were hole-y before I even got the knot tied.

There's nothing like free balloons to get kids to drag their parents over to your booth. Madison and Ella were beyond thrilled at being the ones with all the balloons to give away, rather than being the one who wants the balloon. (I tell ya, I give these kids EXPERIENCES.) Anyway, I got a lot of signups to the KOA list, and it was also a real rush to ask parents, "Have you heard of KOA?" and often to get the answer "Oh, gosh, yes, I get the email every week, I love it, I always look forward to it, are YOU Debra Ross?" It was a lot of fun for me. And really exhausting, too. I smashed various fingers and toes in the whole helium tank escapade, and wore away bits of skin on my right index finger from tying balloons for six hours, but it was worth it.

And I can now settle in with nothing more looming that I have to prepare for. Aside from work, that is, and my kids' education. Oh, and we have to distribute and collect the money for the Girl Scout cookies that came in yesterday. And we're having a cookie booth at RIT (the troop is, I arranged it) to sell G.S. cookies on Friday.

I've actually been quite prolific on the Frontier Team book that I'm writing (with Madison, to some extent). We got delayed with the research, romping through classic children's mystery books and finding "rules for detecting" contained therein so we could reference them in our book, and we're still doing that to some extent. But I've been getting the story fairly well fleshed-out, lately, and we're about 1/3 of the way through the book. Frankly, being at the RCBF on Saturday was inspiring, in that if these people could be successful authors, there's no reason I couldn't be. And I have a built-in marketing machine, anyway, so I'm hoping I'm that much more appealing to a larger publisher. We'll see. It's been fun putting in real-life places and people in Rochester, too. And weaving good reasoning in there, both implicitly and explicitly.

Patrick

Today, my dear friend Patrick will finish up his final chemotherapy treatment for colon cancer, the 12th of 12, although it will be some time before the side effects completely release him. What a year it has been for him. The prognosis is good, I’m happy and relieved to say.

Patrick and his family actually have a lot to do with who I am as an adult. On October 19, 1991, Patrick’s little brother was in a near-fatal car accident and took 5 weeks to emerge from a coma. We were 22, Dan was 17. That was a soul-etching incident for me, and it’s the reason I am cheerful, as a rule, now. Really. We didn’t know whether Dan would live, or ever be himself again. I remember being in terrible pain about this...then, right at the depths of my despair, it occurred to me that I’d never felt as acutely alive as I had at that moment.

After that, everything was relative to that day. No matter what setbacks occurred in my life, as long as no one was terribly sick, or in the hospital, or dying, I have typically been able to keep it relatively in perspective and, mostly, not let it get me down. So, I’m usually very cheerful, unless someone I love is in physical or emotional pain, or in the hospital, or dead. (Or, also, if I find out I’ve done inadvertent harm to someone. Okay, and I get morose when I'm sick.)

I got a call on October 20, 2001. Exactly 10 years to the day after his brother’s accident, Patrick himself was in a near-fatal car accident in Michigan and took months to recover from a head injury and other injuries. The accident permanently damaged one of his optic nerves; one of those beautiful blue eyes will never be the same. The effects of the accident will probably always be with him – he gets tired more easily, for instance. And then, this spring, he was diagnosed with cancer and they removed half his colon. Christ.

See, really bad stuff happens. People die sometimes. People’s children die. There is war and oppression in the world. But my children are alive. They are healthy. They are smart. I feel almost guilty about it sometimes, when not everyone can say that. I will admit that not infrequently, I find myself beating back the fear of losing Madison and Ella to some illness, or to some accident. But even that image helps me maintain equilibrium in the face of day-to-day setbacks, because so long as that is not happening, I can’t say that it’s too bad.

I have been criticized in the past for being too cheerful, for always saying everything is good even when, technically, not everything is ideal. The accusation has been that I'm not being "real"...i.e., not showing my "real" emotions when I'm stressed, or mildly upset. On the one hand, I'm married to an ex-Presbyterian and have learned why stiff-upper-lipping it beats collapsing under pressure any day. And reason IS superior to emotion as a tool for managing life.

But, also, I think it's important to note that I'm not being phony. Life IS good, at least as long as we’re not being faced with a real tragedy. We live in a mostly free society where people can mostly accomplish what they reasonably attempt. One has the choice to focus on positive things, or dwell on negative things. So long as I'm not ignoring anything important, I choose the positive things.

Patrick has cheated death twice. His continued existence here on the planet is one of many bright spots in my life, and in the lives of a lot of other people as well. He is alive, so I am happy.