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Results For "Month: June 2007"

Update

Saturday 30 June 2007

I don’t think any of us could have anticipated L’s success on the potty chair. In the past ten days or so, L has done her messier business almost exclusively in the potty chair.

So, she’s potty trained, right!? I mean, a couple of accidents, statistically speaking, are fairly meaningless. And the fact that she’s not telling us that she needs the potty chair is a function of her age and development and nothing more. After all, she knows what it’s for — every time you put her on it, she does her best to have a BM.

Well, admittedly, she’s not potty trained in the truest sense of the term, but I think we’ve laid a fairly sure foundation for a quick, painless training when the “real” time comes…

Ron Paul

Friday 29 June 2007

Ron Paul is Exhibit A in the case of why we need more than two viable political parties. Granted, there’s the Libertarian Party, and that was RP’s party of choice some years ago, but now he’s running for the Republican party nomination — even though most of the Republican party shuns him.

He does seem fairly un-Republican in some ways. His ideas about Iraq win him more applause from Bill Maher than any of the Democratic candidates.

If we think we can do what we want around the world and not incite hatred, then we have a problem. […] They don’t come here and attack us because we’re rich and we’re free. They attack us because we’re over there. (Republican candidate debate)

I don’t know of any Democratic candidate who’s talking about blowback and 9/11. It sounds like something out of a Chomsky book, as do his comments about the folly of spreading democracy with a gun.

And yet, Paul was talking to Cobert, he indicated that he’d be more than willing to have a small a government as possible, eliminating various agencies such as the Department of Education and the Department of Homeland Security.

What he is, in reality, is a real Republican — an isolationistic, small-government, states’-rights, federal-government-butt-out, old-fashioned Republican. The Republicans have strayed so far from their original principles that a “real” one stands out.

Roan Mountain

Thursday 28 June 2007

Over the weekend, we took J to see the rhododendrons on Roan Mountain.

The blossoms were a little past peak, and some of them were already wilting, but it was impressive nonetheless.

Color Blinded

Wednesday 27 June 2007

Now that we have a house under contract, K has joyfully jumped into the wide world of paints. We have swatches and brochures and booklets lying all over the place.

Since I’m colorblind, I can’t really offer that much constructive input. After all, I did once buy a dark blue fleece jacket that turned out to be mockingly purple. And I did think for years that my friends’ parents had a gray car, only to learn, after I’d confused everyone by suggesting we take said gray car, that they didn’t own a gray car — it was light green.

Still, I’m glad someone in the family is interested in it.

Colors

Even L was taking part in the discussion.

Solids

Tuesday 26 June 2007

We’ve entered the wild, wonderful world of solids,

DSC_7795

which means a number of things:

  • It takes a little more time to prepare for a feeding;
  • Feeding is more labor intensive;
  • Post-poop clean-up is more labor intensive; and,
  • Preference begins to rear its finicky head.

On the other hand, feeding is more amusing and more conducive to photography.

DSC_7797

Cheating?

Monday 25 June 2007

When I was in Poland the first time, I made a vow: I will write in my journal every single day. I blew that pretty much within the first week, if memory serves. I was in Radom for “Pre-Service Training” with roughly 90 other Americans, and the late nights took a toll, I suppose.

A photo blog of Radom is available here, but it’s all in Polish. Still, gives you an idea of the city.

So I modified my resolution: I will write in my journal every single day once I get to my site. And I did — except, I believe, for one day.

Well, two. Evening I got in late and was bed before I remembered, so I got up to write something — anything — and I think I put down something like “This is just to keep my streak going.”

This time, I came up with something a little better, I believe…

A Day at the Park

Sunday 24 June 2007

Last week, we took the kids in the program — who have been really working hard on their social skills of late and making great progress — to Carowinds, a theme park on the North/South Carolina border.

It had been years since I’d been to an amusement park. And it certainly showed me how much I’ve aged — within about an hour, after having ridden one or two coasters with the kids, I was thinking, “Well, if we were to leave right now, I’d be perfectly content.”

And then one of the kids got the idea to go on the “Drop Zone Stunt Tower.” A tower with seats that pull you up to some relatively impressive height — at least it seems that way at the moment — and then drops you. Fairly simple.

The specs are not all that impressive:

  • Tower Height:174 feet
  • Maximum Height Reached by Transports: 160 feet
  • Length of Freefall Before Braking: 100 feet
  • Highest Speed: 56 M.P.H.
  • Lift Speed: 16 feet/second

But the overall experience is — weightlessness for just a few moments.

And I must admit that I, another staff, and one of the kids (we split up for a while) rode it more times than we could later remember.

Imagine that — in my mid-thirties and still able to have fun in a park.

Still, I couldn’t help but think the unavoidable, the predictable: I can’t wait until we take L to such places…

House Hunt: Mission Complete

Saturday 23 June 2007

Last week, we decided to make an offer on a house. We’d seen it three times. The first time, we were idiots — we judged from the easily fixable stuff and ignored the rest.

The kitchen, as it presently exists, is awful. Counter tops made from bathroom tile?! No thank you. The cabinets are old, and the walls are covered, it appears, with the original material from 1968. Dated and worn, in other words. It made such a little impression on us that I didn’t even post a picture of it.

Later, we reconsidered, but it had disappeared from the real estate web site. Then it reappeared, and while the kitchen was just as horrifying the second time, the rest of the house had a certain charm that we liked. More importantly — rather, most importantly — the foundation is solid and sound, and it has so much potential.

So we went back a third time, and decided to make an offer.

And that’s when the adventure started, because it turned out that there was already an offer on the house. “But they haven’t secured financing yet,” our real estate agent told us. We, on the other hand, had had the foresight to get pre-approved before we even began looking. So after a day of faxing, emailing, calling, signing, and FedEx-ing, we swooped in and scooped it up.

Which is to say, we are now on the receiving end of a house that is under contract.

Maps

Friday 22 June 2007

Via Kerim at Keywords, who found it at Strange Maps.

GDP Map

It is a bit misleading, though, as Strange Maps explains:

The creator of this map has had the interesting idea to break down that gigantic US GDP into the GDPs of individual states, and compare those to other countries� GDP. What follows, is this slightly misleading map � misleading, because the economies both of the US states and of the countries they are compared with are not weighted for their respective populations.

Pakistan, for example, has a GDP that�s slightly higher than Israel�s � but Pakistan has a population of about 170 million, while Israel is only 7 million people strong. The US states those economies are compared with (Arkansas and Oregon, respectively) are much closer to each other in population: 2,7 million and 3,4 million.

All the same, fascinating.

I went to Strange Maps myself (obviously) and found a map much more interesting, in my view: the Inglehart-Welzel Cultural Map of the World.

Cultural Map

How to read the map?

On this map, East and West Germany are next to each other, as one would expect. But Romania�s closest neighbour is Armenia? And Poland and India are side by side? Well, this is not a straightforward geographical map, but a cultural one. It plots out how countries relate to each other on a double axis of values (ranging from �traditional� to �secular-rational� on the vertical and from �survival� to �self-expression� on the horizontal scale). This makes for some strange bedfellows � for example: South Africa, Peru and the Philippines occupy almost the same position, although they�re on three different continents.

If I were a social studies teacher…

Improvement

Thursday 21 June 2007

When teaching English as a Foreign Language, I often wondered whether I would work in an educational setting that provided such clear evidence of progress. When you take a first year class that speaks no English and help turn it into a group of kids almost all of whom pass the English language exit exam with good marks, there’s a definite sense of achievement.

Then I spent seven months working with autistic children.

A couple of the students finished the year as completely different children than when they started. Gains in reading ability, social interaction, verbal expression, math skills, and general life skills left me simply astounded, and understandably proud that I had something to do with it. (Seven Months)

Now, working with at-risk kids, I get a third example.

A young man came up to me the other day to tell me something.

When he first arrived, he spoke to me only when he absolutely had to, he cussed me out on a fairly regular basis, and he never, in any circumstances, looked me in the eye. He had trouble getting along with other kids, and if you judged him just from that, you’d come away thinking he was a fairly unpleasant person.

This time, his eyes wide with a big smile, he said, “I done something good today, but you didn’t see it.” He then told me about how he’d managed to keep his temper under control with another kid in the program whom he finds irritating.

It was the first time I’d ever seen pride in his face.