Report Card, Sort Of

I realized I haven't said pea turkey about the new school year in a while, so here's a bit of an update!

Birdman was promoted again in CAP. He's now a Cadet Senior Master Sergeant (only 2 more promotions until he's a Cadet 2nd Lieutenant!) He's been doing remarkably well with his Geometry, considering he can't watch the teaching CD-ROM right now. Biology is going well too; he did an experiment the other day in which he extracted DNA from dried peas. I was chained to my sewing machine and unable to take photos, unfortunately.
He's also pretty much taken over the yard work....I may give it a good going-over in a couple of weeks but its bearable the way he does it for now.

Velvet....math remains a problem, but I have determined that she CAN spell. She just chooses not to - in too much of a hurry maybe? She wrote me a note the other day and ALL the spelling and punctuation was correct! I plan to put the note in her folder and save it.
She's quite responsible about letting the chickens and Eli out in the mornings, which is very helpful since she gets up way before either of the boys crawl out from under their respective rocks. I have a bit of trouble getting her to remember to take a poo bag with her when she walks Eli, but even that is improving.
We have some new neighbors staying with the family across the street, and she and Lightning have befriended the two children. Velvet enjoys having a new playmate in the afternoons, and they seem to have a good time together.

It's a struggle to challenge Lightning McQueen. He was blessed with an abundance of smarts, but way too much of it goes towards thinking of ways to get into trouble. He's a year ahead of Velvet in math, and I'm trying now to think of other structured things to keep him occupied so he won't run me completely into the poorhouse.
He and are going to work together and build an incubator in which to try to hatch chicken eggs, and we're also going to build a second coop to expand the flock.

I had put a field trip on the calendar for this coming week, but I pushed it back a week because it's been so rainy....one of the destinations is Johnstown, PA and I'd hate to get caught in another flood up there!

Birdman will be going to the library this week to research Korean recipes for our first International Menu Night; as soon as we have a menu I'll post it. I have a feeling the main dish will probably be bulgoki.

(Realized there is one misspelled word in Velvet's note, but believe me that's an improvement)

Oh I Wish It Would Rain

In Texas, that is. We've had more than 24 hours of steady rain here; the temperature right now is 58 degrees....Saturday night it was 82 at this time of night. It's supposed to be rainy all week, just about.

Meanwhile a huge portion of Texas is burning. I have a lot of friends in Texas, and I see their posts about new fires in my Facebook feed and my heart aches.

People are losing their homes, roads are closed, and a few people have died as a result of these terrible wildfires. Texas has I think more than half the state in what they call Exceptional Drought, and I believe they need something like a foot of rain to end it.

If you are reading this, please take a moment RIGHT NOW to say a prayer that Texas gets two things: firefighters to help get the fires under control, and RAIN. Lots and lots of rain. I don't think they would object much to a tropical storm right now, even. Then share this post on any and all of your social network sites - Twitter, Facebook, Google+, Plurk, email, link to this on your blog, let's get this prayer network out to the whole internet!!

Thank you so much in advance! May God reward you for your prayers!

My Imaginative Friends

 Drew this face on a tomato they got from their garden, and it was in the basket of fruits and vegetables they brought to Divine Liturgy this morning to have blessed for the Feast of the Transfiguration.

They did have the presence of mind to put it 'face' down in the basket so it wasn't grinning insanely at Father while he was doing the blessing.

Back to Tech-Free Tuesdays

For a while there our attempts at staying unplugged on Tuesday evenings were pitiful to nonexistent. But without a lot of fanfare (so as to hopefully avoid weeping and wailing, gnashing of teeth, and casting into the outer darkness) we had a pretty tech-free Tuesday afternoon this week.

I had a political meeting in the evening, and took Lightning McQueen with me, and even if I'd said not to watch tv, Velvet and Birdman would have had it on, scurrying to the back door every so often to see if I'd come home yet so they could turn it off without me knowing.  And I let Lightning play with my phone at the meeting: two sound recordings, a video, multiple sessions of Angry Birds and at least one visit to my Facebook page that I saw out of the corner of my eye.  Sigh.

So the revised plan is this: to have one evening a week off the technological grid.  It'll still be called Tech-Free Tuesday, but depending on our schedule it might happen on Monday, or Thursday, or even Saturday. (It's my day and I can call it whatever I want. :-p) No tv, no computer games, no blogging or facebooking.  Radio permissible.

Now, in other unrelated news, remember I posted about some mom who came ranting to my doorstep about my kids terrorizing the neighborhood "for weeks"?  Well, a bunch of kids were roaming the streets around my house today and it turns out they are the kids whom that mom says my kids were so mean to. These are AWFUL, unruly kids.  Two of them were riding their bikes up our driveway, turning onto the walkway that goes from the driveway to the back door and then on to the side street!  Didn't their parents ever tell them that's trespassing? I know a lot of kids who seem to have no idea about how to respect other people's property; what are these kids' parents teaching them?  That it's ok to just go wherever you want because it looks interesting and you're having fun? Next thing you know they will be helping themselves to the produce from my garden; they were running through my yard outside the fence already. (For the record my kids were not outside playing with these kids, they were doing their chores and finishing up a bit of schoolwork). I don't care that these kids were riding their bikes around our street, but they need to STAY ON PUBLIC PROPERTY unless they are in their own yard.
Yes, it seems I am turning into a real grump. But from the way those kids' mom talked to me, I can just envision one of them falling off a bike and running home to say it happened on my driveway and there we are with a ginormous lawsuit.  So don't go where you're not invited, children, and if my kids aren't out, stay OFF my driveway, sidewalk and grass!

The second job goes well.  I think I will get my first paycheck next week.

Just About Tired of Trying

I got the photos uploaded but life happened and I haven't had time to compose a post to accompany them.

I started a second job today, as a seamstress at a local casual-clothing store in the mall (mostly hemming jeans).

Some woman I've never seen before in my life came to my door this evening and told me that "every day for weeks" my kids have been abusing her kids and her neighbor's kids, that one of my kids tore up her daughter's expensive bicycle, and pushed her daughter and hurt her wrist so that she has to take the child to the Urgent Care. She said she is contemplating calling the police. I did ask the woman why, if this has been going on for weeks, did she wait this long to come to my house to say something.  She said that 'the older boy told me he was telling you everything.'

And my mom said it wasn't anyone else's responsibility to check on her and my kids last week.

Ever feel like crying but know that it's just not worth the effort?

West Virginia: Not Just for Hillbillies Anymore

I drove home from my retreat yesterday and reached the West Virginia state line shortly after noon.  Since this was the first time I'd passed the brand new Welcome Center/Rest Area with a need to use the facilities since it opened earlier in the year, I took the exit and parked as close to a (very small) tree in the hopes that maybe I'd get a square inch or so of shade over the car and it wouldn't be six billion degrees in there when I finished my business inside.

I pulled open the door to the building, and what is the first thing I see?

Keep in mind that this is WEST VIRGINIA.  A state with a reputation for citizens whose educational level is somewhere between house plant and second grade, where persons from more economically-advantaged areas think no one wears shoes, everyone walks around with a chaw in their cheek, and outhouses and cars on cinder blocks are common sights.  Coal is King here, at least in the southern part of the state - in my neck of the woods it's natural gas (and Marcellus Shale gas at that, if we can ever get the dang permits to do the fracking so the gas will come out of the ground).

WEST VIRGINIA, where you are either a Mountaineer fan or you prefer the Thundering Herd (rarely neither, and never both).

When I walked through the door into the building at the Welcome Center/Rest Area, the first thing I saw was

Two women.  One in full black burqa, the other in jeans and tennis shoes, but wearing an abaya and hijab.

Just FYI, in the 2000 Census the population of this state was estimated at about 2 million people.  Of the 46% of people who listed a religious preference on the census forms, only a little over 1,500 self-identified as Muslim.  West Virginia has 100 times the number of Methodists as Muslims, and over 95 times the number of Catholics. 

I'd be interested to know what you, dear reader, thought I was going to tell you that I saw.

The Neighbor Project

Right before the New Year I read this book, in which the author tries to get to know his neighbors in an upscale suburb by going on sleepovers to their homes. It made me think that, even after living in the same house for almost 6 years (and in the same neighborhood for 10), we don't really know our neighbors.

So I'm making a real effort to get to know the people who live near us. (We're not going to do sleepovers!) Most of our neighbors seem to work rather long or irregular hours, plus the weather hasn't exactly been conducive to either being outdoors in the yard or walking around the area, so we've gotten a bit of a slow start.  I have hopes, though, that as the weather improves and folks start mowing grass, sitting out on their porches and taking walks, that we'll be able to actually meet the people who live near us and put names to most of the faces.

We do have new neighbors across the street from the back of our house, and I took them a loaf of homemade bread a couple of weeks ago.  I got to see inside their house, which has beautiful (original) narrow pine tongue-and-groove flooring, a rather outdated kitchen, and a gas-fired steam heating system with real radiators.  They're doing a bit of remodeling in the (outdated) kitchen, installing new light fixtures to replace the ugly utilitarian ones in the dining room and living room, and the husband tells me that the big project for this summer is to replace the hideous stoop in the front with a real, usable, as-near-to-original-as-possible front porch. The family is pretty nice - parents and two young-adult kids (upper high school age).  They were enthusiastic about the prospect of buying eggs from us when we have them, and seem to be making great progress on the house.  I'm thankful that the house wasn't bought by a landlord, chopped up into apartments and rented out to college kids.

We're going to start with the houses we can see from our house, then branch out from there.  Homemade bread, fresh eggs and maybe some goodies from our (hopefully soon to be started) garden will make good icebreakers, I think.

I've been thinking of what to call these neighbors when I post about them; I think I'll call the husband Handy Man (he seems to be pretty competent at a lot of home improvement tasks).  Then I guess logically there would be Mrs. Handy, Son of Handy and......what to call the daughter?  Suggestions welcome!

Do you know the people in your neighborhood?  Do you live somewhere that it's hard to get to know the people near you, and how do you deal with that?