Category: Uncategorized

Ah yes, what an adorable Facebook group.

I’ve almost no sympathy for this one.  We often get all high and mighty about people learning another language for our convenience.  Coming out of an American’s mouth, it’s appalling.   Chances are good anyone joining the aforesaid group is fluent in exactly one language –English.  Chances are equally as good that they’ve not traveled enough to know what it’s like to try to get by in a day to day situation in one’s non-native language.

Unless and until you’ve followed complex instructions in a language that is not your native language, you don’t get to have an opinion on this.

I’m saying this as someone who does speak more than one language by the way.  My French is good enough to do minor tech support[1], I can follow a Karate class taught in an Okinawan dialect[2] and can understand Spanish well enough to follow a movie without reading subtitles.

Those are easy languages/situations, I have a talent for languages and it’s still rough.  My bank account, credit rating or legal future are not involved in a fine understanding of any of those languages.  To expect someone to “just pick up” English well enough to handle this is absurd and self-righteous.  Especially out of people I expect don’t have any talent for languages themselves.

Show a little imagination and empathy people!

---

[1] try it sometime on four years of high school French learned at a time before most computer terminology was even invented

[2] Ya, body language and visual cues to help!

I’ve trained myself to hyperfocus for a few minutes when necessary, but because I don’t like to do it for long periods of time, I tend to do it in fifteen minute chunks.  I’ll put my sleep timer on my iPod to play music[1] for fifteen minutes then just dive into whatever I need to do until the music turns off.

I made a bit of mistake in my playlist today.  I had the theme from Jurassic Park in the playlist.  That did not help my concentration, as it sent me into a reverie.

The first career I ever considered was paleontologist.  I was that annoying kid who would correct the museum guard or guide about them.  There’ve been millions of us over the years.  To this day, I could not tell you why I loved dinosaurs so.  I’ve known of few children who were that into the monster aspect of paleontology.  Most of us who loved them did so from a very scientific standpoint.  Maybe that was it.  Kids love logical puzzles and paleontology is all about learning to construct logical theories.  It was many of our introduction into many sciences[2] – from geology to biology to forensics…  You could branch off into so much.

For those who are misguided enough to think that emotions and intellect are polar opposites, I’m sure the sight of someone sitting in a dark movie theater watching Jurassic Park for the first time with tears running down her face at THAT SCENE[3] with the brachiosaurs would be a bit of a shock.

To this day, I cannot hear that theme without recalling the power of seeing the dinosaurs living and moving for the first time.  So it’s a bad one to play when I’m trying to concentrate on something else.

---

[1] Usually classical, but almost invariably instrumental.

[2] Though not mine.  I was introduced to computer science before I could read.

[3] Anyone who has had the experience knows the scene.

Okay, I’ve got one for you.

Why in hell do people flip out at a rumor that Facebook is going to start charging for its services?

A)     Aint’a gonna happen, my little chickadees.  Facebook’s business model is based on you donating time to market research playing Farmville, favoriting products for free advertising, and writing book reviews, ‘kay?  This is an order of magnitude cheaper than advertising on a sitcom and the audience is much more specifically targeted.  As far as revenue?  I assure you they get more money off of advertising than they could out of charging you.

B)      Even if that weren’t so, why does a company owe you an expensive service that’s a pain in the butt to maintain?

Do I mostly go for the free services? Yep. I use Pandora, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Yahoo, Gmail, Google Docs and Wikipedia.  Shoot, several of the former I even use professionally!  But there are services I pay for.  My Livejournal account is a paid account, because I like the lack of advertising.  My blogs are hosted on a server I pay for, ditto.

Are there a lot of free services offered on the Internet?  Yeah, and a lot of them are pretty cool.  I think it’s a neat development that we can do so much for little money.  If a service isn’t worth me paying for, I don’t.  I have a free Pandora account because I don’t find the ads that annoying, and I never have it playing for more than 40 hours in a month.

But it seems kind of silly to me for people to think that sysadmins and programmers are supposed to work for free or something so people can post about what they had for breakfast, ya know?

A favorite passage of mine from Terry Pratchett’s Hogfather:

‘All right,’ said Susan. ‘I’m not stupid. You’re saying humans need… fantasies to make life bearable.’

REALLY? AS IF IT WAS SOME KIND OF PINK PILL? NO. HUMANS NEED FANTASY TO BE HUMAN. TO BE THE PLACE WHERE THE FALLING ANGEL MEETS THE RISING APE.

‘Tooth fairies? Hogfathers? Little—’

YES. AS PRACTICE. YOU HAVE TO START OUT LEARNING TO BELIEVE THE LITTLE LIES.

‘So we can believe the big ones?’

YES. JUSTICE. MERCY. DUTY. THAT SORT OF THING.

‘They’re not the same at all!’

YOU THINK SO? THEN TAKE THE UNIVERSE AND GRIND IT DOWN TO THE FINEST POWDER AND SIEVE IT THROUGH THE FINEST SIEVE AND THEN SHOW ME ONE ATOM OF JUSTICE, ONE MOLECULE OF MERCY. AND YET— Death waved a hand. AND YET YOU ACT AS IF THERE IS SOME IDEAL ORDER IN THE WORLD, AS IF THERE IS SOME… SOME RIGHTNESS IN THE UNIVERSE BY WHICH IT MAY BE JUDGED.

‘Yes, but people have got to believe that, or what’s the point—’

MY POINT EXACTLY.

She tried to assemble her thoughts.

THERE IS A PLACE WHERE TWO GALAXIES HAVE BEEN COLLIDING FOR A MILLION YEARS, said Death, apropos of nothing. DON’T TRY TO TELL ME THAT’S RIGHT.

‘Yes, but people don’t think about that,’ said Susan. Somewhere there was a bed…

CORRECT. STARS EXPLODE, WORLDS COLLIDE, THERE’S HARDLY ANYWHERE IN THE UNIVERSE WHERE HUMANS CAN LIVE WITHOUT BEING FROZEN OR FRIED, AND YET YOU BELIEVE THAT A… A BED IS A NORMAL THING. IT IS THE MOST AMAZING TALENT.

‘Talent?’

OH, YES. A VERY SPECIAL KIND OF STUPIDITY. YOU THINK THE WHOLE UNIVERSE IS INSIDE YOUR HEADS.

‘You make us sound mad,’ said Susan. A nice warm bed…

NO. YOU NEED TO BELIEVE IN THINGS THAT AREN’T TRUE. HOW ELSE CAN THEY BECOME?

Tastes and smells can be highly evocative of memory.  I think science has pretty much proven that these senses are hardwired into your memory.

I had an experience of this today.

Snow used to be special to me.  I grew up in Virginia, where it didn’t snow often and when it did, it meant a holiday from school, sledding, an icy butt because few people owned water-resistant snow pants, and…

Toll House Cookies

A snow day meant Toll House Cookies.   Looking back, I realize it was a way for mom to keep us occupied when we were sick with excitement from the snow, and chilled to the bone from being too wet and not wanting to come in from the cold¹.   She would get us to go down into the basement and strip out of sopping wet cold snow things, hang them in front of the wood stove to dry and we’d change into warm dry clothes.  Being quick and efficient about this meant a reward of a spoonful of raw cookie dough.

I took a taste of the cookie dough today as my son and I were making toll house cookies in celebration (for him) or consolation (for me)² of the first snowfall of the year.   When I’m tasting something and want to concentrate, I tend to close my eyes.    As I did so today, I was right back in my mother’s kitchen, asking her if the spoonfuls of cookie dough were the right size to make good cookies, smelling the chocolate, sugar and vanilla, and anxiously staring into the window on the oven waiting for the melty cookies to solidfy and be ready to eat all warm and gooey.  I remember being glad that Mom’s mixer had two beaters, as my brother and I were allowed to lick the beater when the cookie dough was all mixed up.  My Kitchen Aid only has one, so if one child gets to lick the beater, the other is allowed to scrape the bowl.

Toll House cookies were such a favorite in the household that Mom always baked a batch with the other Christmas cookies, so that’s another good memory I tend to have associated with them.  In fact, I don’t think I have a bad memory associated with making them.   They’ll always mean wintertime coziness with loved ones to me.

---

¹Northerners, don’t laugh. Those snow pants we buy every year for our kids are simply not an appropriate use of money when they’ll be used at most twice before the child is too big to wear them. It’s a considerably different proposition when the kid is walking a mile to school in the snow every day for four months out of the year.

²Snow used to be magical to me, even when I first moved up here. Almost nine years on and the magic has worn off a bit. Now it just means shoveling driveways and dangerous driving to me. I should take up skiing or something to return to a more positive view.

My grandmother had four children in four years.  My mother is the oldest, then came my uncle Gary, then my aunt Susan, and last my aunt Inkie.

I give this background to help give an idea of the person that Susan was.  The family was a bit compressed — not only in age, but in physical space.  It turned my aunt Susan into a toughie.  In fact, Lil Toughie was how most people referred to her off and on for most of her life.  I can’t think of many people that were more appropriately named.  The name Susan has become almost iconic for a tough and practical woman.  Her middle name, Parrish, was her mother’s maiden name.  This set the stamp, I think, on her for a devotion to family.

My aunt Susan had pretty features and all, but that wasn’t the point.  She was an amazingly beautiful woman from force of personality — from the way her soul glowed, if you will.  It was something neither age nor illness could touch.  One of my cousins commented, “Isn’t she beautiful?” the day before she died.  What with how wasted her body was, that might sound like a crazy comment.  At first, I thought it was.  But Sam was right.   Susan was beautiful right to the end.  Her beauty was never about the perfections possible in youth, even when she had them, but the beauty that comes from being yourself just as hard as you can.   She was that right to the end.

Susan was an artist.  While she dabbled in various mediums, probably one of her favorite was to make art from the gifts the Rivah gave her.  Shells, tops from crab pots and driftwood found themselves in her hands to be turned into painting.  The paintings usually incorporated the textural elements and shape of whatever she found.  She turned empty crab shells into Santas (like all my family, she loved Christmas), painted beach scenes on crab pot tops, and took her inspiration from the wind and salt and water. 

She loved her family.  She was deeply in love and passionately devoted to her husband.  Her children were the world to her, and I can remember clearly the joy and pride she took in each one when they were born.  She loved more than anything to gather her family in close to her.  Over the course of her life, she invited people to the family cottages by the river, hosted an enormous Thanksgiving gathering her entire adult life (a tradition her oldest son has started to carry on), had family parties to celebrate her grandmother’s birthday.  For Susan, it was all about the family. 

For many years she had a business as a daycare providor out of her home.   Children she kept still remember the care she gave them and the lessons she taught.  When the kids would get to be a bit too much – too rowdy or misbehaving, she’d always send then out into the yard to pick up stick in their tree-laden lot in preparation for cutting the grass.  Years later, one of the children she kept came back and told her he does the same thing with his children when they’re getting rowdy and need to burn off some energy.  It’s a great lesson on several levels.  When your energy and natural exuberence gets too much and you’re not behaving as well as you could, go do something useful!

Susan was greatly loved and will be deeply missed.  She made her corner of the world a better place by her life, and there’s not much better you can say than that.

Okay, so my husband is ranting about consumerism, especially in relation to the day after Thanksgiving sales.

(If you’re a maternal relative of mine, now would be a good time to swallow anything you’re drinking and to put down the cup.  This won’t really be funny to anyone else).

Man of the House:  Son, we your mother and I were young, we didn’t bounce out of bed on the day after Thanksgiving to go hit the sales.

Me: (eyebrow raised):  Nanny always loved to go shopping on Black Friday.

Man of the House:  Well, she was an economic visionary.

Sweet Potato Bake

3 medium sweet potatoes, sliced into 1/4″ discs with skin on

3 cooking apples (You want something firmly tart), sliced to about 1/4 inches per slice

1 small onion, sliced into rings butter salt to taste

Preheat oven to 350. In a 3 qt baking dish, layer 1/2 the sweet potatoes across the bottom, covering the bottom of the dish. Add a layer of 1/2 the apples, and finish with 1/2 the onions. Add a couple of pats of butter and a sprinkle of salt, then repeat layers. Add some walnuts if desired.

Bake for ~45 minutes until sweet potatoes are tender.

This is a favorite fall dish of mine. A lot of people put brown sugar on sweet potatoes, but don’t even try it with this dish. It’d make it cloyingly sweet. This goes especially well with pork and poultry dishes.

A story I often tell whether teaching or whatever, is about a time when I couldn’t have been more than five.  Daddy had taken me onto The Base¹ to show me where he worked.

I remember two things very clearly about it.  He’d written a little program that would print out a punch card with my name on it.  That really impressed me, as did the banks and banks of machines with reel to reel tapes.  It looked so cool and futuristic to me even at five.

But he said something that really stuck with me.   He was explaining the computers, what they are, how they work (more or less) and commented that when I had children, I’d have a computer I could hold in my hand that would be much more powerful than tons and tons of metal sitting in that cold room with the tile floor.

At the time, I really thought he was pulling my leg.

Usually, I’m telling this story to my students in computer classes.  I then pull out my phone (a Palm Centro) and we all share a laugh.   I’d mentioned it in passing the other night and the man of the house laughed and asked me if that was why I’d wanted a netbook so badly, and why I’m fascinated with little, powerful bits of technology.

I expect that’s part of it.   But, I’m fascinated by compact usefulness in general, though.  I mean, I make Japanese-style bento.  I can fit my lunchbox in my hand!  The idea of having a wardrobe that’s interchangeable enough that I can pack a week’s worth of clothes in a carry-on fills me with glee.  I have fifty novels on my smartphone that I can read.  My dream home these days is a Tiny House.

But, yes, it would be fun to go back in time to that twentysomething young man with the little girl and say to her, “Nope, hon. He’s not blowing smoke.  You are gonna love the future of technology.”

---

¹There’s an R&D naval base on the Potomac where my father has spent a majority if his career.

My coffee maker is on the fritz again.  I can’t seem to get more than a few years out of even the most expensive model.  Clearly I must be doing something wrong.  Not everyone buys a new coffee maker every three years or less.  I’ve had the no-frills version (lasted the longest – five years before the burner broke), a fancy version that brewed into a thermal carafe (it could be counted on to overflow at an inconvenient time), expensive models with timers and all sorts of bells and whistles.

And then I have this cup-top brewer.  I think I paid a couple of bucks for it.  I know it was less than three, anyway.  It works Every. Single. Time.   There’s nothing to break.  If I want to make a cup of coffee for a friend who doesn’t prefer that her coffee be strong enough in which to stand a spoon, why, I can make her a cup her way.  It doesn’t take any longer to make a cup of coffee than a cup of tea, it’s fresh each time you make it and you’re not mindlessly drinking too much coffee because there’s a full pot around.  (Goddess of Java, I may be, but I have a human liver that shouldn’t be asked to absorb too many drugs too often).

I am so disgusted with coffee makers, I swear I think I am going to buy the ten cup version (which is still cheaper than almost any automatic coffee maker on the market) for those rare occasions when I need ten cups of coffee all at once.   For parties, I can pour it in my thermal pump pot and be done with it.