Light and Momentary

Second verse, same as the first

Hm, this post is providing a visual for my observation that there is less leisure time available during the semester than during the summer.

Stella and I are still reading E. Nesbit's Complete Book of Dragons. We both love it, which makes for a pleasant change from Roald Dahl. (She loved it; I tolerated it.) It has been too long since I read an E. Nesbit book aloud, and I had forgotten how much I enjoyed her writing. Stella is hanging in there beautifully with the Victorian arcana (what's a snapdragon and why is it on fire? also, what's caning and why is it happening to Edmund?) We are three-quarters of the way through and I will be a little sad when it's over. But I will also lobby for Five Children and It as our next read, which could be a lot of fun.

I am still (still! STILL!) reading How Not To Be Wrong. I've been reading this book since, like, the Pleistocene Era. It's a really good book; don't get me wrong. If I don't finish soon I might need a little Trollope dalliance to fortify me for the final chapters. 

My Metronome is coming along, as you can see. The pattern mixes up clever and brainless in a way that ticks my knitterly boxes. It requires a lot more purling than a garter stitch project usually does, but the stripes are so appealingly tidy, and the back is such a thing of beauty, that I am willing to keep on trucking with the purling. I will have to post a picture of the beauteous back one of these days. It will cause anyone who has ever sworn at a tangly intarsia project to drop her jaw in astonishment.

I am having a little color anxiety about this project. WILL my second skeins of the cream and teal, ordered months after the first ones, look more different once I start knitting them up? SHOULD I have feathered them in? HOW will that 70s appliance green look as the contrast color on the edge? My 16yo, who pulls no punches, tells me it will be fine. But he doesn't really care if I look like a 70s washing machine, now does he? My grandmother's washing machine was exactly that color. I loved my grandmother enough to name a child in her honor, but I am not willing for my accessories to pay homage to her appliances.

You know, as I am typing this up the solution to part of my uncertainty appears obvious: tomorrow I will wind the new hanks of yarn and feather them in. I can do that. 

Goodness, 9:00 comes early. Hoping to run at 5, which means I am posting without proofing. Other Yarn Along posts are here.

A golden afternoon

Yesterday I had a moment of feeling glum about the week ahead, and then I thought to myself, "What would be a really fun way to spend this afternoon?" I took the two youngest kids to a nature center about 25 minutes away. We watched hummingbirds at the feeders -- dozens of them! so cool! -- and then the kids played in the creek for an hour while I sat in the shade with my knitting. On the drive home there was thunder in the distance, and a spectacular double rainbow. It looked close enough to run to, until it faded away. We stopped at Dairy Queen on the way, even though it was really too close to dinner for eating ice cream. 

It left me feeling completely un-glum. Must remember that for future Sundays.

In search of my squasher-downer

When my oldest son was a toddler, we bought him Richard Scarry's Busy Busy Town. I had happy memories of Richard Scarry books from my own childhood, and I gave him the book shortly before we moved to Scotland. He thought it was the BEST BOOK EVER. He was ENTRANCED. He wanted to make sure the woman next to us on the plane understood the charms of his Richard Scarry book. Like, really sure. Did I show you the squasher-downer? Are you sure? Would you like to see the squasher-downer one more time? (Dear lady on the plane, wherever you are: sorry about that.)

The job of the squasher-downer was to take a garbage dump and turn it into a park where people could picnic. 2016 Jamie is unconvinced about the wisdom of dining atop potentially toxic waste, but Richard Scarry did not consult me before sending Huckle Cat and Lowly Worm off on their picnic. He made it seem like an easy-breezy undertaking -- no mercury in these fluorescent light bulbs, folks! 

I've mentioned before that I've been working my way through Mystie Winckler's Simplified Organization course. There are six modules, and I've been feeling stuck in Module 5. Part of it is that my semester has started and there is not a ton of extra space in my head, but part of it is the Brain Dump.

Mystie Winckler is a big fan of the brain dump, where you make yourself a List of all the things that are niggling at you. I made the list, sure. It covered most of 6 pages on a legal pad, but some of that was my brain worrying again and again about the same thing. Did I write it down already? Can't remember; let's write it down again to be sure. Now I have it condensed to two pages, but the next steps feel onerous. I am supposed to go through line by line and attack it with Dave Allen-style mind-like-water zest. Did you know Dave Allen used to be a karate instructor before he became a productivity guru? Imagine me delivering a fearsome sanbon-zuki to my pile of indecision and uncertainty. Imagine it really hard for me, friends, because I can't quite imagine it myself yet.

I am mixing metaphors here, to have my imaginary squasher-downer delivering imaginary karate punches. I've got my dump; I'd rather have a lovely peaceable picnic spot. I'm not quite sure how to get from point A to point B. Maybe I'll just try the small bites approach: 10 minutes a day probably won't cause me to sanbon-zuki myself in the face, right? Right??

I'll report back on my squashing-downing progress. Picnics ahoy!

28,941

That is the number of steps my Vivofit is showing me for today. More than 20,000 of them were from this morning's run -- billed as a 10-miler, but it worked out at a hair over 9.5. I thought about running loops around the parking lot until I got to 10, but then I came to my senses.

This week was an enormous improvement over last week. I can't say I was capering with glee during those last few miles, but there was never a moment when I wanted to sit down by the side of the trail and cry until my husband came to pick me up in the car. Last Saturday I limped off to bed at 8:15, and this week I am probably going to last until 9:30. Progress!

Done

My free-range parent mojo is MIA, friends, torpedoed by that 911 call last month. I'm just tired of fighting that battle.

A few weeks ago Stella and I were walking to the library together. There are road closures near our house, so we took an alternate route through an unfamiliar corner of campus. We were walking together along a low wall when she lost her balance and skinned her knee. There were tears and hugs and pats and bandaids, and she was still a little weepy when I said, "Look where we are, sweetie. Do you know how to get to the library from here?" Even while distressed -- even while bleeding -- she knew how to get oriented in an unfamiliar spot. She pointed unerringly, and then she picked herself up and started walking that way.

This, I think, is a skill worth having. And so it makes me sad that I don't actually plan for her to deploy her independent navigation skills this fall. She's doing a library program one afternoon each week, and a class at the downtown ballet studio on another day. She is absolutely capable -- 100% capable -- of getting herself there. But I am absolutely confident -- 100% confident -- that people will give her crap about it if she walks alone.

I'm tired of people giving my children crap.

I haven't even posted about all of it-- the times that Petely would ride his bike while I ran, and we'd agree on a meeting spot a half-mile away or so because he was faster than me, and when I got to the meeting spot there'd be hovering grownups asking if his mom knew where he was. YES, I know where my son is. YES, I have confidence in his ability to conduct himself appropriately in public for five whole minutes. And even though I've posted about a lot of it, I'm not sure how much of my anxiety comes through. I hate it that other parents feel free to tell my children their mother's decisions are "totally not okay." I hate it that my daughter's principal told her she shouldn't be walking to school. I hate it that my son's soccer coach drove him home repeatedly against my clearly expressed wishes and in spite of my signed waiver, saying, "I just can't let you do that, even if your mom says it's okay." 

This week I have been prepping a lecture on cognitive development across childhood, and I've been thinking a lot about how kids' abilities emerge. For vast swaths of human history we have been aware that 7-year-olds can handle a measure of independence, that they are learning to get around in the world. It is strange and wrong for 21st-century America to decree that this capacity does not actually exist, and that any attempt to exercise it will place children in grave peril. From a historical perspective it is genuinely bizarre that otherwise sensible adults around the country are calling the police and CPS on children because they are spending modest amounts of time without direct adult supervision.

If you've ever studied cognitive development you've read about Piaget's recognition that children around the world learn to uncover hidden objects at about 8 months old. (We can argue about his interpretation of this observation, but the pattern is consistent.) It seems to me that our current cultural craziness is like shouting at an 8-month-old, "Noooooo! Do not pull back the blanket! There might be a snake! or a worm! or a centipede! or a revolutionist!" (<-E. Nesbit shoutout) These abilities unfurl in kids because they need to build on them. What do we gain by suppressing them, other than a false feeling of security and a smug sense of superiority?

So. I signed my daughter up for the after-school program at school, instead of giving her a house key and an assurance that her brothers will be home 15 minutes after she arrives. I am adding her activities to the long list of things that require my presence, even though they should not actually require my presence. My husband says, "Jamie, you're right and they're wrong and this is important." It's true; I believe it. Even so, I'm done. I'm not done forever with this battle, but I'm done for right now. Because I can teach a kid how to be a safe and courteous pedestrian, I can teach a kid how to be a confident and flexible navigator, and I can teach a kid how to handle most of the surprises that might arise on the short trip to the library. But I cannot figure out -- and believe me, I've been trying -- how to shield my kids from "helpful" adults whose default response to an unaccompanied child is to call 911.

Day late, dollar short

Oh my goodness, friends, this is going to be a busy couple of months. I am coming in late with a Yarn Along post:

Stella decided she would read James and the Giant Peach to herself (thank goodness -- I was ready for a break from Roald Dahl -- and hurray for advancing reading skills). We are reading E. Nesbit's book of dragon stories. SO much fun. I can't remember when I last read these aloud -- long enough ago that I'd forgotten many of the particulars. I much prefer reading E. Nesbit to reading Roald Dahl.

I've made some progress on my Metronome, after ripping it back to end the first blue stripe a few stitches over. Fun pattern, yummy yarn. One of these days I should update my Rav notebook, but today is not that day.

I have not made much progress on How Not To Be Wrong. I am really, really enjoying it, even though I'm only on chapter 14. My Kindle told me that I should expect it to take me 10 hours to read, and I scoffed. But my Kindle knows me fairly well -- its "time remaining" estimates for Trollope chapters are usually spot on. (That's a little creepy, now that I think about it.) The fun part of the book is Ellenberg's voice. He reminds me of my brother -- smart and quirky.

Other Yarn Along posts are here.

What doesn't kill us

I am not sure, internet, if I communicated the degree of unhappiness that Saturday's run caused me. It made me wonder whether I should take up a more pleasant hobby, like gnawing off my own digits or perhaps auto-enucleation (a nice biblical hobby, that one). I was not really persuaded that tonight's run was a good idea: 1 mile warmup, 3-mile tempo run, 1 mile cooldown. To my surprise and relief, it felt great. I had planned to keep my heart rate in the low 150s for the tempo phase, and I kept having to raise the treadmill speed to make that happen. I am still slow, mind you: don't imagine me raising the treadmill speed very high, but I only had to muster about 30% of my willpower to keep myself moving forward, and no louring black clouds of doom gathered over my head, mustered by the magnetic force of my misery. This, my friends, is progress.

Florence Foster Jenkins

On Friday night Elwood and I went out for dinner and a movie. The movie was Florence Foster Jenkins, which I'd been wanting to see ever since I first heard about it. I want to chat a bit about the spoilery bits of it, so if you plan to see it and you don't want to know anything at all about it going in, you might just want the summary: fun and worth seeing.

I enjoyed all of the performances. Meryl Streep is masterful as always, nailing FFJ's vocal missteps without overdoing it. Hugh Grant brings more nuance to his part than I initially expected: he really does love FFJ despite his shenanigans. (We get to see him dancing again -- remember that bit of Love Actually?) The actor who plays FFJ's accompanist has an extraordinarily expressive face. There's a showgirl whose part teeters on the brink of not working, I think, but she pulls it off.

There was another member of the cast whose presence I wasn't expecting: Treponema pallidum. In the movie FFJ has syphilis; she's had it for 50 years. This disclosure made me say, "....Ooooohhhhhh." Advanced syphilis causes neurological symptoms that can include confusion, disorientation, mental instability, dementia. There's an Oliver Sacks book in which he treats a former prostitute who diagnoses herself with tertiary syphilis. She says it has caused her to feel pleasantly disinhibited. And pleasantly disinhibited seems to be FFJ's MO.

Did you ever wonder how she could possibly subject herself to the howls of thousands? Did you ever wonder how she could claim to love classical music while simultaneously butchering some of its most celebrated works? Did you ever wonder how she could think it was a good idea to distribute recordings of her wince-inducing renditions of those works? The pleasantly disinhibited explanation makes SO MUCH SENSE to me.

It would have been easier to make a movie in which FFJ's musical foibles were just played for laughs. Instead of mocking its characters, though, this movie elicits our sympathy: for Madam Florence, for her fallible and long-suffering husband, for her accompanist. There's a scene at the end in which we see Madam Florence as her best self, the performer she believes she can be. And for a moment, we almost believe it too.

End of Summer

Today I worked my way slowly through the last envelope of the prints I ordered in May, sticking them down onto album pages. I still have to deal with the pictures from this summer at some point, but I'm all right with that.

I made good progress on both of the papers I was working on this summer: one is under review, and the other is just about ready to go to the co-investigators on the grant that funded it. I'm hopeful that my co-author will give me the green light to move forward in the next week or two.

My syllabi are posted on the course websites. (I took out the line that said "cell phone use in this class may result in rupture of the instructor's cranial sutures, which would be both sad and messy.") My first class is at 8:00 tomorrow morning. (It's a new prep.) (And I'm co-teaching for the first time.) (And I'm teaching a lot of the material I taught in my sad class last spring. All of this makes me a little nervous.)

One of the helpful pieces of Mystie Winckler's Simplified Organization course is a time budget, where you figure out where your time should go each week. My shiny new time budget has me getting up earlier than I'm used to, so I'm moving my bedtime back accordingly.

Wish me luck!

Another post about the longest run

Remember last Saturday, when I was so chirpy about running eight miles? Well. Today I ran nine miles, and I am not at all chirpy about it. I am, like, the Antichirp about this run. The root of the problem, I think, is that I'm 20 days into the Whole 30, and it's not super compatible with distance running. Too many salads, not enough fruit. I haven't been trying to avoid carbohydrates, but that's what seems to happen on a grain-free sugar-free diet. Next week I've got to be more careful about glycogen -- I was feeling crummy from the first mile.

Our route today had only one water fountain. We passed it twice, when we were 2.75 miles and 8 miles into the run. Since I knew this was coming I was carrying a water bottle, and (this sounds whiny, I know) I'm not used to that. It was interfering with my arm swing, she said whinily, and I needed my arms today especially. I was so exasperated that I thought about stashing it in my cleavage, or leaving it by the side of the trail and coming back to retrieve it in my car afterward. The running store that sponsors this training program sent me a $15 coupon yesterday, and I am going to use it to buy a fuel belt tomorrow.

There is zero chance that I would have run nine miles today without the training program. I thought about bailing early on, when we ran a loop that took us back toward the parking lot. I thought about bailing a little further along, when the rain started pelting down. Things were better for a while, thanks to a long gentle downhill, but then we got to the turnaround point. Math is usually my friend on a run; I'm constantly calculating percentages and occasionally cheering myself up with prime factorizations. But when I said to myself at 5.2 miles, "It's okay! It's just 38 more tenths of a mile!" -- I was utterly uncomforted. The fact that I was 59% of the way through the run at 5.31 miles was soul-crushing, not encouraging. (More whining! Sorry!) "All righty," I said to myself at 6.3 miles, "now you only have to do 3/7 of what you've already done!"

Are you ready to smack that math cheerleader yet? Because I was totally ready to smack her.

I usually run with the second of our four groups, and as we ran back toward the starting point I kept watching for people from the slowest group. Finally I asked the mentor who was running with me: where'd they go? (You guys, she was SO patient and encouraging. I was ready to sit down on the trail and call my husband to come and get me in the car, but I knew I couldn't do that when she'd been hanging back with me.) She told me that the women in that group had agreed to run together earlier in the day instead of running with everybody at 7:30. Which meant I was going to be the last participant to finish the run today-- the very last one.

It turns out that even the last person to finish a training run can still say she finished the #@$#!% run. It turns out that I can run (or sort-of-run) 9 miles, even when 6 of them are mostly misery-- even when rain and sweat drenched me so thoroughly that after I got home and stood still in the kitchen I was quickly in a puddle of my own making. It also turns out that I'm going to bed at about 8:15, so: THE END. We will return to your regularly scheduled less-whiny posts tomorrow.

Under Review

This is the beginning of my fourth year on the tenure track, which means that it's time for my department to make a formal review of my progress toward tenure. Our departmental documents describe this process in a paragraph: tell us what you've done in terms of teaching, scholarship, and service. Give us a current CV; include copies of your papers; write up a self-evaluation. So back in June I wrote up my teaching philosophy and my research statement and sent them off to some peers for their comments. It was a little painful, but NBD. I had a brief talk with my chair, who told me (in language that made it seem optional) to go ahead and complete the formal application to the provost that I'll use when I apply for tenure in two more years. I have to go back to my teaching evals (joy!) and pull out some numbers, but it didn't seem onerous.

Yesterday I sat down with the colleagues who are also going up for review and two of the faculty who will be doing the review, and learned that my colleagues have spent HOURS and HOURS over the summer creating giant binders. One of them said that hers contains hundreds of artifacts. I don't even know what she means, exactly-- conference programs, I think? sample assignments from her classes? thank-you notes from students?

Sooooo I am suddenly feeling a bit behind. My binder is due in two weeks, and I had thought I could tie up my loose ends today, before the start of the semester. Part of me is worried that I have a lot more loose ends than I thought. But no: I am going to push back against the worry. I have more than enough publications by the standards of my institution, my teaching evals are fine (with the exception of my heartbreaking spring class, for which I can provide context), and my interim letters from the committee that reviews yearly productivity reports have all been fine as well. (Do you hear the panicky part of my brain attempting to spring free from the cave where I have put it in time out? It's howling, "But the thaaaaank-yooooouuu noooooootes from students!!!!!")

The committee members expressed a clear preference yesterday for streamlined binders. But I cannot quite shake the worry that mine will look too skimpy next to my Type A colleagues' submissions. I'm pretty sure that being ahead of the game on pubs will cover a multitude of sins -- but only pretty sure.

And another Yarn Along post

I forgot to share the Yarn Along link last week, which was not good linkup manners.

This week Stella and I are finishing up Matilda. We should wrap it up tomorrow. All five of my children have loved Roald Dahl, but he is a little bleak for me.

I am still working my way through How Not To Be Wrong. I'm enjoying it very much, but I keep trying to read it in bed at night. In the battle between sleep and math, math keeps losing. I just finished his section on what Bayesian inference can tell us about the existence of God. (Answer: not much, but it's worth reading anyway.)

I am knitting a Metronome. It's a fun pattern featuring a novel and clever method for painless intarsia, but I think I'm going to rip it back. I want to take that blue stripe a teeny bit farther over, so it is exactly the same length as the setup rows. This small difference has bugged me in all of the Metronome pictures I've viewed, and dernit, it doesn't have to be that way. I am also wondering if I might get a nicer drape with a size 6 needle, or if the yarn will become more pliant and drape-y when I wash it. It's all garter stitch, and you know how garter stitch will sag if you give it a chance. I should probably just wash it instead of wondering, you figure?

I am knitting it with fancypants yarn: it's Kate Davies' Buachaille, acquired in last winter's Seven Skeins Club. None of those patterns really spoke to me, and I'd been thinking to myself, "What am I going to do with these 50g skeins of luxury sportweight wool?" Then when I got the itch to knit a Metronome I thought to myself, "It's too bad I don't have any nice sportweight wool in my stash." And then, like a 1970s Reese's cup commercial, those two thoughts collided and produced a good idea. Or at least I think it will be a good idea. That green on the left does not fill me with joy. I like the pictures of it in other people's projects, but in my own personal house with my own personal lighting, it always looks to me like somebody's grandma's couch from 1977. I was thinking I might use it as the contrasting border for my Metronome, but I am going to have to go outside in the sunshine and take a good hard look at it first. It would be a shame to knit up something that left me looking like I had mistakenly donned a 1977 couch.

Speaking of books: fun quiz from the NYT!

Devoured

I wrote you a post and then Typepad ate it. Snarfed it right down, leaving no trace in the "restore content" buffer. It was a mildly pleasant post about Tuesday night hill running and the imp that might or might live inside my computer, telling me repeatedly that "toastliness" is not a word, but it seems to have vanished forever. My 14yo suggests that I sum it up for you in a few words: Nitwit. Blubber. Oddment. Tweak. (Maybe it worked better for Dumbledore.)

"As far as it depends on you, live at peace with everyone"

Last night I was making myself a plan for today. I was hosting a tea party for Stella and her friends, and I hadn't done the advance baking that I'd originally planned to do. As I was thinking about what 5:00 today might look like, I thought I'd be ready for a break from kid noise and dishes.

Instead the kid noise and the dishes didn't really register at 5:00. At 5:00 I was busy thinking about three other bits of news that had broken in the preceding ten minutes: the vent-cleaning guys caused a minor flood in our basement when they disconnected a hose last week, the walnut tree sent most but not all of a giant branch sliding down onto the trampoline, and one of my teens texted to say that his summer job had ended abruptly and unhappily.

Elwood came home just a little after 5, and together we talked about what happens next. Was it necessary to saw up the walnut branch to prevent damage to the trampoline, or was that a dangerous idea with the rest of the branch still semi-attached up above? Did we need the shop-vac for the basement, or just the dehumidifier? How much of a fuss should we kick up with the vent-cleaning folks? What kinds of repercussions might the job kerfuffle cause, and how should we respond?

I have often thought and occasionally posted about the virtue of patience. The Holy Spirit does not sprinkle patience dust upon us while we sleep; instead he equips us to respond patiently in situations that spark impatience in us. My kids have heard my joke enough times to roll their eyes at it: I wish God would HURRY UP and make me more patient already.

Tonight I was thinking about peace as a fruit of the Holy Spirit. Its growth happens in the same way: we can't depend on a steady stream of low-stress circumstances to make us peaceful people; true peace is the capacity to keep trusting calmly in the face of difficulties.

I kept having to reign myself in this evening. What if the damage to the walnut tree allows PATHOGENS in and the whole tree becomes DISEASED and falls on our HOUSE while we are sleeping or we have to pay EIGHT THOUSAND DOLLARS to have it taken down? What if the expensive cabinet in the basement is RUINED FOREVER because of the water issue and the vent-cleaning guys say it wasn't THEIR fault? 

Once I start it's easy to keep going. At the dinner table I was fretting about the boy who was driving home from the gym along flooded roads. "I hope he's not driving on autopilot," I stewed. "I hope he doesn't just go the usual way, since the police closed it." 

"Jamie," said Elwood, "if the police have closed it then he can't go that way on autopilot."

With mock irritation I said, "Excuse me, can't you see I'm trying to worry here? Do you think it's easy to think up all these things to worry about?"

He burst out laughing. "You do actually make it look pretty easy to find things to worry about," he said.

It would be better if I could make calm and trust look easy. That, I fear, will require some practice.

Flashing like silver

I have been scrambling to get the Stuff done before the semester starts: the paper trays are empty, the "things I need" items have been crossed off the whiteboard where the kids write them, and I am within striking distance on getting pictures into albums. This means, unfortunately, that "have fun with kids" sometimes gets treated like a task that needs ticking off. Today I ticked one of those boxes, and I even had some actual fun in the process.

Pete had told me that before school started again he wanted to go boating on a nearby lake and visit our neighborhood ice cream shop with a friend. So today I loaded two of my boys and one of their friends into the van, and we drove up to the boat rental shack. 

I didn't grow up boating -- did you? I learned how to canoe through Scouts, mostly. During the summer that I worked as a camp counselor, we lived along the shores of a lovely crescent-shaped Wisconsin bay. From the outermost units, it was more efficient to take the canoes in for breakfast than it was to walk all the way back. That's where I got comfortable in a canoe.

I'm a nervous boater with the kids. I take them out once a summer or so, but I'm always a little worried that my keys are going to end up at the bottom of the lake when one of the kids capsizes us. This time, though, my youngest passengers were 11. It was a perfect day for canoeing: sunny but not too hot. The water sparkled as we glided (okay, splashed) across it, and the echoes called back to us when we shouted. I relaxed enough to go farther than I've ever gone before, far enough to lose sight of the little dock.

We only had the boats for an hour, and I wasn't quite sure how far to go. The breeze had been helping us on the way out, and the two 11-year-olds in the boat with me weren't providing much in the way of motive power. I didn't want to go too far. As it turned out, we went exactly the right distance: as we rounded the last point, we saw a beautiful snowy egret, wading gracefully. 

I think for the last few years I've had Stella in a paddleboat while the boys handled a canoe themselves -- maybe that's why I enjoyed the canoeing so much today. I want to remember the feel of my paddle biting into the water, the satisfaction of propelling us forward stroke by stroke. In Girl Scouts we used to sing a song to keep pace when we went canoeing, and the rhythmic swing of the paddle brought it instantly to mind.

The boys are big enough now that they can help to haul the boats up the ramp. As we drove away I noticed the first hedge apples had fallen: summer is ending.

The Longest Run

Last summer I was thinking I'd sign up for the fall half-marathon in my town, but the solo long runs did me in. It was so hot and miserable, even when I left early. I managed the 7-mile run, but I just.could.not.do that 8-mile run. And then I was behind in my training plan (not to mention unwilling to run outside in the summer heat ever again as long as I lived), so...I wound up bailing on the half-marathon idea.

This summer I've already blogged about how much easier it is to suffer with a group than to suffer alone. The effects are spilling over into my solo runs as well. I was dreading the 6-mile run I needed to do at my parents' house, but I didn't want to get behind. The 7-mile run I had to do on the treadmill last week was not what you'd call fun, but I knew my groupmates were slogging it out in the heat and so I just kept trudging. Today I had to be at church for an early meeting, so for the third week in a row I couldn't do the scheduled long run with the group. But I could do a piece of it with them, at least.

I left my house at 6:20 and ran 2 miles south followed by almost 4 miles north, meeting up with the training group just as they were getting started. The coordinator saw me at the water fountain. "Jamie!" she said. "How many miles have you run already? Come and have some of our water." As I was knocking back nice cold water from their cooler, I said a quick hello to my groupmates. Just that quick taste of friendly human contact sent me speeding southward. (Well, "speeding" is relative.) I didn't want to stick around while they were doing their warmups, but the fastest group caught up with me (and passed me!) about two-thirds of a mile from home. This sounds a little hokey, but that quick glimpse of them kept me running the rest of the way. I was positively cheerful when I waltzed in my back door.

It is a little nutty to run 8 miles on a Midwestern August morning. It's much more pleasant to be collectively nutty than to be individually nutty.

Vanity of vanities

I was going to call this post "All is vanity," but then I thought, "Hmm." I thought, "I think I already have a post called 'All is vanity.' I'll check." There are actually two posts in my archives called "All is vanity," so I'm branching out. 

All three of the posts are about hair: the first about a terrible salon experience, the second about going gray, and now this one about the ridiculous haircut I got today. Here, I'll show you:

See how the hair on the left side of my face is three inches longer than the hair on the right side of my face? That is not what I asked for.

I just wanted a quick trim. Perhaps if I were more of a real grownup I'd have a regular person who cut my hair, but I've only ever found one person in this town whose haircuts I liked enough to go back for. And her salon closed, leaving me high and dry. So I just went to the chain shop again, coupon in hand.

Maybe I should have known this was a bad idea when the hairdresser stopped the person working next to her to seek help. "What should I do here?" she asked. "Cut it dry," the person at the next station said sensibly. "Don't stretch it out or you'll cut off more than you mean to. Just lift it up gently." Exactly right, I thought to myself. That's all that needs to happen here. Just a quick evening up and I'll be on my way.

"So, ah, how long have you been cutting hair?" I asked lightly. "About four years," she said, "but for almost all of that time I was cutting men's hair. I've only been working here for about six weeks." "Well, my hair is pretty forgiving," I said. 

For most of the haircut I wasn't really worried. I've had so many terrible haircuts in my life, you guys. The Please-Don't-Give-Me-Layers Layered Cut of 1981, the Nearly Bald Fiasco of 1986, the Never Let A Hairdresser At Your Scalp With Scissors When He Just Had An Argument With The Manager Trainwreck of 1989, the Weeping In The Car On The Way Home Episode of 1990, the Low Blood Sugar Is Bad For Stylist Listening Comprehension Hatchet Job of 2001 -- and those are just the lowest points. I thought I was inured to bad haircuts.

She quickly abandoned the instructions from her neighbor and reverted to what she knew: combing out every strand, stretching it to its full length, looking surprised when it sprang back shorter than planned. I didn't panic. I had a bunch of damage from sun and chlorine, and I knew that she might need to cut a fair amount to tidy it up. I looked increasingly Bozo-esque as the comb and the scissors left my hair increasingly frizzier and shorter, but I stayed calm. She was checking for symmetry as she went, I thought, and it was still long enough for a (tiny) ponytail.

But then I got home and discovered that she had given me the least symmetrical haircut I have ever received, in 46 years of largely disappointing haircuts.

My hair is pretty forgiving. If I had only shown you this picture--

--you would probably not have said, "Gee, Jamie, your hair is looking awfully lopsided." It is even less conspicuous now, since I haven't just finished stretching it out to show the contrast and my head is not tilted to the longer side. But still!

I am not quite sure what to do. I don't really want the left side to be as short as the right side, which means that I don't actually want to go back there and get it evened up. I don't want to complain and get this stylist in trouble -- she would probably have been fine if I had less crazy hair. So I guess that means I just...walk around with uneven hair for a while?

This does not seem quite right to me. It's an opportunity to cultivate detachment, right?

School supplies redux

Did this article show up a bunch of times in your Facebook feed too? It has a clickbaity title: Why I won't buy one extra box of tissues for my kid's school supplies; signed, a frustrated parent. Spoiler: she's not declining to buy any tissues; she's declining to stop at a single box. All the tissues! She can afford it and it's the right thing to do.

Is it really, though?

I think we should send a better message to kids. The author says that when you tell kids to clean up at the end of the day, they will throw half-used pencils and crayons into the garbage. She says this as if it is inevitable: the sun rises, the sun sets, the kids throw away usable materials because that's what kids do. 

There's a continuum of possible responses to kid destructiveness, right? On one end, a hypothetical parent is completely mellow about broken stuff ("Go ahead, Geranium, toss my extra pair of prescription sunglasses in the trash compactor too!"); on the other, s/he is super-strict about taking care of belongings ("What do you mean, you lost a paper clip, Wilfred? You are not leaving this desk until ALL 100 paper clips are back in the box! IN ALPHABETICAL ORDER!!"). We can all agree that there's a sweet spot somewhere in the middle: it varies with kids' ages, it varies by family, it varies with the value of the stuff being destroyed or preserved. I hope we can all agree that there's a range of normal here within and across parents and teachers-- adults may be more focused on personal responsibility on some days or on chilled-out understanding on others. I'm fine with that. But I submit that the attitude presented in the post does not show adequate respect for kids' burgeoning abilities to steward their resources wisely.

Of course kids will need some extra crayons. The black always gets used up; maybe the lilac gets broken when you are drawing your awesome Angry Lilac Monster. I dispute the author's assertion that kids need lots of extra crayons because they can't help but throw them in the trash.

I think we should send a better message to schools. When it comes to technology in schools, we are making it up as we go along. Many school districts are spending many many dollars in hopes of educating tech-savvy kids and streamlining teachers' workloads. The thing is, any tool -- tech tools included -- must be purchased and deployed prudently. I do not know how much money my district is spending on math software that cuts down on teachers' grading loads. (I am ALL IN FAVOR of reduced grading loads, let me say that loud and clear.) But it's even easier to assign soul-crushing amounts of automated math homework. At least in 1985 if a vengeance-minded sub told us to do every single problem at the end of the chapter, she was going to have to do something with the submissions. I'm not a fan of the "more is better" approach that I'm seeing among some district math teachers -- "drill & kill" is a bad idea in both analog and digital iterations.

How much does the license for that piece of software cost? How much did it cost to buy an iPad for every kindergartner in my children's school? What if there were iPads for half of the kindergartners, and the classes took turns using them? Then perhaps, just perhaps, there would be some money in the budget for duct tape and file folders.

I think we should send a better message to teachers. The author concludes by saying that teachers do an important job for which they are "incredibly underpaid." I am not in any way suggesting that teachers should be buying their own office supplies. I am saying it is really important for us to muster the political will to get them what they need. If administrators and legislators are declining to provide teachers with the resources they require to do their jobs, then collusion with them is not the remedy. Exhorting fellow parents to suck-it-up-Buttercup in the face of lengthy school supply lists is an exercise in mutual hopelessness, in refusal to believe that we can come up with a better strategy than offloading an ever-increasing proportion of educational costs to families. Which brings me to my last point:

I think we should send a better message to families. One of the privileges of childhood in the United States of America is a guarantee of a free and appropriate public education. This is a gift worth preserving. Do we really want to continue the march toward free...ish? Of course families should absorb some of the costs of equipping their children for school, but the school supply run gets more complicated and more expensive every year. I propose that this is not the direction in which we want to travel. I am writing this while feeling a little stressed about the August financial pileup. I admit that I am experiencing a degree of resistance to the idea that I must buy yet another graphing calculator* because none of our previously purchased graphing calculators are exactly the right model. (They graph. They calculate. Who could ask for anything more?) But I think there is a bigger-picture truth underlying my personal frustration: educating our children is a burden we have agreed as a society to bear. So let's bear it already.

*You know I don't expect anybody to buy me a calculator, do you not? I would just prefer to skip some of the other stuff.

Further Yarn-Alonging

Three chapters left in These Happy Golden Years. We lost steam after Little Town on the Prairie, but we should finish this one tomorrow. Just before bed we read the storm chapter, in which a neighbor boy is picked up by a tornado and found dead the next day. Stella was heartbroken -- huge gulping sobs for this nameless broken boy. :-(

The Kindle book is How Not To Be Wrong, which is a lot of fun. I'm on the part where he's talking about the shortcomings of null hypothesis significance testing, which is one of my husband's favorite grumbles as well. (Perhaps one of them might like to persuade the journal editors in my field of the merits of their perspective.)

That little bit of knitting is a hex from the Beekeeper's Quilt. It is my twentieth hex, which means I should have a completed project in, oh, 2075 or so. That yarn is pretty blinding, is it not? If you look closely you may notice that the hex needs a little TLC. I was watching Stella's mounting worry out of the corner of my eye as we read about the storm, and this caused me to knit a row in which I decreased at one end and increased at the other. I think I'll stop writing and get the resulting wonkiness sorted out right now.

Buffer

One of the problems with a desire to Do All The Things is that doing things is often messy. There's a prerequisite you didn't know about, or the phones are down, or the Scout store just ran out of the patch you need, or or or. We won't even talk about the times that you try a solution only to discover that the thing needs re-doing in painfully short order.

I was reminded forcefully of this problem today. Getting our ducts cleaned has been on my list for a long time, and it was finally on the calendar. They showed up, they sussed out the situation, they started spreading their hoses and cords all over my house and making loud ominous noises in the basement...and then they stopped.

Every time they turned on the vacuum machine, they blew another fuse. They blew A LOT of fuses, so that I had dusty ducts and multiple power interruptions. This is the way it goes in a 1923 house, I suppose. "This isn't going to work," said the owner. He said he'd come back with a generator sometime in the next week or two. "That's okay," I told myself. It's just not what I expected.

I was going to return a kid's birthday gift (from MAY) when I took another boy to a friend's house, but I discovered that the parcel wasn't really ready to go (no padding, not enough tape, unsecured label). We were out of tape. "That's okay," I told myself. I went to CVS and bought tape. I went to the PO and got the package ready to send. As I was taping down the label I noticed for the first time that it said...UPS. But it's too big to fit in a dropbox, and UPS wants to charge $10 to pick it up. "That's okay," I told myself. I'll drive it to the UPS store. It's just not what I expected.

On my way to the office I stopped at the junior high to drop off Petely's health forms. I talked to the nurse to make sure everything was in order, and as she flipped through she discovered that the PA who did his exam had said he couldn't do PE until examined by a cardiologist. This PA sent TWO of my children to cardiologists this spring over totally benign findings. I am grateful for benign findings, grateful for adequate insurance. Even so, those totally benign findings cost me hundreds of dollars out of pocket and two mornings away from work. Here in August, his caution continues to cost me. "That's okay," I told myself. It's just not what I expected. I walked over to the office, followed up with the family practice clinic, followed up with the nurse. We'll shall see if the promised fax materializes.

Sometimes it works the other way, of course. The second of the two papers I hoped to submit this summer has been held up by stats difficulties. Today my plan was to dedicate a solid hour to the problem, accepting in advance that it would only get me partway there. But! You guys! Inside that hour I FIGURED IT OUT! I should keep a roll of aluminum foil in my office for days like today, so I can craft myself attractive WINNER medallions and staple them to my shirt. The joy of finding a solution that makes sense (and supports my hypotheses, baby!) is more important than the frustrations of the morning.

I don't know if it's the Whole 30, or the August clock ticking (only two more weeks until the semester begins), or the fact that I got 9 hours of sleep last night, but I am feeling like a juggernaut at this exact moment. (A kind, gentle juggernaut. A patient juggernaut, you understand.) I just need to remember that even a juggernaut has to allow for some buffer.