2008 February « Like I Have Time For This?

Archive for February, 2008

Clever and vainglorious kings they may be…

Published February 13, 2008 Hallmark Moments From Hell , Homeschooling 10 Comments

but they still wouldn’t last five minutes when facing my bored, coming-down-with-a-cold 4-year-old.

The magic marker marks happened during our history reading today, when I (foolishly) left my pink-magic-marker-wielding 4-year-old in visual range of this book so that I could use the bathroom. I was gone only moments, but that’s all it takes.

The scissor-situation is a long-running battle in which I desperately try to keep all scissors hidden and locked away until someone actually has a REASONABLE NEED for such an item, while my 4-year-old (mastermind that she is) continually manages to find those hiding places and consquently reclaim the scissors and then use them to give haircuts to every single Barbie and stuffed animal she can get her hands on while I’m busy on the computer working that freelance project I took on so as to be able to finance her up-and-coming homeschooled education.

The clump of hair you see next to the recently-re-confiscated scissors is from the large stuffed horse she got for Christmas this year. Said horse now has a significantly shorter tail and mane, and I now have to wash all her sheets and blankets because that’s where she was sitting when she took on that enormous styling project and there’s stuffed animal hair clippings everywhere.

She’s coming down with a cold, the weather outside is dreadful and dreary, and it’s just THAT kind of day around here.

How much you wanna bet that even the Gorgons would run screaming in the opposite direction?

Neat.

Published February 9, 2008 Photos 1 Comment

One of RegularDad’s coworkers went to Vietnam on a business trip and brought back two of these for our girls. They’re these neato dragonfly toys that are made in such a way that you can balance the very tip of their noses on anything. Here in this shot, we’ve got it balanced on the tip of a mechanical pencil.

Six unimportant things.

Published February 7, 2008 Not Worth Categorizing 5 Comments

Sara over at the Learning Umbrella tagged me for this meme. Well, she didn’t really tag me. She’s got tag anxiety, just like the rest of us, so she said she wasn’t gonna tag anyone. But then she said that if she WERE to tag anyone, it would be various fabulous bloggers, myself included.

Here the rules of the meme: (1) Link to the person that tagged you. (2) Post the rules on your blog. (3) Share six non-important things/habits/quirks about yourself. (4) Tag six random people at the end of your post by linking to their blogs. (5) Let each random person know they have been tagged by leaving a comment on their website.

1. I got maybe four hours total of sleep last night, so I’m a bit punchy right now, which makes it hard to think of another five quirks about me. This is scaring me a bit, because normally I could rattle off at least two dozen quirks about myself in less than ten minutes.

2. I used to bite my nails when I was little. It was so bad that my fingernails were almost completely nonexistent. I stopped by using that nailpolish that tastes terrible. It really works. But now, I bite my cuticles. Till they bleed. I have to wear bandaids to stop myself sometimes. In stressful weeks, I’ll have at least 4 or 5 bandaids wrapped around my fingers. Back before I had kids, when I still worked full time as a graphic artist, one of the guys I worked with nicknamed me Less Nessman because I always had at least one bandaid on at all times. (Right now, by the way, I’m wearing two bandaids.)

3. I saw a sign in a church lobby today that said: “Elizabeth’s Goodbye Luncheon” and thought it sounded like a good title for a poem.

4. I’m almost completely hooked on the TV show, House.

5. Tonight, I overcooked the pork chops by mistake, and I didn’t get all stressed out about it at all. I just shrugged and said “sorry about that” and expected everyone to eat it anyway. And they did. Except my 4-year-old. But she ate most of her broccoli and didn’t whine the whole time, so for her, that’s good.

6. Right now, everyone’s asleep except me.

__________________

Well, that’s six things. I’m too tired to tag people. In fact, I sat here way too long just trying to get to six, I’m that tired. So I’m gonna use my blanket “everybody but Doc” tag, and go see if I can find a House rerun before I fall into bed.

‘Night, all.

Shame on them!

Published February 5, 2008 Dysfunction Junction , Homeschooling 7 Comments
Tags: Homeschooling, civic responsibility, plagiarism

Go and read this article over at the Mad Editor.

http://www.madeditor.com/2008/02/id-rather-be-hated-than-used.html

It’s long, but it’s important that we all read this, especially those of us who blog. The blogging community needs to be aware that blogging brings with it an inherent responsibility to not be jerks. To not steal. And then to not blatantly tell the person you steal from that you don’t care, that you won’t own up to the fact that you’re stealing just because you don’t want to give up the increased blog traffic that you’re getting because you stole that incredibly cool and funny thing that SOMEONE ELSE WROTE!!!

For the record, the thing that got stolen is this: http://www.secular-homeschooling.com/001/bitter_homeschooler.html, written by Deborah Markus of the Secular Homeschooling Magazine. If you find this article someplace else, and it doesn’t give credit to Ms. Markus, please be aware that she wrote it, and that someone stole it from her.

And just to clarify some basic rules of writing: If you take something someone else has written and post the entire thing on your own blog or website and NOT GIVE CREDIT to the original author, that’s plagiarism. And that’s theft. And if you do this, please be aware that you are being a jerk, and that you should stop being such a jerk because the world’s already got way too many jerks.

And if you find that you’ve accidentally linked up to the site that’s got this article posted without proper credit to Ms. Markus, it is my ferverent hope that you will change your link to point to the original author’s site and remove and all links to that other website that doesn’t deserve any more links EVER. And if you want to roast them alive in a fabulously scathing blog post, by all means, do so and let me know so I can read it and feel better.

One of the reasons I homeschool is that I want to teach my kids to be adults, and professionals, to teach them CIVIC RESPONSIBILITY, and part of that is teaching them that STEALING IS WRONG.

When I see homeschoolers stealing, it makes me so angry.

Because teachers are role models, right?

Published February 3, 2008 Homeschooling , In the news... 8 Comments
Tags: Homeschooling, public education, violence in schools

Here’s a fun little breaking news story:

http://abclocal.go.com/wpvi/story?section=news/local&id=5919703

A woman allegedly made numerous threats against the school where she teaches, including leaving threatening notes written to mimic a child’s handwriting and fashioning “fake” bombs and leaving them around the premises to be found by others, all because she’s angry that she didn’t get to teach fifth grade this year. Instead, she was told to teach fourth grade students. And she’s pissed off about it.

Because fifth grade is SO MUCH MORE EXCITING AND CHALLENGING THAN FOURTH GRADE???

Sorry, but I just don’t get it. Maybe it’s because I’m only teaching first/second grade stuff right now? And I am, of course, teaching in somewhat OPTIMAL conditions. I don’t have to answer to any administrators or school boards. I have to answer to RegularDad, I guess, but he’s pretty happy with our educational plan so far. He’s the farthest thing imaginable from an irate, dissatisfied parent. Sure, we have parent-teacher conferences. Just as often as we can. And they’re really, really FUN. If you get my drift.

Ahem…ANYWAY…

If this woman taught in conditions such as mine, perhaps she would have found a better way to handle her disappointment. And seriously, if a teacher doesn’t get her way, and starts doing things like this woman, what kind of message is she sending to her students? Like, what if they get angry with her because they didn’t get an extra 10 minutes of recess, and they threaten her and leave bombs in her desk? What recourse does she have? She is, after all, TEACHING them that this is the proper way to express one’s anger and disappointment.

This story is happening not far from where I live, by the way. It’s not the same district, but it’s damn close. And then, also close by, another district is on strike.

All’s I’m sayin’ is: Homeschooling ROCKS!

Don’tcha just love Doc?

Published February 2, 2008 Not Worth Categorizing 3 Comments

I love Doc. Don’t you?

Tell everyone that you love Doc. Get yourself one of these:

Get it from here. Get it while it lasts.

Tell the world that you love Doc. In a completely innocent I-swear-to-God-and-all-the-saints-that-I’m-really-REALLY-REALLY-not-stalking-Doc kind of way.

Really.

More meme catch-up work.

Published February 1, 2008 Weekend Reading 5 Comments

I got tagged for another meme earlier this week from Audrey via the recently-upgraded (and what a tizzy it’s been!) Well Trained Mind message boards.

This one’s a book meme. Short and sweet. The rules are:

Pick up the nearest book (of at least 123 pages).
Open the book to page 123.
Find the fifth sentence.
Post the next three sentences.
Tag five people and ask them to do the same (unless you’re Doc, and unless you don’t want to, that is.)

So, the book nearest to me at the moment just happens to be Foucalt’s Pendulum by Umberto Eco. (Eco also wrote The Name of the Rose, a book which was later made into a movie starring Sean Connery and Christian Slater.)

From after the 5th sentence on page 123:

And the paper says they came to a great hall with a fine fireplace and a dry well in the center. They tied a stone to a rope, lowered it, and found that the well was eleven meters deep. They went back a week later with stronger ropes, and two companions lowered Ingolf into the well, where he discovered a big room with stone walls, ten meters square and five meters high.

A secret room at the bottom of a dry well that you can only get to from inside someone’s fireplace. Pretty cool. That’s what I’ll be reading this weekend.

I’d tell you how it all turns out, but then you might not read it for yourself.

Many thanks to Audrey for the tag. And I’m gonna tag Maria, Karisma, Wendy, Heather, and Kitten. And anyone else who’s up for it. Except for Doc, that is. She’s, like, really busy right now.

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Like I Have Time For This?

Archive for February, 2008

Clever and vainglorious kings they may be…

Neat.

Six unimportant things.

Shame on them!

Because teachers are role models, right?

Don’tcha just love Doc?

More meme catch-up work.

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