LE's song about salad for breakfast: Your wash my hands, you wash my hands. Crunching time, crunching time.

I resolved to learn to cook. This wasn't really a New Year's resolution but rather some thing I decided late last fall.
Now I could do basic cooking and was able follow a recipe but cooking is more than that. I'm improving in meal planning and having regular dishes that take less mental energy because I am in practice. My microwave sits idle most of the time. My grocery cart is mostly full of ingredients rather than prepared food. I'm still far from a great cook but I was happy with my progress until we hit really hot weather.  Suddenly I had no good plan for days when I had no desire to turn on the stove.
My problem is that I have been taking the phrase 'cook a meal' too literally. I have one pasta salad that I make, which though it takes cooking pasta can be made in large batches and served cold. And what I need is first to think of sandwiches as a meal and second to have two or three sets of fixings and three to be aware enough of the weather to know when to have them on hand.

This is a series of stories I have been telling LE at nap time:

This is a story about Jump and Hoppy, two frogs who live in Powderhorn Park, in the pond, on the west side among the reeds.

Then I talk about what kind of insects they have for lunch, the current weather, whether they spent the afternoon on land or in the water and if they encountered any other animals.  The story always ends like this:

As the afternoon turned to evening and the sun began to set Jump and Hoppy returned to their home in the reeds on the west side of the pond in Powderhorn Park,.

I dyed my hair for Beltaine. It didn't come out perfectly but it's a lot better than it could have been.

Thursday night the group went out to a bar after the ritual and I had a pint of pear cider. So I come home late, Little Elf is already asleep so the house needs to stay relatively dark and quiet.

I've never done this before so I read the instructions twice, section off a hank of hair and apply the bleach.

15 minute gives a light brown, 35 a medium yellow. The dye is aqua blue. Blue plus yellow equals green, so I decide to stop before my hair gets too brittle. I rinse it out, and mix up the rest of the bleach.

There's not nearly enough bleach to do all my nearly waist long hair which is fine. The first two sections are at the temples, a la the Bride of Frankenstein. I cover them well and wrap them in tin foil., I then start painting and dabbing the rest of the bleach into the sides and back trying for a highlighting effect.

Now my bathroom is small. The tub takes up half the space, the toilet half of what remains and the last quarter is divided between the sink and standing room. So here I am in this tiny space, mostly sober by now, trying to figure where I have and have not put bleach. Eventually I run out of bleach.

So a sit and read the latest Discover, then check the temples which just a little paler than the test area. Into the shower I go and succeed in not getting bleach in my eyes. My hair doesn't look nearly as light as I though it would be. Oh, well.

Now for the dye. How much should I use? I pour out about a third of the jar. Oh crude, I ought to have different gloves for the dye. Bleachy gloves or no gloves? No gloves. Dab and brush, dab and brush. How long do I leave it in? Half an hour I think. Wash it out. Wrap it up. Go to bed.

When I brush it the next morning its mostly brown hair with subtle green streaks,  like moss on bark.

I like it but its a little too subtle.

Next time I'll leave the bleach in longer, plus I'll be adding to what's already done. And I'll leave the dye in all night if I can.

I've dithered about dyeing my hair for years now, using excuses like 'my job won't let me' or 'I'm pregnant' but I used to dye my hair red back in my early twenties and the truth is that I don't do such a good job keeping it touched up.
Little Elf is almost two now and, if we don't adopt more, in a couple of years she'll be in school and I will once again be in the job market. So its now or wait until I'm sixty five.
So here's what I'm thinking: I want to bleach two streaks of hair at my temples, a la Bride of Frankenstein, then add some color via something like Manic Panic.
I'd love any advice any one more experienced in coloring hair has to offer.

So this is Day 3 of Naked Baby Week or Month or something. Mid December, 65 degrees in this house and Little Elf will not keep her diaper on, much less anything else. So as I'm running after her with diaper in hand she is yelling "Time out, time out!" Now she self narrates everything, say what she's doing as she's doing it. But she rarely gets a time out, its been weeks since she's had one. Is 'time out' her way of narrating 'no intention of obeying?'

I strive to not pick up pigeon English from LE but I really struggling with 'nilk' which is so cute and which she says a dozen times a day. Must . . . re . . .mem . . . ber . . . 'milk.'

Little Elf and I play a game where I write for her words she names. So today her first suggestion is  'Obama.' 
I add likes and ask her 'What does Obama like?'
'Hair'
'Hair?'
'Hair, hair' she responds.
'Okay , what should I write?' I ask after writing that down.
'Obama.'
'Obama eats' I put down. 'What does Obama eat?'
"Food.'
This is followed by ' (LE) kicks shoes, '  'Circle is Obama,' and 'Dragon eats food.'
'What food does dragon eat?' I prompt.
'Obama'
If Obama is eaten by a dragon then she's psychic.

So I when to Ingebretsons for fish and cheese and as I'm leaving I park the stroller partially blocking the door. As I am bundling the baby a woman goes by me saying 'let me hold the door for you'. I respond, 'Ok I'm almost done', which after moving to let her pass takes 3 or 4 seconds. In that time she has gone straight out without pause. 'Ok', I think, 'she couldn't wait, oh well.'  So I start to back the stroller out of the store just as the man at the counter says 'I'll hold the door for you, so I say 'thank you!,' straighten out the stroller to let him pass and follow him. The door shuts in my face as he also fails to pause. Now I'm miffed. I mean these are my people, Scandiwhovians, older than I am but not old enough to be my parents, yet certainly old enough to have some kind of experience with parenthood. If they had wanted past they could have asked, or if they did not want to be so bold, it would have taken less than a minute for me to be out and clear  without their interuptions. Was the time saved really worth the deception? But it goes beyond these two, I am constantly amazed how many people are not moved to hold the door for a woman pushing a stroller. I will even confess that when someone stands impatiently waiting without helping I will slow down and take as much time as I can to get through a door. I know passive aggression is not a good habit but sometimes I don't feel like being good.

Like crowbar wielding Hansels there is a crew of men going after my old siding as if it were gingerbread.  Boy I hope LE can sleep through this.

I'm feeling jumpy and anxious and perhaps depressed. I have started worrying that the siding is not going to happen. That I'm being scammed. I paid for about a third of the project on Monday . The contractor was going to start original late July, then on the 2nd,  then a week ago then yesterday, now next Monday.  The delays didn't bother me until I'd actually paid him. Its possible that these feelings are hormonal. My cycles definitely changed after my pregnancy, mostly for the better but am I now premenstrual?  Or maybe its my worries about this election spilling over into the rest of my brain.  Time will tell.

I was wondering what you all would think if I simplified and or shortened the chore list.  We are all using it less and it for one am finding it a chore just to update my actions.For  example we have three shopping chores that could be combined.  I'd like to see chores grouped under daily, weekly, monthly, groups as well as a fly lady/ challenges group that had tasks that rotated or change occasionally and a simple living group that included clutter control and green tasks. Also I find hairballs an unsatisfying reward it should be a monster. What prizes do you what added and do you what to encounter monsters?  Every day items? Fabulous items? Humorous items? What suggestions do you have? 

Happy birthday Rosalux. If you find the time let us either take you guys out to eat or take Mica so you can go out.

I am appalled, just appalled by Palin. Another dirty politician who ran on a reformation platform. I'm appalled by the main stream media that repeats her words over and over again and never mentions the ways she has abused her power in the past. This woman is Cheney in a dress. 

I am also disturbed that corporate owned media has found a plot line that lets them support the candidate that gives its owners large tax breaks. They exhibit deliberate and willful amnesia about the way they have treated female politicians and families on the Left as they fall over themselves to 'not pick on' Palin or her  daughter. 

I am in despair about how my fellow citizens are being treated. The level of police misconduct we have seen in the past month has been building ever since Bush took office. Here's a nice little quote from Palin's pastor: "if you criticize the President, you will burn in a lake of fire for all eternity. "  Or in other words it is morally wrong to criticize people in power. This is the way too many people on the right think and it scares the crap out of me.

I am ashamed to say that I know that the right answer is to take to the streets myself, but I don't. I can't decide if LE's safety and care is a justifiable reason or only an excuse. I see my country slipping away  don't know what right action is. If I keep her safe now, am I destroying her future?

I am afraid that Obama will not win. Perhaps Bush was right, the answer is to go shopping. Should I buy an Obama t-shirt or just donate money?

Babylon 5, The producer had a lot of prescience about the media and the Iraq war. It was chilling to compare CCN's pre war coverage to his ISN (Interstellar Network.) And then his plan for seasons four and five got jumbled in uncertainty in whether or not their would be a season five. It would be interesting to see what stories he would tell now that we have had five years of war.

When I first opened the book "How to Teach Your Baby to Read", I came across a page with a single paragraph that starts: "There are no chauvinists at the Institute."

Oh, no, I thought, I know what this is. Its one of those excuses for not using gender neutral language. As if pointing out their non inclusiveness with some lame and faulty reasoning will make their prose not grate on my nerves.

It went on: "To solve the maddening problem of referring to all human beings as 'grown-up male persons' or 'tiny female persons' we have referred most often throughout this text to all parents as mothers, and to all children as boys. Seems fair."

I can't decide which is worse, the pretense that the only choices are between chauvinistic language and impossibly clunky jargon or their pretending that historically the default gender for parenting isn't female and that the default gender for children isn't male.

This is out of a 2006 revision of a book from the early sixties, that my mother in law used to teach my SO how to read. If she didn't expect me to use the thing I wouldn't have read farther and this rant could end here.

Half of one chapter is about how experts discount how much a mother knows her own child. Its not passively inclusive. Its a cheerleading sort of screed with the tone: 'don't let those men in lab coats intimidate you.'

And when we get to suggestions for making lists of favorite words mother is told to go down into the basement to find out the names of various tools, not because its a thing no parent would know but because 'mother' does not refer to to all parents (not to mention the assumption that mother would not already know those words), and the names of tools are among favorite words not because all children would be interested but because girls' interests are just not even considered.

My SO thinks the authors may have not even considered parents of girls were a target audience, but I think its just utter insensitivity to how rude they are being.

In order facilitate increased awareness and better manners, I think we should have a century or two of using the feminine as the default gender (except when the role is for unpaid labor.) Seems fair.

Of course we have a plan. I take the baby and go cower in the other room and he deals with it. Its exactly the same as our spider plan, our bat plan and our cat vomit plan.

On Saturday I went to a panel at the Con called Girls and Gaming. It was about the issues that female gamers encounter. GTA comes up and one of the moderates says the rape in the game is not real because the women consented, that is because they are prostitutes what they experience is not really rape. I am happy to to say that most of the crowd vocalized disapproval and I stood up to point out that the same argument was in the past used to invalidate charges of rape between spouses. On one hand I am pleased by my own out rage at such a statement. My normal state ranges from happy to content to mildly annoyed. Knowing that anger is there when justified is good and it shows just how well my life is going. On the other hand, I was completely shocked that some one in my own community, especially one who put herself forward as a feminist, would say such a thing. It has so many wrong assumptions embedded in it from 'bad girls deserve/ask for rape' to 'lawbreakers are not entitled to legal protections' to 'I am only concern for people like myself.' Most of all it is part of a mind set that the answer to rape is in changing women's behavior not men's.

We are headed to the Con today.  I asked Rob to get his costume together on Monday but he didn't.  I predict chaos today with a high chance of missing parts on Saturday  when he gets dressed up. No costume for LE this year, she's too old to just tolerate it and too young to understand playing dress up.  Good thing we dressed her last year, now I can blackmail her when she becomes rich and famous, and scare off boyfriends with embarrassing photos.

Getting to the post office is like pulling teeth, literally. I have postponed mailing a package longer than I postponed pulling wisdom teeth. However I actually did it. When I graduated I promised my sister my honor cords. Today I mailed them - 24 years and three weeks later.