welfareloser's totally excellent parenting adventure!

today, AccidentProne stopped by to borrow the circular saw

noreply@blogger.com (welfareloser) — Mon, 01 Mar 2010 01:49:00 +0000

kinda sounds like the opening to a really fucked-up joke, doesn't it? but it's not! he stopped by to borrow the circular saw... and PositiveRoleModel said okay. and who am i to judge? instead of judging, i'll just pop my popcorn and enjoy the horror movie!

actually, the punchline here has nothing to do with any accidents that might occur as the man puts together his pigeon shed. the punchline here is the artwork that SpazMonkey threw together for him while he was here.

really, only the "die" part is creepy. the rest is adorable!

EDIT: the twits just wandered past the laptop, and informed me that, in fact, it was DramaQueen who penned that masterpiece. SpazMonkey actually did this bit on the reverse side:

goin up cripple creek, goin in a whirl, goin up cripple creek to see...

noreply@blogger.com (welfareloser) — Thu, 25 Feb 2010 20:06:00 +0000

...some science.

okay. so, if you don't count the occasional 4-hour road trip to our hometown to see our parents, PRM and i have never taken all the kids with us on an honest-to-god family vacation. so, we may be in a golden window here... our youngest is now old enough to get something out of a family vacation, and our oldest is still young enough to not be horrified at the prospect of taking a vacation with his embarrassing parents (though he might have that nailed down after actually doing it once. i'm just sayin. he's not stupid.)

one of our favorite vacation spots for the last several years has been Colorado. it has everything PRM and i love. it's got fishing, it's got hiking, denver is only an 11-hour drive from iowa city, it's got snowboarding, it's got the national fencing headquarters (okay, so that one's more for me than PRM,) and perhaps most importantly, it's now home to several of our friends who are willing to let us crash in their homes.

now, taking the kids along does change the itinerary a bit. first and foremost, we will be staying in hotels rather than attempting to inflict our children on anyone we know. also, there isn't going to be any snowboarding, partly because we're not going until july, partly because of the expense of equipment rentals for 6 and lessons for 4, and partly because at least 3 of the kids are huge pussies (and the one who isn't has no goddamned business on a snowboard while he's still in diapers.) PRM and i went snowboarding this past weekend, and took care of of our need to throw ourselves down mountains without dragging along any of the "OH MY GOD THERE'S SNOW IN MY EYE!" brothers. there will be "fishing," if you can loosen the definition of the word to include episodes of casting into water that contains fish, with no real hope of actually catching any due to the noise and splashing. there will be "hiking," so long as that can be considered to describe an episode of driving the van to a parking lot that directly abuts a wildlife area that can be satisfyingly explored in under 1 mile of actual walking.

also, there will be some additions to the itinerary, specially tailored to meet the vacation needs of our geeky offspring:

The Lincoln Children's Museum
they have a lunar lander, and human-scale prairie dog tunnels. also, it's a good place to stop to divide the driving into two days. so on the way back, we can hit:

The Lincoln Children's Zoo
pony rides. butterflies. lots of monkeys. game, set, match.

the Body Worlds exhibit
score! PRM and i both REALLY wanted to see this exhibit, but haven't managed to make it to any of the cities where it's been set up yet. it happens to be scheduled to be at the denver museum of natural history until july, so we're there! luckily, the kids are totally stoked about it too... because we'd be dragging them even if they weren't.

then, we'll head south to the:

Florrisant Fossil Beds National Monument
we have a pretty neat devonian fossil gorge here, and the kids love it. so i figure if they're impressed by a bunch of coral and fragments of primitive plants and the occasional brachiopod here in iowa, they are going to be blown away by the 1700 species of plants and animals at this site... which is on the way to what, as far as the boys are concerned, is our main reason for going to colorado at all:

The Cripple Creek Gold Mines
(see? the title of this post isn't just some random bluegrass lyrics... i was going somewhere with that, bitches!)

two different gold mines. gold, silver, and some iron pyrite. my periodic-table-obsessed offspring couldn't get to sleep the first night after i told them about this place. ride a train. take an elevator 1000 feet down. wear a hardhat while riding on a rickety mine train on the tour of the mine. pan for gold. did i mention they were excited? SpazMonkey had a solo sick day a couple days after this vacation was announced, and after the thermometer confirmed he wouldn't be going to school that morning, he jumped up and yelled, "GOOD! BECAUSE I NEED TO START PACKING FOR COLORADO!" he then proceeded to make a 2-page list, only some of which was readily available in the house for him to pack (we still need to buy him a pickaxe and dynamite, apparently.)

things this vacation will not include:

1) CAMPING: it almost sounds like fun... until you think about it. and if we actually woke up with all 4 children still present and accounted for in the tent in the morning, i would eat a wet dog turd.

2) THE TELLURIDE BLUEGRASS FESTIVAL: damn, that's a tough one to pass up. a few hours west, and it takes place about the time we're planning on being there. my hero, chris thile and EG's hero, edgar meyer will be there. you know who else will be there? stinky hippies. piles of them. so you know who won't be getting within smelling distance of that hot mess? my kids. they might learn a little about music there, but there's a whole lot of other shit they'd learn, too. i'd sooner take EG to see his other hero, flea, at a red hot chili peppers concert. seriously. i've thought about this.

yep. throw in a day of fishing, a day of hiking, some nights of hanging out with friends here and there, some long hours of gameboys and blue's clues dvds in the car, and a couple dozen stops at mcdonalds and burger king, and probably at least a couple episodes of spectacular puking, and that's our big-ass summer vacation!

so. you could reasonably expect this blog to not get updated at all in july, as it may take me a month or so to recover from all the awesomeness.

slap-o-matic

noreply@blogger.com (welfareloser) — Sat, 20 Feb 2010 19:03:00 +0000

so the east side beginning orchestra, comprised of 90ish 4th-graders from the half-dozen elementary schools on this side of town, had their first concert at the end of january. we had known that EvilGremlin was enjoying playing the bass, and we thought he was good. turns out, he's REALLY good. we found out that he's plowed through about 2-3 times as many pages in his lesson book as any of the other kids. during the concert, he was one of the few kids who was drawing long, steady bow strokes with confidence; while the other 8 or so bass players wavered off key and off beat, you could clearly hear EG playing in tune and on time (even as he struggled to see the conductor over the apparently non-adjustable music stand.)

in addition to a little skill, he's also got some balls. after the beginning orchestra played, they took seats in the audience and listened to the advanced (5th and 6th grade) orchestra play. i knew he liked it - i didn't know how much. without mentioning the bug up his ass to either of his parents, at his next lesson, he told his teacher that he really liked the music the advanced orchestra had played, and asked if he could play with them. she made sure it was okay with us first, and then said yes.

so! the first advanced orchestra practice was a little intimidating... for me, mostly. EG is tiny and goofy, and dropping him off at the high school in a roomful of 11-13 year olds seemed like one of those things that could go really wrong really quickly... but it was fine. 4 practices in, i'm convinced this is this nicest group of middle-schoolers on the planet. they pay attention to the teacher, they're polite, outgoing, take the work seriously, but have good senses of humor. several of them went out of their way to make sure EG had all the sheet music he needed, they joke around with him like he's one of them, and after the initial shock of jumping straight from "plucking out Mary Had a Little Lamb in unison" to "bowing one of eight separate parts of Pachelbel's Canon in D" and "getting a crash course in playing slap-bass at 142 beats per minute," he's having a really, really good time.

i had warned him that one of the more difficult new skills he would need would be keeping time perfectly when other people are playing something completely different from what he's playing. so i grabbed the violin parts for some of the orchestra music so i could practice with him at home and help get him up to speed more quickly.

yeah. let me just say that i can probably get him through the summer with my help, but by next summer, he's going to be outplaying me in a big way. we did good on "Crystal City March." within a few days, he was able to count his measures of rests and come in on his pick-up notes with no problems. i quickly determined that there was no way in hell i'd be playing the violin part to Canon in D anytime soon, so i set up an mp3 player on his old-ass windows 98 computer and got him a recording to play along with.

then there's the traditional american folk music. like "Cripple Creek." i LOVE cripple creek. it's fun. it's easy. i have it memorized, on both the banjo and the fiddle. EG loves cripple creek, too. so he's practiced it a lot. and as of right now, i physically can't keep up with the boy on Cripple Creek. now, granted, between my nerve-damaged hands and the necessity of learning how to provide, and then providing, language therapy to MonkeyBeef, i basically took nearly two years off playing the banjo and fiddle, but fuck me! you know that sinking feeling that you're a douchebag when a 10-year-old hands you your buckwheats at Halo 3? multiply that by about 3, and that's where i am. actually, on those occasions when i've told him to correct his bowing technique to improve his tone, and then taken a turn on his bass to show him what i mean, only to realize that the tone i get out of a bass bow is nowhere near as good as his... make that multiplier more like a 10.

mostly, though, we're really, really proud of the little shit. it's okay when your kids don't like the same things you like (okay, so i almost cried when the twits had me take down all their star wars posters so there'd be more room for science posters, but other than THAT, it's okay.) and it's okay when your kids aren't good at stuff. but when your kid loves something that you love, AND is good at it, it's REALLY freaking cool.

so, yay! i'm working on getting my bluegrass back up to speed. PositiveRoleModel and i can both keep up with him on "Boil Them Cabbages Down" and "Ashokan Farewell" and "Red-Haired Boy." and MonkeyBeef loves to come busting in on practice sessions, grab the bow, and sway back and forth as he belts out the ABC song while playing the bass that his big brother will helpfully hold for him. and the twits... are busy composing music. they're mostly frustrated by their parents' inability to play what they have written - even when they write it in tablature for a certain retarded banjo player. even though said retarded banjo player insists that there should be the same number of lines in every measure, and that the numbers on the lines probably should have 2 digits only on very rare occasions, and never 3 digits... banjo players are still retarded. just ask DramaQueen and SpazMonkey!

anyway. family music. good times!

yeah, it's cool... but it probably won't get you laid

noreply@blogger.com (welfareloser) — Thu, 18 Feb 2010 16:44:00 +0000

so i've mentioned that the kids are really, really into science, right? right. one of their favorite games to play right now is to quiz each other on the periodic table. turns out, they can all name every element, its atomic number, whether or not it's radioactive, which series and period it's in, its electron shell configuration, its most common valence states, and, in the case of metals and whatnot, its crystal structure (and if you can't visualize "trigonal bipyramidal," they'd be happy to draw a picture for you. no shit.)

and that's just the base knowledge that all 3 of the older boys have down cold. any one of them may also be able to tell you a melting point, a color or hardness, or the latin root (score one for me... those little shits are getting some stealth linguistics whether they like it or not!) and any number of other oddball properties.

even MonkeyBeef gets in on the act. it's pretty damned funny when mr. special ed drags a kitchen chair over to the periodic table poster in the kitchen and starts jabbing his finger at random squares on it, saying, "WHA DIS? WHASS NUMMER ONE? ISS HI-JO-JEN!" he also loves the new 8-bajillion-piece molymod molecular model kit... he knows the red is oxygen, the white is hydrogen, the yellow is sulfur, and the black is carbon. "a white one hi-jo-jen, tiny bond, a wed one OCK-DOH-JEN, tiny bond, a white one HI-JO-JEN... WADDER! YAY! SIX BWACK ONES - BESSZENE WING! YAY, BESSZENE WING!" he'll build a random molecule and ask his brothers to tell him the name of it.

it probably goes without saying that they are not impressed with the large holes in my knowledge of chemistry. i enjoyed chemistry. i was good at it. i took honors chemistry. i may have even gotten A's. but it's now been 15 years since i was a freshman in college, and i'll be damned if i can remember much about sp3 hybrid orbitals. EvilGremlin is learning how to to use that thing called the "index" at the back of the chemistry textbooks i've gotten for him.

so. here's my big-ass list of product recommendations.

MolyMod makes the best molecular model kits available - you can do space-filling or ball-and-stick models, its sturdy, the models don't fall apart when handled (or when used to thwack a brother on the head.)

www.webelements.com is the place to surf. also, the place to buy really awesome posters. and periodic table socks.

"World of Chemistry" basically, anything written by stephen zumdahl is good, but i like this one because it's for low-level high school chemistry. being written for unmotivated 16-year-olds makes it perfect for a highly motivated 10-year-old.

i just picked up a cheap used copy of "An Introduction to Molecular Orbitals" for EG - there are a ton of orbital theory books out there, most probably over his head; the big selling points for this one were that it was recommended for beginning-to-intermediate chemistry students, and that the reviews all raved about the quality of the illustrations.

"The Elements: A Visual Exploration" has been a great book for the twits, who are less interested in theory and more interested in what the heck technetium and beryllium actually LOOK like.

"The Cartoon Guide to Chemistry" - basically aimed at high-schoolers, and very well-written. EG has devoured this book, and even at age 6, the twits can follow it pretty well.

"It's Elementary" - for younger kids. the twits love it, and even EG thought it was pretty good. lots of cool pictures and real-world examples of where you might find each element.

Basher's "Periodic Table" - ahhhh, the book that started it all. we now own 4 copies, no fighting. 4 really dog-eared copies.

Basher's "Chemistry" - they are counting down the days until this book is released. i should probably change my pre-order from 1 to 4 copies. i should probably also not mention that we will be out of town when it ships, or they'll want to rearrange our entire summer vacation road trip to colorado.

but really, i owe the biggest debt of thanks to the Mad Science after-school program. all 3 of the older boys have now completed both the astronomy class and the chemistry class. if your child's school ever offers it, DO IT. for $64 per child, they got a 2-hour session once a week for four weeks, taught by someone with a PhD in the relevant science. each session had at least one "make and take," like a little toy rocket or "atomic coins," which were pure genius in their simplicity... punch-out circles of the appropriate sizes for hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen, carbon, sodium, calcium, and sulfur, each with appropriately-spaced little slits cut around the edges to represent bonds it could form. you slide the single slot of each of two hydrogens into the two slots of an oxygen, and you've got a nice, bent H2O molecule.

the boys played with theirs til they shredded and died, so we made more. a little adobe illustrator (okay... a LOT of figuring out, and then teaching the kids, how to use adobe illustrator,) a little info on valence states and atomic radii from webelements.com, and voila! several snow days were filled with drawing these and printing them on cardstock. there's nothing else like it on the web (believe me... i looked hard before resorting to teaching myself how to use freaking adobe illustrator!) the project is only about 90% complete, but i thought i'd post them here in case any other parents of nerdy children need their very own set of printable atomic coins for making molecular models on snow days. you get both the .pdf version for printing out, and the .ai version for making your own changes to the original file if you like.

THE PDFs:
atomic coins 1 atomic coins 2 atomic coins 3 atomic coins 4 atomic coins 5
atomic coins 6 atomic coins 7 atomic coins 2 atomic coins 9 atomic coins 10

THE AIs: 01 02 03 04 05 06 07 08 09 10

Economics Lesson of the Day: You No Can Has

noreply@blogger.com (welfareloser) — Mon, 15 Feb 2010 14:34:00 +0000

EvilGremlin asked for an electron microscope. i told him that the last one i had used had cost about $100,000. He waited for the punchline. i told him that we could not afford an electron microscope. he disappeared, and after a bit of googling, he showed me a refurbished electron microscope he had found for "only" $10,000. i explained that was what his dad's car had cost, and he lit up and suggested we sell dad's car. ah, optimism.

ever since opening a savings account for him with his summer earnings, and explaining to him the magic that is compound interest, i think he's been as exuberant about the possibilities of wealth as a bunch of bankers circa 2007. so today, i added to his economic repertoire the concept of "depreciation." apparently, i killed some of his innocence and youthful optimism with that one, because he looked like i had just told him that santa claus stabbed the easter bunny after burning down disneyland.

i don't think he's done plotting to get an electron microscope, though. he was looking through the job ads in the newspaper later that afternoon.

Chemistry Lesson of the Day: the awesomeness that is setting hair on fire

noreply@blogger.com (welfareloser) — Wed, 10 Feb 2010 17:49:00 +0000

what?

Special Ed gets on the short bus!

noreply@blogger.com (welfareloser) — Tue, 02 Feb 2010 20:13:00 +0000

yesterday was MonkeyBeef's third birthday. he got a blue's clues cake, a blue's clues toy mailbox with some home-made laminated blue's clues letters, some fat blue's clues crayons... and a blue's clues backpack.

because today, the boy is officially old enough for special ed preschool, courtesy of the taxpayers of the great state of iowa. he's made decent progress in his weekly language therapy with a speech pathologist at the university hospital - about 5-6 months worth of progress in the last 4 months. not awesome, but good enough, i think... we've spent the 9 months since he got his tubes placed wondering if the deafness was all that was wrong with him or not. some days, it seemed like there was something else going on; other days, there were sudden explosions of progress. over christmas, for example, he was suddenly speaking in near-sentences, like "turn key open door please!" (referring to the sun porch where some of his favorite toys are stored) and "don't throw baby!" (referring to his baby cousin, whom it seems he'd really like to throw, at least when he's occupying my lap.)

at this point, we've pretty much decided that his language skills - which now stand at the skills expected for a child of one year and nine months of age - are the result of 1) catching up after not being able to hear from about 9 months of age to about 27 months of age, 2) missing a critical window of learning how important it is to use language to get shit done; he instead developed other, nonverbal strategies that he now has to unlearn and replace, and 3) the fact that he's an incredibly stubborn butthead who doesn't give a flying fuck at a rolling donut about your goddamned expectations, thank you very much.

so. today was his first day of school! he got into an absolutely awesome special-ed classroom that has 2 teachers that specialize in speech and language difficulties, a max of 7 students (currently just 4 students,) it meets 5 days a week from 8:30 to 11:45, AND is the only special ed classroom in a really nice community daycare center, so for two hours of his 3-hour school-day, each of the 3-year-old special-ed kids gets paired up with a normal 4-year-old "buddy" to talk and play with. awesome, right?

the unfortunate part of all this is that his three older brothers also start school at 8:30. my choices are a) drive MB to school while his brothers walk to school alone, or b) continue to walk his brothers to school, and have MB ride the special-ed bus. if my 4th-grader just had one 1st-grader to walk to school, i'd let them do it. but two? uphill, two blocks, in the snow? some days, i could just about throttle them for screwing around and dragging their feet. and i've watched other big/little sibling pairs walking to and from school... and it's not always pretty. the little girl who dragged her feet - so her big brother dragged her by the scarf... the 5th grade boy who, charged with walking his 1st-grade brother and 3rd-grade sister home, managed to piss them both off so badly that his sister ran back inside the building, wriggling out of her backpack and slamming the door in his face as he failed to tackle her; and as he ran in after her, the youngest brother watched for a moment, then shrugged and walked home by himself after they failed to return after five minutes... the 4th grader who forget his brother in kindergarten and had to turn around and go back for him 20 minutes later...

it's not that any of them are bad kids... every one of those kids is actually a really GREAT kid: nice, smart, good. but. they're just kids. and when you put kids in charge of even smaller kids, hilarity ensues! so, yeah. i'm not even going to try that one out, because i have a pretty good idea of where that's headed. a 55-pound EvilGremlin in charge of 90 pounds worth of brothers is not a fair contest. so, the short bus it is!

of course, i can only do so much to explain all of this to a kid who can barely talk. so he knew i was talking about school, and he knew i was talking about a bus, and he knew his new backpack was awesome. so here's the little man with hot fudge sundae pop tart still crusted around his mouth, and no idea of what's about to happen:

and here he is wondering why the hell EvilGremlin is trying to put his backpack on his back (where he can't even SEE it! i mean, come ON!):

and here comes the short bus:

he was cool with walking outside. he was cool with the bus. then he realized i was putting him on the bus and not coming with him, and he was definitely NOT FUCKING COOL.

so. he cried the entire bus ride. but, having cried himself out, he apparently was almost all smiles for the first two hours of school. he laughed. he painted. he played with his new friends. he scooped rice in cups at the "rice table" and thought that was the shit. he was tired by 11 AM, and occasionally started to tear up and suck his thumb... and when he came around the front of the building at 11:45 and saw me, he was laughing and crying at the same time and just about lost his shit, because hey... that was the first that he knew that i wasn't getting rid of his ass permanently!

so! so far so good! he's in school. he may not be that impressed with the fact that he's expected to do it again tomorrow, but it's looking like he'll get the hang of it pretty quickly. also? we're now going on 3 hours of nap and counting. whee!

anatomy of a "Type 2" snow day

noreply@blogger.com (welfareloser) — Fri, 29 Jan 2010 05:47:00 +0000

"Type 2" = PositiveRoleModel is not only not home during the day, but won't be getting home until after midnight because he's on call. notice there are no pictures to go with this post? yeah.

8:00 AM: make coffee.

11:00 AM: wonder why the hell you haven't gotten a chance to pour a cup of coffee yet.

2:00 PM: wonder why the hell your not-quite-three-year-old would choose today to not nap.

4:00 PM: open your second red bull.

5:00 PM: wonder where the hell your second red bull went, since you're pretty sure you didn't drink much of it.

5:15 PM: wonder why the hell your not-quite-three-year old is naked, soaking wet, and reeks of red bull.

6:00 PM: put in a movie to try to buy yourself enough time to go poop.

6:01 PM: have the following conversation with your 6-year-old shouting up the stairs at you (and your maybe-won't-live-to-see-three-year-old happily parroting him in the background)...

DQ: MOOOOOOOOOOOOM!
MB: MAAAAHHHHMMMuh!
me: what?
DQ: THERE'S SOMETHING WRONG WITH THE SINK!
MB: AIR SUH-SING WONG HIH HUH SEEEEEEENGK!
me: WHAT'S wrong with the sink?
*pause, filled with the sound of lots and lots of running water*
DQ: ummmmmmm...
MB: UMMMMMMMM!!
DQ: HE DID IT!
MB: HEE DIH YIT!
DQ: OW!
MB: OW! NO-NO! DON'T DO DAT FOOWICK!
DQ: OOOOOWWWWWWW!
MB: GODDANNIT FOOWICK NO! HEEHEE!

6:02 PM: arrive downstairs to find your going-the-fuck-to-bed-early toddler standing on a kitchen chair which he has jammed into the guest bathroom, apparently for the sole purpose of hulking out on the faucet, the handle of which he has ripped off and is now using to beat away the brothers who are trying to get him the hell out of the bathroom so they can attempt to stop the water gushing out of the broken bathroom sink.

6:30 PM get your oldest to read bedtime stories to your youngest while you repair the plumbing.

9:00 PM: throw out the pot of coffee.

anatomy of a "Type 1" snow day

noreply@blogger.com (welfareloser) — Wed, 27 Jan 2010 05:04:00 +0000

we've had a lot of snow days over the last couple of weeks. "Type 1" = PRM took a sick day, so all six of us were home all day. he was actually sick, and spent most of it on the couch or in bed. even at that, his presence made a huge difference. we'll get to the anatomy of a "Type 2" snow day a little later.

8:00 AM: watch blue's clues, or practice your japanese at the kitchen table.

9:00 AM: build forts with the 240 square feet of foam tiles you got for christmas.

9:30 AM: destroy the forts with nerf guns.

10:00 AM: build totally sweet nerf-proof armor.

10:30 AM: build a single, massive fort out of every single square foot of foam tile.

10:45 AM: depending on your age, either attempt to destroy the massive fort, abandon your brother to build the massive fort by himself, or bitch about your brothers not appreciating your efforts to build a massive fort.

11:00 AM: use the rest of the aluminum foil to build totally sweet replicas of kidneys, liver, spleen, intestines, stomach, heart, pancreas, and several made-up internal organs.

11:30 AM: bitch about how there's never enough aluminum foil in the house, no matter how many times you helpfully write it on the shopping list.

12:00 PM: depending on your age, take a nap or help mom shovel the driveway and sidewalks.

1:00 PM: play in the snow.

3:00-6:00 PM: bitch about the mess of japanese books on the kitchen table. grumble about how you always have to clean the kitchen table. sit at the kitchen table and read chemistry books, discuss radioactive elements, surf www.webelements.com to absorb every atomic radius, melting point, and other insignificant property of every element on the periodic table. teach yourself how to use adobe illustrator to make scale models of every element, print them out, cut them out, and build molecular models of every organic compound you know the name of. make up new ones. scientifically defend your case for why they would probably be explosive. pepper your parents with questions about chemistry and nuclear physics. have a drug-free mind-expanding trip courtesy of the heisenberg uncertainty principle. accuse your mother of making up the heisenberg uncertainty principle just to fuck with you. ridicule your mother for being unable to recall what the hell an sp3 orbital looks like.

6 PM: eat dinner.

7 PM: read, practice instruments, take baths, and fight over whose turn it is to take "The Periodic Table" to bed to read tonight.

8 PM: go to bed and pray for more snow tomorrow if you're under 5 feet tall, or clear skies if you're over 5 feet tall.

in a market crowded with shit, this turd stands out as the stinkiest

noreply@blogger.com (welfareloser) — Sun, 17 Jan 2010 02:35:00 +0000

there are some bad fencing books out there. in fact, most fencing books are bad. however, "modern saber fencing: techniques, tactics, training, research" by zbigniew borysiuk is the biggest piece of shit i have ever had the misfortune of spending $25 on. i've been disappointed by other fencing books; this one, though, left me genuinely pissed. maybe it was just that i got my hopes up for this one, since it was marketed with the following: "It's been over 50 years since the last English-language book devoted to saber... Saber has been revolutionized ... And this book teaches the new saber! The world of saber has changed, and it needs this book!"

no. no, it really doesn't. it actually needs its $25 and 2 hours much, MUCH more than it needs this book.

my disclaimer: i understand that this dude is a really, really, really good saberist. i get that. i'm sure he could beat my ass 5-0 in about 17 seconds. while blindfolded. and standing on his hands, wielding the saber with his foot. his LEFT foot.

that doesn't mean that he wrote a good book. he didn't. he wrote a mostly bad book that is sort of about some random aspects of fencing.

let me break it down:

PAGES 1-47: FLUFF
the author's opinion of his book. the author's opinion of himself. the author's colleague's opinion of the author and the author's eminent qualifications to write the book. the obligatory history sections (summary: "in the beginning, there was a planet. then it got people on it who beat the shit out of each other in various creative ways, like fencing. polish fencers were better at it than all y'all other motherfuckers, by the way. then they got this electronic scoring thing going, and fencing sped up. it was cool.")

PAGES 48-89: THE PART OF THE BOOK THAT IS ACTUALLY WORTH HALF A SQUIRT OF PISS
these slim 42 pages comprise chapter 4: modern saber technique. for just under 18 percent of this otherwise shitty 235 page book, the author at least makes a one-cheeked attempt to offer some instruction in how to fight with a saber. (you know, like the title says.) it's not even close to a comprehensive list of techniques, and the techniques that are presented are treated with varying levels of detail, ranging from "cursory" to "almost adequate." but compared to the rest of the book, it was gold.

PAGES 90-115: THE PART WHERE THE AUTHOR SPENT THE LAST OF HIS ADVANCE ON HEROIN AND REALLY STOPPED GIVING A SHIT ABOUT QUALITY (ie, "the turnaround")
this is chapter 5: modern saber training. as you may have already guessed from the fact that it's all of 26 pages long, it's not exactly a complete training program. nor is it a cohesive training philosophy. it's probably best described as "some random thoughts about a partial list of certain aspects of training, plus a handful of skeleton outlines of sample training sessions."

PAGES 116-235: AN EXTENDED SESSION OF VERBAL MASTURBATION THAT MAKES ME WANT TO PUT DOWN MY SABER AND PUNCH THE AUTHOR IN THE FACE, THROAT AND BALLS UNTIL HE GIVES ME MY $25 BACK, EVEN THOUGH IT'S NOT NICE TO PUNCH PEOPLE ON THE AUTISM SPECTRUM SINCE THEY CAN'T HELP BEING PERPETUALLY UNAWARE OF WHAT DOES AND DOES NOT CONSTITUTE APPROPRIATE SHARING OF INFORMATION.
there's 10 pages on nutrition, followed by a whopping 49 pages devoted entirely to the topic of "how to predict who's going to be a champion fencer before they get any training at all." this section is divided into three chapters for no reason whatsoever. the author got a P-h-fucking-D by doing "scientific" research on this burning issue, and by god, he is going to tell you all the FUCK about it, right down to entire pages of cartoons of people sitting in front of boxes with buttons on them to see how fast they can push them.

and no, i'm not just ridiculing this section because his brilliant research is over my head. i understood every word of it. heck, i've done scientific research, too. the difference between me and this stroker, though, is that if i were to write a book about the results of the research i did on diabetes, and then market that book to diabetics in general, with the title "modern diabetes management: treatments, regimens, patient education, research" ...i would just tell them that exercise was good for them. i might even spend a sentence or three on the study that led to that conclusion. what i wouldn't do is spend 49 everfucking pages on the details of running rats on treadmills, cleaning their poop off the shock grid that kept them motivated to run, performing surgeries to induce diabetes and test nerve and muscle function (complete with a cartoon!), throwing the dead rat in a blender, and testing the poop-scented milkshake to see what the little fucker's fat/muscle ratio was. not that that isn't interesting as all-git-out; it's just that that's not what the fucking book was supposed to be about. i'm just sayin'. but maybe that's just me!

the whole science-as-crystal-ball-of-fencing-championship meme is especially tiresome since - as the author even admits himself - these abstract qualities tested in simplistic laboratory setting have exactly zero-point-shit to do with whether or not a fencer will turn into a champion.

in the final section, again inexplicably divided into more than one chapter, the author basically spends 38 pages throwing science-themed word-salad at a flowchart of stimuli -> identification -> decision-making -> action. perhaps a grand total of a paragraph or two are on the topic of practical applications in fencing training. the rest is verbiage straight out of shitty articles in 5th-rate non-peer-reviewed journals. and while i'm sure the article he had accepted by the Uzbeki Journal of Sports Medicine, Sexual Deviance, Acupuncture and Farm Animal Psychiatry is gripping reading, there's a reason i don't subscribe to that journal, so i don't need the entire article and then some taking up space in this book i just gave that asshole $25 for.

PAGES 236-359: TACTICS
that's just a guess. i don't really know for sure, since my copy of the book stops at page 235.

IN CONCLUSION:
there isn't a single demographic on the face of the goddamned planet for which this book would be even marginally useful. consider:
novice fencers? it's too vague to be of any help.
advanced, competitive fencers? it's too basic.
coaches? the sample lessons are skeletal, and are not presented within the framework of any kind of synthesis or "big picture." a few ideas from the author's "scientific" reasearch may be interesting, but the discussion of the ideas doesn't even approach the realm of application.
creepy eastern european coaches who want to snatch babies from their cribs, test them for optimal fencing characteristics with electrical equipment, and keep the ones that have physiological responses several nanoseconds quicker than their peers so they can pump them full of black-market horse steroids and train them for the olympics 17 hours a day in their basements.?
okay. that demographic might love this book. all seven of them.

did i mention i want my $25 back? fuck.

busted.

noreply@blogger.com (welfareloser) — Sat, 16 Jan 2010 05:08:00 +0000

so, while reviewing several months worth of the nonsense caught on video around here, i came across several "hiragana lessons." the first few were actually of reasonable quality. then SpazMonkey had one of his cornholio episodes. you know, the kind that make me check under his mattress for a secret red bull stash.

when he asks why he's not allowed to use the camera, i'll be referring him to the video.

dammit! no! next time i'll remember NO is the only right answer!

noreply@blogger.com (welfareloser) — Thu, 14 Jan 2010 20:36:00 +0000

...when the question is "mom, can we do some chemistry?"

let me give you a quick tour of my kitchen. the entrance:

the floor:

to fully appreciate what you're looking at, here's the full-size picture.

that particular mess was the result of the "let's extract iron from cereal flakes" experiment, preceded by yet another iteration of the "what kind of crazy shit can we add to the baking-soda-and-vinegar volcano to really fuck it up?" experiment. the answers to that question, by the way, include cornstarch (big, persistent bubbles), detergent (about the same, but black-light active), and gelatin (holy shit.)

of course, we brought this on ourselves.

now, not all science is messy. like dry ice! cheap thrills, no mess:

sometimes baking is messy. when baking with kids who consider it a science experiment, baking is HELLA messy. however, if you direct the action appropriately, and confine the action to an easy-bake oven, the consolation prize is some good-ass noms:

also? you CAN set shit on fire with an easy-bake oven. that's solid fact.

"I THINK I'M TURNING JAPANESE!"

noreply@blogger.com (welfareloser) — Tue, 12 Jan 2010 18:05:00 +0000

that's an actual quote from DramaQueen. no shit. i can't promise he's never heard the song, but i think he came up with that on his own. either way, i'm putting that mp3 on their playlist.

anyway, the boys continue to actually STUDY japanese. i found a random box of japanese flash cards at goodwill - i have no idea what they say; they just look like they're intended for japanese grade schoolers to learn something about writing. and a monkey that occasionally chases a schoolboy around town. they're starting on some "learn to speak japanese" programs i tracked down for them at the library. they may not come out of it speaking japanese, but it does replace their other favorite things to do on my laptop, like "blinging the holy hell out of a fishtank at fishville until it looks like the front lawn of a meth lab after the entepreneur's baby mama wanted to 'give them babies a nice christmas for once, you asshole' by spending the entire week's profits in the 75%-off christmas lawn ornaments aisle at walmart," and "searching for youtube videos of building demolitions, anchors puking during live newscasts, other little kids playing rockband, and stupid pet tricks."

they are also interested in japanese food. which is great, since we have an awesome sushi restaurant right around the corner. PRM and i treat ourselves to sushi on those weekends when we can't find a babysitter and go out. last weekend, in fact, we ordered sushi twice, and since we order enough for at least two meals, this means we ate sushi for about 5 meals straight.

MonkeyBeef loves him some noodles. or rice. or soup! he REALLY digs the miso soup (minus the chunks of seaweed, which are green and thus obviously not edible.) even picky-ass EvilGremlin will eat plain rice (which "isn't good, but isn't bad because it doesn't taste like anything") and they'll all eat tempura chicken.

the twits even like sushi! except for the nori. and the fish. and the vegetables. so, when they ask for sushi, they mean rice. i make them rice balls of sushi and brown rice, sprinkled with seasoned rice vinegar and rolled in sesame seeds, which they then dip in soy sauce with "cheater" chopsticks. we call it "sushi for pussies."

they're also fascinated by bento box lunches. i had bought them bento boxes when they started kindergarten, since it would save them the trouble of opening wrappers and bags. then they started packing their own lunches in them, and after a few rounds of "smashed tostitos on a bed of grapes," they suddenly decided school food was the bomb. a year later the bentos are back... and this time they want chopsticks! i'm thinking these might be in order... coolest chopsticks ever.

shorty the snowman

noreply@blogger.com (welfareloser) — Sun, 10 Jan 2010 17:57:00 +0000

sadly, this is what they accomplished WITH their dad's help.

girls aren't different from boys...

noreply@blogger.com (welfareloser) — Thu, 07 Jan 2010 19:15:00 +0000

at least, the cool ones aren't. they only dress differently. here's the tail end of EvilGremlin's protracted Christmas burping lesson from his cousins... the kids were not just chilling in the back room. they were working HARD. so hard that they completely emptied the mini fridge, which holds about 6 12-packs of soda. and, yeah, there were 14 kids there, but still. that's a lot of damned soda.

cousins

noreply@blogger.com (welfareloser) — Wed, 06 Jan 2010 19:09:00 +0000

so we took a head count, and it turns out that, even adding up two generations of adults, the kids outnumber the adults when we get together with my cousins and their kids.

christmas lists

noreply@blogger.com (welfareloser) — Mon, 04 Jan 2010 16:45:00 +0000

we went home for a nice, long week - nine days of visiting friends and family and doing a whole lot of nothing.

THINGS I ATE ON CHRISTMAS VACATION:

1. paella

spanish chorizo, some other spanish sausage, rice, and big-ass shrimp.

2. the luther breakfast. i invented it. and then ate it more than once. (duke's bakery glazed donuts, split open like a bagel and turned into a bacon sandwich. cheap, greasy, salty bacon. fuck. yes.)

3. vinarterta

icelandic christmas cake. i've been meaning to make it since i first got the recipe... when i was 19. 7 layers of a torte made with cardamom, vanilla sugar and cream, with a prune filling and vanilla-sugar glaze. kind of like a really awesome fig newton, and easy to make. would have been even easier if i owned more than one 9-inch cake pan!

4. CheeseSteak's Mom's New Year's Dinner
this was so good we made it again this week when we got home. fill a crock pot with sauerkraut, throw in an onion, brown sugar, and a roast. bonus: farting contest. unlike a poo-slinging contest, EVERYBODY wins a farting contest.

5. christmas lump cake

kind looks like a christmas poo, doesn't it? it's a pile of fruit. you bake a walnut spice cake, break it into a mess, and throw that mess on top of the pile of fruit. then you cover it with cool whip. it sometimes lasts more than a day. usually not.

6. peanut butter pie
this is another win from CheeseSteak's mom... peanut butter. cream cheese. cool whip. blender. graham cracker crust. done. doesn't last long enough to take pictures. which brings me to my next list...

FOODS FOR WHICH CHEESESTEAK AND I WILL FIGHT EACH OTHER TO THE DEATH:

1. peanut butter pie

2. pecan pie
my mom has started making two to avoid holiday bloodshed.

3. pulled pork
PositiveRoleModel actually likes pulled pork more than i do, so it's mostly out of principle that i stab CheeseSteak with my fork for approaching the tub of leftovers. also, he winds up exhausted later when it's time to fight over the last piece of pie. strategery!

BOOKS I READ OVER CHRISTMAS BREAK:

1. Super Freakonomics, two dudes named steve

2. Lit, Mary Karr

3. Eating the Dinosaur, Chuck Klosterman

4. The Ultimate Guide to Weight Training for Fencing - i didn't have high expectations, but it definitely exceeded them. surprisingly helpful for a book from a series of "weight training for (insert any sport we can reasonably expect people to spend $15 on a book for here)" books.

5. The Maytrees, Annie Dillard

MUSIC I DISCOVERED OVER CHRISTMAS BREAK:

1. Otis Taylor
blues the way it ought to be.

2. Ghosts and Vodka
they're not famous. but if they were, it would be for their lyric "i want to salt your poop and wear it on my face like a beard."

GAMES WE PLAYED OVER CHRISTMAS BREAK:

1. cirkis - it might seem like nothing more than a rip-off of blokus, but it's really pretty awesome. then again, since blokus, blokus duo, blokus trigon, and blokus 3D are all awesome, that's probably only to be expected.

2. Halo Wars Risk - i know. i KNOW!!! i realize i'm a gutter whore of consumerism for buying a themed variation of a game i already own. hell, i already own Lord of the Rings Risk, too!

and there's a reason that LOTR risk is now a collector's item that sells for $150-$200. because it's AWESOME. the game designers really put a lot of thought into the new rules, and it really plays like a good tabletop roleplaying game - a party of adventurers is actually trying to move the ring from the shire to mount doom as the war rages around them - while still preserving the essential elements of classic risk.

the Halo Wars edition is similarly awesome. it plays like a totally different game than the LOTR version. the game pieces are cool. i stacked a couple of coupons and got it for $20 instead of $50. and most importantly, i wiped the floor with my competitors like the sexy goddess of war that i am.

3. tiddledy winks. not tiddly. TIDDLEDY. you've been getting that wrong your whole life, haven't you? i hope you feel stupid!

REALLY fun. SpazMonkey is strangely skilled at it.

4. super scrabble
i won. that pretty much covers that one!

5. khet

Merry Christmas!

noreply@blogger.com (welfareloser) — Fri, 25 Dec 2009 21:16:00 +0000

the sound of music

noreply@blogger.com (welfareloser) — Tue, 22 Dec 2009 17:28:00 +0000

so i've mentioned that EvilGremlin plays the bass in the school orchestra. he's really, really, REALLY good. he's blowing through the hal leonard instructional book. i made the rule that he had to be able to play any assigned exercises three times in a row with no mistakes before he was allowed to move on and start practicing the next exercise. he's about 3/4 of the way through the lesson plan for the school year. he generally practices 40 minutes a day, and the only time he's resisted practicing was when he was supposed to play "ode to joy" in 2nd and 3rd position, after he had already mastered it in 1st position. yes, it does sound better in 1st position. yes, switching positions slows you down. but the point of the exercise is to learn HOW to do it before you HAVE to do it... and there will be songs higher up the skill ladder where you WILL have to do it. he was cool with that. and i'm already composing my apologist treatise in defense of the upcoming scale exercises.

PositiveRoleModel showed EG that the 4 lowest strings on the guitar are identical to the strings of a bass, so EG turned PRM's classical guitar into a bass:

he showed this to the twits, who now also insist on holding their 1/2-size guitars upright:

we keep a third child-size guitar on hand, a piece of crap that has the neck half-unglued, just so MonkeyBeef can bang on it when he needs to, but today he was more interested in playing with the magnetix ALL BY HIMSELF, a rare occurence in the loser household.

then DramaQueen wanted me to take a picture of him playing 3 instruments (guitar, sony keyboard, and schoenhut baby upright) at once:

and this is DramaQueen having a totally metal moment on the 1/4-size violin:

EG's best friend, DayDreamer, plays the viola in the orchestra, and also plays the shit out of the piano (it doesn't hurt that his mom's a piano teacher, and her brothers are in an awesome bluegrass band.) anymore, when he comes over after school, they spend the entire time between school and dinner screwing around on every instrument in the house. they both want to play in the school band next year, as well. DD's mom plans to have him drop orchestra to start band, because practicing 3 instruments daily might be a bit much... but i can see her resolve is about as strong as mine on this one, which is not very strong. because seriously, how cool is that when your freaking ten year old loves something enough to work on it so hard and get so good at it? i never worked that hard at something when i was 10. if i had started the banjo or snowboarding or fencing when i was a kid, i'd be - well, probably permanently injured, since i had no goddamned sense when i was kid, but i might also be pretty good! so if EG wants a saxophone next year... he just might get one.

and a bass guitar. see, it's the same instrument as an upright bass, only with frets. and pickups that plug into an amplifier. heehee. see, we need one. because we don't have one. and we have a friend who works for a guitar store and can get us one at cost. i try not to acquire more instruments. really, i do! but sometimes, they just carjack my restraint and crash my home. against my will.

anyway. the bass isn't for me. i swear. it's for EG. just because i will play it whenever i want to doesn't mean it's not EG's. from now on, it's gonna be EvilGremlin "BitchMagnet" Loser!

missing the point of the spoon

noreply@blogger.com (welfareloser) — Fri, 18 Dec 2009 13:21:00 +0000

hobbies

noreply@blogger.com (welfareloser) — Sat, 12 Dec 2009 11:58:00 +0000

the current hobbies in this house include:

learning japanese:

after printing out the hiragana and katakana characters and working with all the information they could google for several weeks, i got them some books, too. there are three i'm particularly impressed with:

the "jimi" books, wherein a disturbingly flat-affected manga-monkey teaches you hiragana and katakana, and crazy for kanji, which does a good job of teasing out the poetic etymologies of the much more difficult kanji writing, making it easy to understand and remember hundreds of kanji characters, in a quiz-laden format my ten-year-old finds entertaining.

facebook time-wasters:

if it makes you ashamed of your own lame addiction to learn that my 10-year-old enjoys farkle, my 6-year-olds think feeding and selling fish and pimping their fishtanks is awesome, and they all enjoy mobsters 2... here you go. consider yourself shamed.

tying balloon animals:

EG found a book of 20 balloon-tying patterns, and was pretty interested in scary-clown origami. have i mentioned how much i love my amazon prime membership? i have no idea how their business model works; all i know is that free two-day shipping on everything i need at the lowest prices on the planet is freaking awesome. after 10 minutes of reading reviews, got the "best balloons that all the professionals use," qualatex, for $7.50 for a bag of 100, plus an incredibly well-designed balloon pump (the thing inflates both when you push the pump in and when you pull out, which is pretty nifty) for another $7.50. and now we have a giant black octopus on the twits' light fixture, an army of green and purple poodles, and lopsided mice with googly eyes named "P32," "carbon-14," and "francium." and if you noticed that their names have a radioactive theme, then you must also be interested in the next hobby on the list,

chemistry:

"chemistry" sometimes means "mixing all chemicals in the kitchen that seem likely to explode (and if you think there's no fun to be found there, you've probably never added gelatin to a baking-soda-and-vinegar volcano.) sometimes it means "culturing bacteria." sometimes it means "helping mom cook, especially if it involves yeast." and sometimes, it just comes down to "attaching yourself permanently to mommy after the 15th baking-soda-and-vinegar erlenmeyer flask tried to eat you."

on a final note, if you were ever unsure of whether or not my kids were nerds, let me share this: the other night, as i chased a naked MonkeyBeef down to slather him with lotion and throw pajamas on him, the twits sat down at the laptop. as i threw MB in bed, i heard them cackling nonstop. i figured they had either bought some more godawful blinged-out lawn ornaments for PositiveRoleModel's fishville tank, done a youtube search for footage of newscasters throwing up on live tv, or found the latest japanese porn fad. in fact, they were laughing at, i shit you not, a page entitled "FACTS ABOUT STRONTIUM." and it wasn't even the fact that strontium is used in fireworks that tickled them... aparrently, strontium's melting point is in the "hilarious" range.

PART TWO of the most awesome road trip ever!

noreply@blogger.com (welfareloser) — Tue, 01 Dec 2009 19:15:00 +0000

Q: what's more awesome than a 5-hour road trip that ends in puke?

A: the return trip!

okay. so we actually didn't have that much cleaning to do upon our arrival in illinois. 99% of the puke was on MonkeyBeef, in his carseat, and on the rubber floormat - all removable and washable. i had to do some scrubbing to get it off the back of the driver's seat headrest, and wipe the splatters off MB's window and door, but once that was done, the smell was practically gone.

the smell of THAT puke, anyway. the problem is, we've owned this van since the twits were 9 months old. 6 years later, it's probably been puked in a dozen times, had a hundred sodas spilled in it, endured enough mcdonalds food grease-splats to fatten up entire sub-saharan refugee camps, and has spent hundreds of hours transporting sweaty kids, fencing gear so soaked in sweat that it outweighs me, kids sitting in full diapers, and kids soaked in river water, lake water, and any other kind of water they can manage to fall into. the kids have complained about the "air quality" in the van for years. i clean it, but that can only help so much; it's not like i can hose the goddamned thing out, right?

yeah. turns out, monkeybeef didn't just puke in the car on the way to illinois because he was singularly upset and full of angnong poewoe, he puked in the car because that's what he does now. he gets carsick. he was fine all weekend, and then about 2 hours from home on the way back, *bleah.* we pulled over at a scary truck stop, threw away his t-shirt, wrapped some new clothes around him, tried to convince him that gatorade was the shit, yo, and got home.

surveying the damage in the morning - shit. puke had dribbled down into the little wells where the removable captain's chair that holds MB's carseat hooks into the van's floor. the 4 wells under the other captain's chair, and the 4 under the bench seat where the twits sit weren't exactly much cleaner. there were ancient cheezits in there that the vacuum attachments could never quite reach, leaves, playground mulch, drips of soda - always diet soda, so not a completely nasty rotting sugary mess, but still... it was time to clear my schedule and do some serious cleaning.

PLAN A:
so i got out the vacuum, and the steam cleaner. and i pulled out the captain's chairs. eww. okay, so i grabbed a bucket of hot water with a little pine sol, and a sponge. and then i pulled out the bench seat in the back. and there was a dead. fucking. mouse. staring at me.

PLAN B:
so i put away the vacuum. and the steam cleaner. and got out a bigger bucket. and filled it with pine sol and a little hot water. and i got out the wet-dry shopvac and the garden hose. then i went and got a stick to get the smashed mouse out of the well where the bench seat hooked in, and it didn't. fucking. budge.

okay, so fuck me. i am not easily grossed out. my last paid job involved running rats on treadmills in the dark basement room of a research hospital, cleaning up their fried turds from the electrical shock grid that motivated them to keep running, and then, after various surgeries, snuffing them, shaving them, putting their bodies in a non-stick loaf pan, pressure-cooking them in an autoclave, removing the steaming bag o rat-jello that smelled like cross between thanksgiving turkey and rat turds, dumping it into a blender, homogenizing it into a turkey-and-turds milkshake, and pipeting out samples of the chocolate-colored liquid. i did this hundreds of times for a year. (and if you're thinking, awww, poor rats, you monster, well, fuck you, veggieburger. it provided an important step in curing diabetes. so you're welcome.)

my point: i didn't drink a chocolate milkshake for a couple of years, but other than that, i wasn't really bothered much by the job. i have a strong stomach. but this? trying to pick up a squashed mouse that wouldn't move? and stared at me? fucked me up. so i went inside, called SlutMonkey to tell him about it, because A)i needed a break, B) he's an ER doc, and thus likely to be home and awake at damn near any time of day or night, and C) i knew he'd laugh his ass off, which goes a long way toward calming me down. (this is also the friend i called in the middle of driving to the ER with my underwear hanging out of my pants on the epic failboat mission. and the time the twits emptied an entire bathtub full of water onto the floor, which i noticed when it began dripping through the basement ceiling, shorting out all the ceiling lights as i sat on the toilet down there, which is of course the fitting karmic punishment for any mother who dares to take 90 seconds for herself for such luxuries as pooping without an audience.)

so. i seem to remember a camping trip many years ago, wherein i later found the edges of my car's manual chewed, and mouse turds in the glove box... turns out, little fucker checked in and never checked out. and is now five years dead. and petrified. and glued in tight. SO!

PLAN C:
i got the oldest, most expendable pair of barbecue tongs in the house, got a good grip on the little fucker's squashed body, turned my head, closed my eyes, and carefully started pulling. it came out. kind of. i didn't look, but i got to hear lots of cracking, popping sounds as mummified body parts, i'm assuming little legs and maybe part of a tail, broke off and stayed stuck. EW.

i threw the tongs and mouse into the garbage can. then i threw pine sol everywhere. buckets and buckets. i mean everywhere. on the ceiling. into the upholstery of every seat. all down the walls and doors. let it soak. hosed it out. was flooding the engine a possibility? fucking might have been! can you guess whether or not i gave a flying fuck at a rolling donut at that point? i'm betting you can! then i threw another bucket of hot pine sol in. let it soak. hosed it out. at this point, it looked reasonably clean, so i was comfortable getting in there to actually touch surfaces and scrub them. then i hosed it out again. then i vacuumed out the excess water with the shopvac. and let me tell y'all something: i loves me some craftsman shit. 3 HP will suck the shit out of some soggy upholstery - the seats and floors were really only damp by the time i was finished. 6 hours later.

so i left all the van doors open all night to air it out. i figured if some rotten-ass little rodent decided to come check it out, the overpowering smell of pine sol would probably drive it away, and if not, i'd set the goddamned thing on fire, so it's all good either way.

to wrap this story up: we convinced the family to come to us for thanksgiving instead of putting our kids anywhere near a van. van still smells of pine sol a month later. van is awesomely clean. no food is allowed in my van, ever. and CrapFace gets dramamine for the christmas road trip. and no eggnog.

most awesome road trip ever!

noreply@blogger.com (welfareloser) — Sun, 29 Nov 2009 12:52:00 +0000

so we went home to southern illinois for a weekend. it's a 5-hour drive, give or take. not a hell of a lot of fun with 4 kids, but we manage well enough; we've got a pretty good system of entertainment, rules and pitstops that we've worked out over the years. EG is great in the car - hell when he was 4-1/2, we drove TWO DAYS, 12+ hours a day, to the beach in NC, and he was FINE the whole trip. no shit! the twins? not so much. around the 2-hour mark, they get antsy. by the 4-hour mark, SM is crying, and issuing a non-stop monologue that goes a little something like this: I DON'T WANT TO BE IN THE CAR ANYMORE WE HAVE TO STOP I WANNA GET OUT I'M TIRED MY BUTT HURTS I CAN'T FEEL MY LEGS THIS SUUUUUUUUCKS I WANNA GO HOME STOP THE CAR PLEEEEEASE AAAAAAAAAHHHH! in the meantime, DQ is quietly trying to chew through his 5-point restraints.

then there's MB. he's always been better-than-average in the car for a kid his age. other than the fact that he doesn't sleep in the car. at all. ever. most toddlers will conk out and stay that way, especially if you're in the car at naptime or past bedtime. not this kid. we've tried starting this drive at 7 PM, thinking he (like all his brothers before him) would fall asleep and stay that way until we arrived home at 1 AM. nope! he dozed for 20 minutes, then made noises to amuse himself for a couple of hours, then alternately stared blankly out the window and bitched for the last couple of hours. and this was at 18 months.

so, at 2-1/2, he's really pretty good. for the first four hours. which is awesome! but that last hour's pretty rough.

remember this later: as we were packing up the car, i handed MB a sucker, and he smacked that all over his damn face while riding up and down the driveway and playing in the front yard. when i later went to round up the kids to get them strapped in, i asked PRM where MB was. his answer was "CrapFace? he's strapped in already." i looked to find a beaming MB, dirt and blankie-fuzz stuck to his cheeks with cherry sucker-glue. it was pretty funny...

so on this trip, we stopped at mcdonald's at the 3-hour mark. they got out and played at the nasty playplace, ate chicken mcnuggets, and dragged their spongebob toys back to the car... where MB stopped dead and refused to get in. i quickly made a big show of dumping most of my vanilla shake into his half-empty sippy cup of eggnog. "ANGNONG EYESS CWEEM?" his eyes got big, he grabbed the cup, and hopped into his chair. win!

until 30 minutes later, when he started crying. inconsolably. it escalated to tearing-up-my-throat screams... and then hushed into ominous hiccups.

with the lewis and clark bridge over the mississippi river - our "YES, WE'RE THERE!" landmark - 20 minutes away, i turned around just in time to see the mushroom cloud eject from the boy's horrified face. i mean, literally, MUSHROOM CLOUD. imagine this:

made out of eggnog ice cream. coming out of monkeybeef's face.

it was so massive that there was no room for any sound to escape with it. the other three kids didn't even notice it. PRM noticed it. because it hit his headrest. and splattered. there was a moment of silence, first broken by MB's tremulous, horrified voice.

MB: POEWOE? ANGNONG POEWOE?

me: he just called it an eggnog pillow.

PRM: was that what i think it was? *already rolling down the window, since he already knows the answer*

MB: OOOOOH NOOOOOO!

me: yep.

PRM looked in the rearview mirror, to see MB covered from his chin down in chunky eggnog pillow mess. COVERED. sitting in a puddle of it. a freaking pond of it in the deep rubber floormat beneath him.

PRM: crapface.

PRM started laughing. this quickly turned into both of us laughing so hard we couldn't talk. we rolled down the windows. PRM tried not to throw up from the smell. EG bitched at us for laughing at MB. MB cried. the twits freaked. we laughed uncontrollably til we hit my parents' driveway, where the older three kids flew out of the van the second it stopped, and PRM and i unhooked MB's carseat, complete with MB, GreenBankie, and the steaming eggnog pillow, and took it straight upstairs to the bathtub.

and you think that was fun? wait for part two!

SpazMonkey's top-secret project

noreply@blogger.com (welfareloser) — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 04:23:00 +0000

I'M WORKING ON A PROJECT UP IN MY ROOM AND I CAN'T SHOW IT TO YOU BECAUSE IT'S TOP SECRET UNTIL IT'S FINISHED AND THEN I CAN SHOW YOU IT AND I MADE A LIST OF THINGS I NEED TO MAKE IT I NEED FOIL AND CARS AND BOXES AND DO WE HAVE ANY RECORDS? OKAY, I'LL CHECK OFF RECORDS TOO AND NOW ALL I NEED IS BOXES AND RECTANGLE BOXES!

...and then he reminds you that he is 9 years old

noreply@blogger.com (welfareloser) — Wed, 18 Nov 2009 17:57:00 +0000

EvilGremlin likes science. a few weeks ago, he was asking about how acids work. which led to acid-base chemistry. which led to a discussion of valence and electron shells. which led to a discussion of chemical binding. which led to crafting both ball-and-stick and space-filling molecular models. and then there were some big ol' loopy sidetracks: the periodic table, the latin roots of most of the elements, the impractical nature of the transuranium elements, and what the hell the point of a neutron is. thank god it didn't occur to him to ask about sub-atomic particles. i'm going to have to read up on that shit again before i can give him any coherent explanations.

anyway, all of this led to him reading PRM's old biochemistry textbook. no shit. i only gave it to him because i couldn't find my high school or college chem textbooks, and both PRM and i had gotten rid of our college organic chem texts. so... he read the first couple of chapters in a bajillion page pre-med biochem textbook. and understood it. and enjoyed it. and took notes on it. check this out, with the relative sizes and the binding sites marked:

...and then he reminds you that, yeah, he's smart, but he's definitely still just 9 years old: