Live Journal

So. I'll be posting primarily over at Live Journal from now on.

http://www.livejournal.com/users/remcat

A bunch of my friends have accounts there, and Live Journal very kindly will compile a single page of recent posts of people I list as my friends. Too good to ignore!

Fraud

More than one mother I know (myself included) has talked about feeling like a fraud from time to time. As in, we appear to be holding things together and doing a good job of raising our children -- but in reality, we are foul-tempered and scatter-brained. More than once I have said something to one of my boys that I later (sometimes nanoseconds later) regret. I do my best to apologize, and hope that counts for something.

However fraudulent I feel at times, it is NOTHING compared to this guy though. This kind of thing really frustrates me! I have a hobbiest's interest in anthropology, which means I have read a lot of stuff but don't always remember where which information came from. Now I will have to try and sort out which bits of data came from Herr Liar and try to tag them as such in my very muddled mental catalog ... ugh.

Very Funny Link

Ok, so this is about the funniest thing I've read all day, go check it out.

In other news, as of tomorrow I am officially in the third trimester of my third pregnancy. I'd pretend to be all sad about the impending loss of the famed "middle trimester energy surge" -- except I NEVER GOT IT IN THE FIRST PLACE!! I waited and waited, and all I got was three months further along.

Seriously, I am sleeping, like 12 hours a day. Every day. And I'm still exhausted. Of course I'm sure it doesn't help that I wake up every two hours to go pee. I can't wait until this baby is born and I finally can get some decent sleep. :)

Reading List 2005

Last year I kept track of all the books I read, listened to on tape, and picked up to read but abandoned after becoming indifferent or aggravated. I have enjoyed seeing the list accumulate, so I decided to do it again this year. I thought today, as I returned a rather glurgic book on tape to the library, that I ought to write some reviews of the books I've read.

So, without further ado, the selections for the month of January:

Fiction:

The Little Drummer Girl (John Le Carre)
I picked up a copy of this from the "free books" shelf outside our local library -- in hardback, no less! I remember my husband raving about something about it once, so it seemed like a good find. I found it a hard book to begin but easy to finish.

The Secret Life of Bees (Sue Monk Kidd)
This is the February selection for my Mothers & More book club. As usual, I won't be able to make the meeting on time, if at all -- it conflicts with my volunteer night at Canine University. But, all is well. We rarely spend much time actually discussing the book at hand, and instead chatting and eating ice cream (we meet at the Tewksbury Friendly's, despite their miserable service).

The book itself was ... interesting while I read it, but I find my excitement wanes in retrospect. There's an awful lot of bee lore. When I heard the title, I mistakenly thought it was "that book that got made into a movie with that old guy," which turns out to be Ulee's Gold. In fact, this book is about a runaway motherless daughter in search of love and companionship. Lush details, some interesting mysticism, but not a lot else to recommend it.

The Pursuit of Love and Love in a Cold Climate (Nancy Mitford)
What a fun pair of novels! According to the essays within the "Two Novels" edition of these books, they are personal memoirs thinly disguised as social commentary. Think of them as Jane Austen for the 1930's and 1940's. The family at the center of it all is a quirky and (for once) believable group of individuals with strengths and weaknesses and an abiding love and loyalty to one another. Funny and heart-wrenching at turns, I cannot recommend them enough.

Illusions: The Adventures of a Reluctant Messiah (Richard Bach)
This is one of those books that honestly believes it has something profound to say, only it doesn't. Not really. I read Bach's Jonathan Livingston Seagull in my high school English class (sophomore year), and got the same feeling from that text. There's only so much "I'm so much cleverer than you!" I can take in one sitting.

The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction
I played catch-up and read both the Dec '04 issue and the Feb '05 issue. Nothing in particular stood out to me.

Non-Fiction:

Life at the Zoo: Behind the Scenes with the Animal Doctors (Phillip Robinson)
Chose this one off the shelf mostly because I was hoping for some good fun medical stories. I was not disappointed! It was interesting to learn about how the approach to animal-keeping has changed since the middle part of this century. At times the author was a tad repetitive, but I survived.

The Penguin Classic Baby Name Book (Carol Wallace)
A nicely-organized if ultimately uninspiring baby name book. (No, we have not yet settled on a moniker for Mr. Baby #3.)

The Midwife's Pregnancy and Childbirth Book: Having Your Baby Your Way (Marion McCartney and Antonia van der Meer)
This book, in contrast to the previous title, was inspiring. I have had two babies "naturally" -- which I use to mean that I did not accept any medications for pain relief during labor, and strove to let my own body labor and give birth in a way as un-interfered-with as I could manage. I find that when I'm pregnant I love to read about pregnancy and childbirth, especially eye-opening accounts like this one. It has, among other things, many useful lists of questions to ask one's health care provider, to find out what they really believe about childbirth.

On Tape or CD:

Rescue (Nicholas Sparks)
I suppose there are some who would call me mean-spirited to call this piece of super-sweet drivel by name, but ... if I hadn't had nothing else to listen to in the car -- I would have never been able to finish this book. Ugh. The author uses a child with severe developmental delays as the sticky honey-glue that holds the two main characters together. The love interests vacillate between being exceptionally self-sacrificing and exceptionally self-centered. It wears on a person. Predictable to a fault and so nutra-sweet my teeth hurt.

Tutoring Rocks

Today I started tutoring my third student with Club Z. I suppose I should use pseudonyms to protect the innocent .... so, um, Randy was having trouble with Trig, and a needed help with Chemisty too. We focused mainly on Trig for this first meeting, because that's where he was struggling more. Randy is this super-personable, chatty 17-year-old guy who characterized himself as "lazy." I don't think so! No "lazy" person wants to understand WHY the Law of Cosines works.

We started out looking at the half-angle and double-angle formulas, and it turned out that they used the Law of Sines and Law of Cosines, and then it turned out that the Law of Cosines used a trig identity... anyway, we ferretted out the underlying truths together, and it was really hugely gratifying for me.

Tangent: about six or seven years ago, I lost something irreplaceable: the red felt Christmas stocking that my mom had sewed and decorated for me when I was a small child. It had a happy felt snowman and a green felt Christmas tree, all surrounded with sewn-on buttons and sparkly bits. To me, this stocking WAS Christmas, never mind that it was something my mom made me.

I had moved six times in just three years, including treks from MA to VA (and then back again). After several fruitless searches, I gave up. I owned up to my mom (hard moment) who promptly began a new stocking for me.

Then, guess what? I found it. Once I found it, I knew just what had happened. I'd been home for Christmas (or maybe at Grandma's house, I'm not 100% sure), and I had received (among other things) a Lego castle kit. I had put it together, but then to travel home I'd taken it apart again. Given the handy box with empty space, I put a pair of snowman-themed red socks inside -- and my Christmas stocking. I'd spotted the Lego box during each move, and each time I thought, "Oh, I don't need to get any Legos out." I never looked inside, year after year.

Figuring out the Law of Cosines was like finding that stocking. I knew I had it somewhere in storage, hoped I did, had half-heartedly given it up for lost -- but *poof*, when I was looking at something else it turned out to be stored in a box all jumbled together with other knowledge. One thing about me I've always liked is that I rarely forget something I've read or seen. Stuff I've just heard, I sometimes can't remember more than a few seconds. (I'm the person on teh phone who says, again and again, "Could you slow down please? Could you say that number again?") Unfortunately, my mind is like my stored boxes after too many moves: everything is shoved together in boxes that don't reveal their contents.

Digging through the boxes in my head is one enjoyable part of tutoring. I truly enjoyed learning stuff in high school! I rocked at high-school math, it was great. I didn't get sullen about it until college, when I found out that MIT counted my two f-ing years of Calculus as one piddling semester of credit. I got a 5 on the BC exam, for heaven's sake! (Obviously: I'm still not over this one.) But Trig and Geometry -- man alive, I love this stuff.

The other part I like is getting to know some high-school students. I have a feeling I've been given the older kids because their is a dearth of people with ClubZ who are able/willing to tutor in math. It's so ironic to me, considering how much I avoided math in college.... although perhaps we can lay that aversion at the feet of my college boyfriends, both of whom were wicked math geniouses.

Anyway, back to the students.... my first student was Isabel, who was struggling in Geometry. Her grandpa had been helping her up until recently with math, but once the proofs started he couldn't help her anymore. Why? Isabel's parents and grandparents were all native Ukranians, with varying English skills. I suspect the amount of English required for writing proofs eluded Grandpa. Certainly they were all very, very smart. Isabel's mom had jumped through all the necessary hoops (seven year's worth!) to transfer her Ukranian MD to the U.S. She spoke fluent English, and Isabel had no accent -- but mostly I dealt with with the grandparents. They seemed eager for her to do well, and to do lots of work -- we had some odd conversations:

Grandma: Give her more work! She needs work more!
Me: I left her with some extra problems...
Grandma: It's no problem! Give her extra work!

After six weeks, I was really getting into it. But, then Isabel got accepted into a weekend math program in Boston, and her parents decided that would be enough extra help. Truthfully, she was probably going to be just fine; I was sad to lose the contact though.

My second student, River, just started a week ago. She's this brilliant girl -- honors everything, quick as a whip. River's getting help because she's dropped to a B in one class, Pre-Calculus. Her mom is worried about her not getting the basics, and having that hurt her later on -- also a lot of the Pre-calc topics show up on the SAT IIs, which River has to take this spring. Smart, all the way around. I have to say, between the subject matter and her super-brightness, I am at the limits of my ability to teach. Staying one step ahead of her will be quite a challenge!

I can't say enough about how much I've enjoyed tutoring, and how much I look forward to sessions with these kids. Using a part of my brain that doesn't get trotted out very often is fun, fun, fun.

Snow Day!

It's official! It's really, really snowy out. Dave did the hard work of digging out the cars (with some very-welcome help from the neighbors-across-the-street, who wisely possess a snowblower). The boys and Kizzy had some good time in the snow.

Seth had to borrow my hiking boots (worn with two pairs of socks), because he left his boots at school -- we think. I'm trying not to obsess about whether or not they're lost.




Eli consented to wear his "big coat" since it was so snowy. (Usually he prefers his "little coat," a mere wisp of a fall jacket, because it isn't so bulky.)




Kizzy thinks snow is just fun, fun, fun! She galloped full speed from here to there, taking the occasional photo break. I honestly think she doesn't feel the cold at all, she has such a thick coat.

Has it really been so long?

Surely it hasn't been so long since last I posted? Surely I have something to say?






Nope.