On the power of television

December 30th, 2010

So, the Delightful Girl is at that age, and has been for a while, where she wants everything she sees.  It doesn’t really matter what it is, but if someone on the television tells her she should have it, she wants it.

We TiVo pretty much everything, and we are very careful about passing through the commercials, when there are commercials.  Sometimes, though, like at this particular moment,  they are watching unsupervised, while I write this.  I am not so concerned that they will see something terrible or inappropriate because they only watch children’s channels, but occasionally, they see an ad for something.  Usually, it’s toys or games or Chuck E. Cheese’s and they come to me with the I wants or the I needs.  Every so often though, the commercial is for something aimed at the adult crowd that is supposed to be watching with them.

The other day, she came running into my office, after having seen the Charmin toilet paper commercial with the animated bears, and proceeds to tell me that we should get Charmin toilet paper because it’s softer than what we use — we are a dedicated Scott Tissue family — and it won’t stick to your butt.

Never mind the hideous concept of cartoon bears on television alluding to *ahem* dingleberries and/or doing your business behind a tree, but here is a five-year-old trying to influence my purchasing decisions of a product that I have to fight tooth and nail to get her to use to begin with.

I mean, really?

Then, again, yesterday while they were sitting in front of the television and I wasn’t paying attention, a commercial for Spray-n-Wash with Resolve comes on.  I glance at them.  They are, literally, standing in front of the television watching this commercial.  It features a man in a laundromat educating the ladies in there on the wonderful ability of his product to clean their stained up clothing.  He demonstrates:  A brown stain on a white shirt.  He sprays, he blots and *voila* the stain is gone without having had to wash the shirt.

The delightful girl turns to me, as if she has received the word of the holy one, directly to her little ears, and she tells me with the utmost seriousness that we should buy Spray-n-Wash with Resolve — and she calls it by its full name — because it will get our clothes clean and I won’t have to even wash them.

Why can’t the universe put commercials on television that applaud the benefits of such things as reading, sharing and being a good listener in the same advertising fashion as they do things that they want us to buy?

I take every opportunity to teach my children the right things.   I explain to my kids why things are the way they are and why we should or shouldn’t do things.  I try to relate those explanations to activities and feelings that they have, so they won’t just be hearing bah, blah, blah, mommy’s talking again, blah, blah, blah.

Yet, when it comes out of my mouth, it seems to go in one ear and out the other.

How awesome would it be if the DGC looked at me and said with the same intensity, You know, mommy, we should stop eating boogers because it’s gross.

How I long for the day when she says, You know, mommy, being a good listener and always trying your best is fun! We should do more of that!

How about, Mommy, I should focus on practicing the things my teacher is teaching me so that I can learn them!

They could work it into the product sale somehow and then kids will want to buy the product because it helps them somehow be better people.  Like, Spray-n-Wash with Resolve will make your life easier so you can spend more time playing with all the millions of friends you have because you’re such a good sharer…

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Expiration

December 20th, 2010

So, any of my Facebook friends will know that I often post pictures of food that I have liberated from the recesses of my refrigerator.    Things that I will often label as “former” foods, because they are so decayed, having been completely forgotten, that they no longer in any way resemble what they used to be.

The Delightful Girl Child’s school is having a canned food drive, the pursuit of which sent me into my cupboards, looking for things to donate.  We are a family that has bigger eyes than we do anything else.  We see something we like, but have never tried, and, in our enthusiasm, we usually buy more than one with the thought that, if we love it and want more, it’ll be there.  We are also a family who sticks to what we know, so we have a lot of things that sit gathering dust in our cupboards.

I took the opportunity to check the expiration dates of some things.  I managed to fill a shopping bag with cans of soup, some organic beans that we inexplicably had more than six can of, most likely the result of a 10 for 10 sale, and various other foods that someone else wants to eat.

I also managed to clear the shelves of foods whose sell-by dates had come and gone.  For the most part, everything I got rid of had expired rather recently.  There were a couple of things that went the way of the Dodo in 2009, which is nearly two years ago, depending on the month.  I got rid of some cans of sardines that expired in 2008.  Frankly, I think the sardines must have swum to my cupboard to die, because that’s the only way I can imagine sardines ending up in my house.

The second worst offender was a jar of artichoke hearts that had expired in June of 2004, which was before we even bought this house, so I had to have moved them from the kitchen in our rental to the house when we bought it.

The absolute worst offender was a container of baking powder from Wegman’s.  Now, to those of you who think, well, so what, allow me to explain.  Wegman’s is a chain store on the east coast.  We live in SF, which, for those of you who don’t know US geography, is on the west coast.  We lived in Buffalo, New York from September of 2002 until June of 2003, which means that I bought this baking powder, probably to make something for Thanksgiving, and hauled it all the way across the country so that it could expire in my cupboard. It is probable that, in the intervening eight years, I have never used it.  I wouldn’t have been surprised if it had been petrified.

This discovery led me to look through some other cabinets where I unearthed and disposed of things such as jar of cumin that I bought in bulk at a big food coop here in SF BEFORE I moved to Buffalo in 2002, half a bag of Nestle Toll House Morsels that were covered in some sort of whitish “dust,” and a whole bunch of bags of tea that I bought upon recommendation of our Bradley Method instructor when I was pregnant with the DGC in 2005.

Our compost bin has never smelled better.

If this escapade has taught me anything, it’s that sticking to what I know works is the way to go, and that if I am feeling like venturing into the unknown, start small.

I do have much more room in my cupboard now, although, I missed the canned food drive, as the DGC was sick and spent three days out this week.  I am sure that there is somewhere else I can donate them.

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Thanksgiving Postscript

December 1st, 2010

So, we had the greatest Thanksgiving ever, actually. It was a beautiful, crisp day. We hung around in our pajamas all morning and watched television — which, if you don’t have kids, can have one of two effects. It can keep everyone calm, or it can make everyone crazy. It tends to make my kids crazy. So, at around noon, we fought everyone into their clothes and went to the park.

Pre-Thanksgiving-festive-meal-play was going on and it was fun. There were tons of kids and parents out for exactly the same reason we were. Nothing to do until it’s time to eat.

Before we left, I put the turkey into the oven, set the delayed start and walked out the door.

When we got back, the kids were calm, the house was warm and smelled like cooking and we were ready to visit with family.

DH built a fire in the wood stove in our living room. I puttered around the kitchen, like a good wife. The kids set about messing things up and fighting with one another, like siblings should. We brought the laptop into the living room, booted up Skype and had a good old-fashioned video chat with the in-laws on the east coast.

The DGC was in rare talking form and conveyed her every thought to the computer people — who were backlit, so you could barely see anyone’s faces. It didn’t seem to matter because she was talking anyway.

The DBC decided to lose his mind. He was dancing around like a crazy person in the background and every so often, he would stop and wildly flail his arms around in front of the computer.

Once we had finished “visiting” dinner was ready and we sat down to eat. While not everything was enjoyed, surprisingly, everyone tried everything…except the stuffing, which I discovered still in the oven, untouched, Saturday evening. I don’t think they would have liked it anyway…

After dinner, there were baths, post-bath television and the kids were in bed, sound asleep by 7:30.

DH and I were in bed around 8:30 and sleeping by 9:30.

Does it get any better?

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The blessings and the curse

November 25th, 2010

So, it’s Thanksgiving and this year we’re by ourselves, so to speak.

We live far away from all our family.  The closest family to us is my sister and her family in Scotsdale, but they don’t speak to us.  Next closest is my brother-in-law in Minneapolis.  Then another brother-in-law in Boston and mother-in-law in NY, and mother in Florida.  We are in SF.

This year, for a number of reasons that I may or may not choose to mention in this post — I haven’t decided where I’m going with this yet — we are staying at home in SF.  We were going to get together with some friends who are also transplants, so to speak, but they decided at the last minute to go down to SoCal and visit family, and so here we are.

Now Thanksgiving has become a day like Easter, where nothing is open and no one is around to play with.  The only difference is that it’s not raining today…thankfully.  It is rather gorgeous and crisp.

I have many reasons to be thankful, not the least of which is my family that is near me.  The Delightful Children and the Darling Husband.  I have a roof over my head.  I have food in my ever-expanding belly.  I have friends…who are all away at the moment, but the rest of the year they are everywhere.

And this is sort of where I get a little miffed at the whole holiday concept in general.  I was talking to someone the other day — and this person shall remain nameless, but it was my mother — and when I mentioned that our holiday plans had fallen through, her initial reaction was, awwwww, and some expression of sadness that we were going to be alone.  As if being with one another as a family is somehow sad and an indication of just a general alone-ness.

Well, I am here to say pfffft to that.  We are hardly alone.  It is that whole holiday expectations and concept of what things are supposed to be like that makes me dislike Valentine’s Day as well.  If you’re interested in why I dislike Valentine’s Day, click here.

For most people I know, Thanksgiving is somewhat of a pain in the ass.  It either means traveling long distances or cooking and cleaning.  Then there are family dynamics to deal with, which are sometimes difficult. And, after it’s all over, there is the belt-loosening and the feeling of overstuffed-ment.   Not to mention the cleaning up and the driving home in traffic.

When I was young, we used to go to New Jersey to see my aunt.  Every year, we piled into the car and sat in traffic on the Jersey Turnpike so that when we got there we could visit with people who, for most of the rest of the year, we didn’t really see or even like.  On the way home, we sat in traffic again and talked about the cold turkey and the salty soup and who said what to whom and we generally trash-talked the entire day.  Then, after a certain period of years, and after the older generation had passed on, we walked a few blocks to a friend’s house and then did the family thing on Friday.  It was almost as if seeing the family was an obligation and we fit it in after we did what we wanted to do for Thanksgiving.

Who wants that?

I also recognize that not everyone has the same dynamic and for a lot of people the holidays are joyous get-togethers during which memories are created and love is shared.

This year we decided not to travel because we travel every year.  It was different when we were single or without kids.  And, even when the DGC and DBC were in preschool, taking them out for a couple of days on either end of the holiday didn’t detract from their educational experience.  It made the actual travel part of it a monumental pain in the ass, but that’s another story.  Now that the DGC is in kindergarten, she’ll miss homework and actual educational instruction, so taking her out isn’t as easy to do without thinking about the consequence.

We are also standing a little bit on ceremony.  For us to travel anywhere, it means four airfares, plus whatever it costs us to board three large dogs.  We’ve been there and done that, and with the exceptions of the grandmas, no one does that for us.  Also, how often can you impose on friends? Putting up four people, two of whom are little kids isn’t such an easy thing to do.

Sad, but true.

What is a pain in the ass and makes this day less enjoyable is our lack of planning.  It is now 11:26 a.m. The kids have only recently been dressed and the house is a mess.  Where was I two weeks ago, when I made the decision to cater this meal instead of cooking it myself?  Shouldn’t I have been looking into things to do with the family to get us out of the house?  The kids are bored and stir crazy.  They’ve already watched a whole bunch of television.  The dogs are acting up.  DH is out at the grocery store picking up the meal.  I am, obviously, nowhere near anyone, as I am writing this instead of paying attention.  ;)

When will I ever learn?  Planning, planning, planning!

Next year will be different.

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The Ladies

November 11th, 2010

We’ve got dogs. They came with my husband, as did a grumpy old cat who has since made his journey to the great beyond.

DH and I met long before we were married. Camp in 1984. I was a counselor. He was the camp driver. I was 18. He was 20. I was (am) loud, gregarious, some might say brash, obnoxious, with a tendency to speak before thinking. He was shy, quiet, skinny — years before we met, he had been nicknamed “Big Stick.” We bonded almost instantly. We had both loved the same music. He introduced me to the music of Frank Zappa beyond Part I of Joe’s Garage. How could we not have been friends? He asked me out. I said no. He was my friend and I didn’t want things to get weird. Things got weird anyway. We ended the summer and when I arrived at school that September, there was a letter from him. Three pages of I-loved-you-and-you broke-my-heart. He doesn’t remember writing this letter. I don’t blame him.

Fast forward 17 years to my San Francisco apartment. I am on the phone with a friend and we are having a conversation about people we’ve lost touch with and I bring up DH. Why don’t you Google him, my friend asks. He’s a software developer and he’s all over the web. I find him. I email him. The rest is, as they say, history.

We “dated” for six months. I put it in quotes because at the time we started seeing each other romantically, I lived in San Francisco, while he lived in Buffalo. Thank god for the JetBlue redeye flight from Oakland to JFK to Buffalo! After a couple of months of adding frequent flyer miles to our respective accounts, we talked about moving in together. The only dealbreaker on his part was the dogs. If they didn’t like me or I didn’t like them, he and I could not be.

It did not bother him that I was in the process of dissolving my second marriage. It did not bother him that we hadn’t seen or spoken to each other in almost 20 years. It did not matter to him that I had spurned his advances long ago and broken his heart. Nothing mattered to him except the ladies. Samantha and Maxine, Sam and Max, the two-year-old yellow and black labrador retrievers that were his babies. The ladies whom I had to evict from the bed in order to be able to sleep there.

Needless to say, they loved me (what’s not to love?) and I loved them, and DH and I got married just more than a year after I moved in.  We are now a family of seven — ten if you count the fish — eleven if you count the mouse who’s now living in our garage.  Our family is shifting, evolving, changing.  The cat went to the kitty heaven and we got a pucking fuppy, or doggalump as the DGC calls her, or Luka, our brown lab, as she is known to the rest of the universe.  Now we’ve got three ladies.

One thing remains constant, the hair on the rug.  I will die behind the vacuum.

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Back to work…

November 11th, 2010

So, it’s been more than five years since I went on maternity leave in order that I might have the Delightful Girl Child extracted from my belly.

Well, it’s been more than five years since I stopped working and just about five years ago that I was laying on my couch like a beached whale praying that I would go into labor. That labor never came naturally, and after many medicinal and surgical interventions, the Delightful Girl Child was extracted.

I was going to go back to work when she was about a year old, but that never panned out. I am/was/am a court reporter and I freelance. As such, going back to work would have meant finding full-time child care, which would have probably eaten up any kind of income, not to mention many hours of hanging out with the aforementioned child care provider when I wasn’t working.

Then came the Delightful Boy Child, a week shy of two years later, and any hopes I had of returning to work any time soon went pfffffft. And I do believe I actually heard that noise.

Well, now the DGC is five and is in kindergarten full-time and the DBC is three and is in preschool full-time and I no longer have any excuse. I can’t even say that I want to take a break because any relaxation in which I might try to engage will be foiled by the anxiety caused by the amount of debt that has accrued in our names over the last five years.

In fact, this very blog was supposed to be an income-generating venture, but aside from spammers in Russia, I don’t think anyone reads it. My mother-in-law has stopped reading, I think, and she was my most loyal reader.

I was going to do substitute teaching, but then it hit me that that is possibly the second to last thing I wanted to do with my life, right behind laboratory rat. This bolt out of the blue hit me in or around March whilst I was driving to interview with the personnel director for the districts of Millbrae and Hillsborough. I went to the interview and on my way home called my old reporting boss and asked if I was welcome to return to reporting. His reply was something to the effect of, “Any time you want to come back, come back.” How could I refuse that?

So, I replaced my steno machine. I bought a new computer. Upgraded my software and set about to procrastinate practicing for about two months. Then, it was summer break and I had to stay home with the kiddies. School started for the DBC and the DGC went to camp. I had no choice but to start practicing.

I sat down and realized that I had completely forgotten how to navigate my software. I had lost quite a bit of speed and agility on the machine. I had a lot of work ahead of me.

I contacted a court reporting school in Dublin, California.  I drove my little car an hour each way to sit in their speed classes in order to get practice time.  What I got was a shoulder injury from driving my stick shift in rush hour traffic, which caused so much neck pain that I was forced to stop moving.

During those hours of laying still, pondering my spasms I thought to myself that this practicing wasn’t going to get me anywhere.  In fact, it was dragging me down into the depths of despair.

I remember what school was like, and not in the nicest way.  Once you make that transition from training to doing you realized that you’re really not being trained to do a lot of what you have to do and that first job experience is a terrifying wake-up call.  All these women — and one guy who sat silently as the instructors addressed the class as the collective “ladies” — practicing procedure and terminology as if they were heading straight out of school and into the courtroom, worrying about depositions and attorneys who might ask them to get coffee.

In my 14 years as a court reporter, I never worked in court.  Well, I have, but not as an official court reporter.  I have been schlepped in by attorneys in the discovery phase who cannot get an official reporter to take minutes of the seventeen-second proceeding wherein the judge denies their motion, or some such nonsense.

Those official court reporter jobs are attained by attrition.  The official court reporter dies behind his/her machine and, as the paramedics are carrying out the lifeless corpse, the new official runs in to take over.  Behind this new official, there are twenty other reporters waiting in line for death to occur so that they might win the prize of a civil service reporting job complete with benefits.

Morbid, yes.  A career strategy, indeed.

I had no desire to go into court work.  My dad was a reporter, as some of you may know, having read the entry about his jury socks.  He so wanted me to take over his position when he retired.  It would have been a great job, but working every day wasn’t what I was looking for.  When I oh-so-miserably failed the exam given to the applicants for his job, I was not unhappy.

I like to freelance.  I like hearing new testimony every time I go to work.  I like being able to never work with attorneys I don’t like again.  I like being able to take weeks off at a time or years, as the case has been.

I am good enough at my job to have something to come back to…and that’s a nice feeling.

What is really nice is that my income — which could be substantial, or not — is supplemental.  That means I don’t have to kill myself doing it.  I can, if I want to, but I don’t have to.

I’ve been at it now for a couple of weeks, and it seems to have taken its rightful place in my new life.  For that I am thankful and I may or may not talk about that at the upcoming festive meal.

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Posted in blogging woes/triumphs, general weirdness, Money woes/triumphs, Mothering, Pain in the ass factor, Schooling, Sloth, Uncategorized, WTF | 4 Comments »

Dora the Yechhhsplorer

July 19th, 2010

At the moment, I am hiding because my kids are watching Dora the Explorer.

I hate Dora the Explorer. It is loud. The music is disconcerting. The backpack character disturbs me. And, for the very life of me, I can’t figure out why Swiper the Fox is even part of the show. The entire concept — the long pauses in dialog for child interaction, the extremely loud voice in which Dora speaks, why her inflection always indicates that she is expecting something — it makes my bowels twist in a knot. I don’t even think it teaches map following or logic all that well. Plus, the Dora character is drawn such that, were she a real person, she’d be so macrocephalic that her neck would break under the weight of her head, not to mention how profoundly retarded she’d be. But, I digress.

Many moons ago, I created a season pass on our TiVo for Dora, after the Delightful Girl Child expressed an interest. I felt blessed that she watched it twice or thrice and lost interest. I rejoiced. Sadly, I cannot say the same thing happened with Caillou, but we all have our crosses to bear.

Then, this morning, as I turned on the television for them so they could watch The Backyardigans — a show which both DH and I love and I think is enjoyable to watch and has many redeeming qualities, not to mention an awesome and eclectic score — and
Dora happened to be on instead of some other show we record. Thus came the fateful request…Mommy, we want to watch Dora!

What to do…

I think there comes a point in every parent’s life when they retreat from their own sensibilities and let their kids do something that they really, really, really want to do that, as a parent, you know is awful, but you let them do it anyway because at some point they have to learn these lessons to become their own fully-actualized person. You cannot protect them from everything. You cannot mold them into a mini-me.

You are certain that at some point in your life, your parents did the same thing — although you may have legally been an adult by that time, but that is neither here nor there.

I am also acutely aware that the ads in the margins of this post will all have to do with Dora and that is yechhy too.

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When your stuff begins to own you

June 1st, 2010

There are areas of my house which I believe to have a magnetic sort of pull.  Things end up in these areas that don’t belong there.  No matter how often I remove these things, they gravitate back to the corner or something else ends up in its place.

My kitchen counters are this type of black hole.  Stuff from the bathroom ends up there — bottles of aspirin, a nail file, a damp hand towel.  Tools from the garage — a hammer, wood screw, allen key.  Books, papers — no pens, of course, because the pens go somewhere else, the location of which is a closely guarded secret.

There is a cosmic path from the toy boxes to the counters, as toys of every sort end up there.  Crayons, Matchbox cars, errant sections of railroad track, a decapitated, half-naked Polly Pocket doll, a bead from something that I vaguely recognize as having come from my jewelry box…

Lately though, it seems that my entire home has become a corner into which people throw things that have no other place. Little piles of stuff.  Big piles of stuff.

I try, in vain it seems, to stow these possessions, but I find that my closets and drawers are bursting.

From whence did I acquire this junk — she asks.  So may ways.  It was given, purchased, inherited, found, possibly it spontaneously regenerated, or generated out of thin air.  I do believe that can happen, as I simply cannot believe that I deliberately put myself into this position.

What position is that of which I am speaking, you may wonder.  I refer to the realization that the crap has begun to own you and run your life.

How can crap run your life, you may ask. Meaningless possessions, inanimate objects, things which have not been looked at, used or otherwise acknowledged in any way for years…allow me to demonstrate.

On your days off, when you could be relaxing or doing something productive, you spend your time organizing and purging because you must in order to feel like you have the space to get relaxing done.  By purging, I mean throwing things away that happen to be broken and/or ill-fitting, things which have lost their necessary parts, things which have lain ignored for so long that you no longer recognize them as your own possessions.

By organizing, I mean neatly stacking the remaining items in the space vacated by the stuff you have recently purged in order to, say, create a path through which one may walk, or, perhaps, to ascertain the level of mold growth, or lack thereof, on the floor underneath.

Once finished, you sweep and mop, vacuum, disinfect — clean by whatever means necessary — and stand back to admire your handiwork. You feel good. You’ve accomplished something. You are at peace with the universe and now you can begin anew, refreshed, clear-headed.

Except that you are exhausted. You glance at the clock and it is 3:57 pm. You have to pick up the kids at 4:30, you are filthy, covered with dust and god-only-knows what other detritus, caked with sweat and there is no way in hell you are going out in public without a shower. So, you wander upstairs to get a change of clothing and you notice that the steps and the hallway are also filthy because you’ve been walking around the house, apparently, leaving behind a trail of schmutz.

*Deep sigh*

One more thing to do before you leave the house. You lug the vacuum out again and you clean the offending areas. It is now 4:12. You still have 18 minutes before you have to leave to get the kids.

And, oh, my god, what about dinner?!?!?! You run into the kitchen. Thank the lord the bread isn’t moldy and you still have some cheese and butter. Grilled cheese it is for the kids. You and DH will have to either fend for yourselves or order something. There is no way you’re cooking.

It is 4:20. You do the stripping run to the bathroom, leaving your clothes strewn about and you’re mentally figuring that you’ll pick them up on your way out of the shower and throw them into the washing machine on your way past it as you leave the house. But then you think, is there enough to actually do a load and you decide that if you can shave two minutes off your shower, you’ll have time to strip the beds and/or collect the towels from around the house so you can put up a full load.

You step in the shower, you manage to shampoo, condition, soap and rinse without anything popping into your head that needed to be cleaned or organized. You get out. You are relaxed. You feel triumphant. You have an understanding of the order of the universe.

You pick up the kids and bring them home. You go to the bathroom to wash your hands so you can start making their dinner. You exit the bathroom and enter the kitchen and there it is — a doll on the floor. It has been abandoned there because its clothing cannot be located. You glance over to the countertop by the phone and you see them, a rubber band, a barrette and Lightning McQueen. A shudder runs down your spine. It has started again.

You know what you’ll be doing tomorrow…

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The jury socks

May 14th, 2010

So anyone who knows me knows that my dad was a court reporter.  That is why I am a court reporter.  When I was in college trying desperately to decide what I wanted to be when I grew up, he used to come home and show me his pay stubs.  I graduated with a BA in Sociology and went straight into court reporting school.

My dad worked as a reporter in the federal court for the Southern District of NY from January of 1967, until he retired in August of 1997. During his 30-year reign as the barely-noticed scribe, there were several things for which he became infamous amongst the people with whom he worked.  He picked his nose almost constantly, yet he still was able to write on his steno machine despite having one finger digging in his nostril.  He could fix almost anything.  And he had his jury socks.

My father believed that red warded off the evil eye.  This notion was suggested by my maternal grandmother, grandma Fanny, who insisted that her sister-in-law, my great aunt Sophie, had the evil eye and that there would be horrendous consequences if we were in aunt Sophie’s presence without some sort of protection.  This protection came in the form of wearing something red on our persons.

As the years progressed, my dad became comfortable with the idea that he should always have something red on him.  That red thing was his left pinky nail.  He would stick it near my mother when she was polishing her nails, and she would oblige.  People thought he was just eccentric — which he was — but we knew the real reason.

If you don’t know anything about court procedure, I’ll give you some background.  Once all the evidence has been presented by both sides, a case is given over to the jury for deliberation.  The jury then goes into the jury room and they hash through whatever they’ve heard over the days of testimony and they agree on a verdict…or not.  In any event, when the case is sent to the jury, the court reporter is on call.  He/she has to be available to read back testimony should the jury need clarification or to have their memories refreshed.  In many cases, the case is sent to the jury toward the end of the day.  In order that they not feel rushed, often the parties stay later than normal business hours to give them a chance to make a decision.

On those days, when it was clear that the case was going to the jury late in the day, my dad wore his jury socks.  It was because he wore these red cotton socks that (he was convinced) the jury would return a verdict quickly and everyone would be able to go home early.  Was this actually the case?  No one is sure.

All I know is that over the years I, too, have been known to call upon the power of the jury socks.  In fact, I have several pairs of red socks which I wear when I want to feel a little more protected.  I slip them on my feet and I am imbued with all the powers and strength that can be provided by red socks.  And those powers are most certainly imaginary, yet still I put on red socks when I feel that things need to go my way.

As I write this post, I look down at my feet and I am wearing red socks.  Why did I put them on this morning?  I am not quite sure.  But were those socks responsible for the fact that I had a good shopping day?  That I have been looking for a long stretchy black skirt and I found one in Nordstrom, where I never find anything I want and, on the odd occasion I do find something I don’t think is hideous, it’s way more than I want to spend, yet today this skirt was on sale and it was the last one and it fit me perfectly.

Now, the interesting question is whether the jury socks influenced the universe to rise up and meet my needs or whether the jury socks gave me a little boost so that I decided to go back and try it on even though at first blush it looked like it would be too big.

I will never know.

Frankly, though, I will wear my jury socks anyway.  They don’t seem to be hurting anything…and they make me feel closer to my dad.

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Posted in general weirdness, Old Wives Tale, Personality traits, WTF | 2 Comments »

The system works, doesn’t work, or works out

April 28th, 2010

So, by now you’ve read my post about kindergarten lottery madness. If not, you may do so by clicking here.

Three weeks or so ago, the grapevine started murmuring that the assignment letters went out. We quelled the urge to sit by the mail slot and awaited the arrival of our logic/common sensically challenged mailman, whom we suspect may not be able to read English, and may possibly not be able to read at all, as that could account for some of the things he’s done…but I digress.

It was a Saturday. We got up and did our usual Saturday thing, pancake breakfast, scrambling for activity ideas, dragging our feet.  There was some whining.  We managed to get out of the house.  We tried our best not to think about it.

We got home.  We ran to the garage.  There it was, in all its black and white, number 10 envelope, lack of pomp and glory.  I almost wet myself when I saw it.  Fear and panic ran through my entire body.

I brought it upstairs and showed it to DH.  ”We got it.”  I told him.

“So?”  he asked.

“I didn’t open it.”  I replied.

“That’s stupid.  Open it.” he said.

I agreed.  I complied.  I opened.

Before I get to the assignment, let me give you a little background.  When I was at the beginning of this kindergarten journey, I visited the San Francisco Unified School District’s Web site in order that I might familiarize myself with this demonized algorithmic assignment lottery wackiness.  I read the page where it describes how it all works, and the school that they used in the example was the particular school on which we had our heart set.  You see, it had been the most requested school in the previous school year and so it was used as the example.  I came away from reading that page thinking that I wasn’t even going to go look at the school because there was absolutely no way I could get the DGC placed there, regardless of the quantity and types of offerings I made to the myriad gods and/or goddesses who are responsible for these sorts of things.

In fact, a friend of mine had visited the school and didn’t really care for it and I, based on her assessment, wasn’t even going to go look at it.  I changed my mind after realizing that she and I had very different ideas of what we wanted for our kids as far as school environment. In fact, the school she chose as her number one choice was a school about which I had absolutely no qualms eliminating from my list.  In fact, there was only one school to which we both applied.  Again, though, I digress.

I made an appointment to see the school and I secretly prayed that I wouldn’t like it.  That would make my life easier.  When I got near the building on that day, I fell in love with it.  It is a large, bright Art Deco edifice.  They were in the process of creating a sea life mosaic on the outside.  I can walk there.

Once I got inside, I fell even more deeply in love.  The walls were festooned with artwork and essays and evidence of learning. It was clean.  There was an air of happiness, even in the halls of the middle school.  It instantly shot to the top of my list.

There were three kindergarten classes, which amounts to about 66 open spots, in the Fall 2010 kindergarten class.  Rumor had it that there was an entire class worth of siblings and two hold-backs.  (Yes, this school is so competitive that they will hold you back in kindergarten.)  That left about 42 open spots.

My eyes fell first to the opening sentence of the letter.   It read, “Dear Parent/Guardian, We are pleased to inform you that your child has been assigned to one of the schools of your choosing…”

It didn’t register at all.  My eyes scanned further down the page to the highlighted box in the middle of the page.  I read the information it conveyed…which was that we had been placed in our first-choice school, which was kindergarten through eighth grade, within walking distance from our house, fiercely academic, and within walking distance of our house, and our first choice.

I rejoiced. Immediately thereafter, I panicked.  It all of a sudden occurred to me that maybe I wasn’t reading the assignment, but I was instead reading the portion of the form that tells you how to read the form.

Imagine my shock when I saw its name on the assignment letter.  I read the letter over again, which did little to convince me I was reading it correctly.  I turned it over.  I read about a third of the way down the other side of the page when I realized that I was reading the Spanish version of the page I had just read.

Still I absolutely could not believe we got placed there.

I proclaimed, “We got our first choice.”  I handed the letter to DH.  He read it.  We both stared at each other, slightly slack-jawed, not believing, not knowing what to say or do.  Then we did a victory dance.

I wanted to call the other parents and find out how they did, but decency dictated that I not.  It would seem like gloating.  I called my mother.  She wasn’t home.  I called my mother-in-law.  She was happy.  I called my friend whose kid hadn’t applied to any of the same schools we did.  She hadn’t gotten her mail yet.  I was anxious for her, but our having been placed in our first choice school made her hopeful.  (She didn’t get any of her choices, but was accepted to a small private school and awarded an almost obscene amount of financial aid, so it worked out anyway.)

The clouds seemed to part and the sun shone.  We went out into the backyard.  We celebrated.  We breathed.  We marveled.

We had won the lottery, almost literally.

After all was said and done, of the seven kids I, personally, know who threw their hats into the public school ring, four got their first choice school, two got one of their choices and only this one friend’s daughter didn’t get anything, except the stupendously large grant for the private school.  This is, apparently, really unusual.

We also got accepted to the private school to which we applied.  I was certain we weren’t going to get in because the DGC made the cut-off by only three days and they specifically discussed that with us, that they may ask her to wait a year.  But, they didn’t.  They also didn’t give us any financial aid.  Well, that’s not true.  They awarded us $1,000.  That brought the tuition down to $21,700.  Had we gotten the redonkulous financial award that our friends got, perhaps we would have considered it.  No, we would have definitely sent her there.  But, two kids at $23,000 each — nope.

I wouldn’t quite say that this experience has made me believe that the system works.  It think sometimes it works out, and that’s okay with me right now.

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Posted in general weirdness, Hysteria, Mothering, mothering irony, Schooling, WTF | No Comments »

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