Yamaraashi-chan's Student-Led Conference

Friday was what I call a shatterday; both kids had the day off, sort-of, but it was also one of those days I work at home, and I ended up with my attention span completely shattered by the constant need to go somewhere and do something.

It started with Omaha and I going to Yamaraashi-chan's school for the quarterly "student-led conference." (This is like a parent-teacher conference, only without the teachers.) I met again her teachers in math, science, art, history, language arts, and health.

I must have a skewed collection of expectations about my children's educational success. Yamaraashi-chan, for example, has beautiful handwriting and perfect spelling. She's one of those kids who does look up a spelling when she doesn't know it. So I winced when I read many of the posters and student projects pinned up along the walls. An example: "Psychiatrist is the oly counsoling job that let your prescribe pills." There were hundreds of equivalents; that's just the one I wrote down.

In the social studies classroom, the student project posters were of miniature nation-states, where the students had to come up with a map and a constitution. Yamaraashi-chan's group had a 70x100cm sheet of posterboard, one side with a fanciful map and the other side covered with the constitution and a collection of laws, over 40 in count. I had a lot of questions about the way the judiciary works, and she didn't really have answers.

Still, that's better than many of her peers. Three students had put together a very sparse poster, one side with a cartoonish map and the other side with what looked like a trivial mission statement and a handful of laws, the one in biggest, boldest letters reading "NO BEASTIALITY [sic]." I wonder what's in that kid's experiences that led him to be so adamant.

I spoke with her health teacher. They'd just finished sex-education. One of the points I mentioned to him was that one of the pamphlet's I'd seen on sex education said that "by middle school, kids know everything," making the point that it's the responsibility of their elders to make sure the right things are emphasized. I pointed out that Omaha and I had been AIDS intervention educators in the 1990s and our idea of "everything" was probably a lot broader than the writers of that pamphlet perceived. He demurred that was probably true.

In language arts, there were posters from the "propaganda techniques" lesson plan on the walls. There were a lot of "Abortion in Bad" posters, making me sad and reminding me of the "Red state abortions: why mine is okay, yours was evil" stories from a year ago. Yamaraashi-chan's "unwed pregnancy is bad" poster was a little weak.

My assessment of Yamaraashi-chan is simple. She's way ahead of most of her peers, and she's a typical seventh grader: she hates homework, but when she does her schoolwork she excels.

The rest of Friday...

The rest of Friday was equally busy. The two-hour block around noon, I had to drive Yamaraashi-chan back to her school to participate in a school-wide clean-up program, then pick her up. An hour and a half later, I had to drive to Kouryou-chan's school and pick her up from the overnight hike her school had taken her on.

Lisakit and I went out and dug into the dirt pile where we'd left it years ago when we'd dug out the retaining wall, an piled it into the 8'x4' raised bed I'd put up in the north-east corner of the property. We put down some compost, and later layers of topsoil. By then, it was dinner time.

After that, I drove Yamaraashi-chan back down to the city-sponsored middle school dancing. Before that, we had a long talk with her along the lines of "you're not going out of the house dressed like that" and "Do you realize when you talk to boys you're presenting like a mandrill?" Omaha showed her how she leans forward. Yamaraashi-chan was totally squicked by the idea that her body was doing these things against her will. It was time for girl-talk, and I sat and tried to read a book without listening. No such luck. Still, I think Omaha got through to her, and we did manage to get a more demure shirt onto her.

When I picked her up at 10, she was exhausted, and Omaha and I had no trouble convincing her that it was time for her and her sister to go to sleep.

Irony Alert!

This morning while driving to work, I drove up behind a beat-up Datsun from the last decade with a bumper sticker in the upper-right-hand corner of its hatchback window. It was a classic American sticker: the flag, and the phrase "These colors don't run."

Maybe not, but in her case, after having been exposed to the sunlight for Cthulhu knows how long, they sure have faded.

Saturdayness...

Saturday was more of the same. After making crepes for breakfast-- which started around 11-- we piled the girls into the car and headed out to a salmon bake being hosted at the indigenous aboriginal Indian Daystar Center at Seattle's Discovery Park, where the descendents of the survining remnants of early American colonial genocide charm tourists and visitors with outdoor salmon wood-baked the way their ancestors did it, and then serve it in one of those hexagonal concrete-spider-buttressed buildings that were so popular for plebian museums and memorials back in the 1970s. We were there for the kickoff of the 2010 electorial season.

We listened to the Democratic politicians make their pleas for money, volunteers, and votes, while we ate dry but acceptable native salmon and drank watered-down lemonade.

After we got home, Lisa and I continued our gardening expedition, adding the last of the topsoil and then planting the squash and watermelons. It would be nice if we got some of those to survive this year. I also planted some jack-o-lanterns in the flatter bed on the north edge, where the soil is significantly more acidic, and there's a bit more shade. We'll see if that makes a difference.

I took Kouryou-chan and Yamaraashi-chan to a couple of sleepover events they'd arranged, and then Omaha and I went out to see Iron Man 2, which was fairly entertaining but definitely not up to the snuff of the first film.

Sunday... does it ever stop?

Sunday, more of the same. Run around to pick up the girls, who'd already eaten breakfast at their respective overnight events. Take them home. Omaha jumps into the car with two thermoses (thermii?) of milk and two sandwich boxes filled with bagels & cream cheese. We hurtle into downtown for our monthly haircuts. Omaha is first, so I hit the bookstore looking for Jillian Weise's The Colony. I don't find that, but I do finally find a copy of Myst: Masterpiece Edition, which is a huge deal because it actually runs on Win32, not Win16, and that means I have a good chance of playing it on my Linux boxes.

No such luck.

Omaha, meanwhile, rants about how I get to play Portal on my Linux desktop (DVD, not Steam, edition) running an Nvidia GeForce FX Series 5, but her Mac with a Series 7 can't run it; she needs a Series 8, at least. WTF?

I get home and now there's more housework. Not the garden this time, the fence. The west-facing fence had fallen over, so now it was me and the neighbor's brawny teenage boys (he was out of town) putting in two new fenceposts, concrete and all. We measured and straightened and dug. I pointed out to the Mrs. next door that it didn't matter that we'd done it right this time-- four foot deep holes, 50kg of concrete-- if they didn't get a retaining terrace up soon, her property was going to erode into the side of my house, and those stresses would be unfortunate. They have plans to finish the terracing soon.

And just before our D&D game, I figured out why I couldn't get my 3D drivers working. I'd tried everything, for weeks, switching out the radeon and radeonhd drivers, the radeon and radeonhd Mesa OpenGL handlers, over and over, and it was driving me nuts. I'd even put Mesa into debug mode and that didn't help. Finally, I hit upon a comment that I could run the GLInfo program in debug mode with the argument LIBGL_DEBUG=verbose, and when I tried it, it kept saying that it couldn't open the card device.

All this time, I, the owner of the laptop, had not been listed as for direct rendering. I wasn't a member of group video in the damn access control lists. I felt pretty dumb.

Neither Myst or PlantsVsZombies ran any better. I'm still working on it.

Sunday D&D

It has to be one of the most epic running battles I've been in. For three days we'd been battling out way through hordes of kobolds, goblins, and Orcs; we'd faced scouring magical winds that tried to take off the mage's face, cramped corridors and rancid food. Only repeated use of Leomond's Secure Shelter had kept us from being dead.

And now we faced hordes of giant spiders. Finally, for once, my monk, being immune to poison, was in her element. Still, it was the berserker half-orc who did the dirty work of taking down the queen spider. I led the way up the escape route as the mage used up his last spell, much of the party was down to a quarter of their hit points, several had poison criticals dropping strength or constitution, and we were covered in 31 flavors of ichor. Our terrified cleric and equally terrified halfling thief tried to run, but I had to outrun them (easily, at 200' a round) and stop the halfling before she ran into more giant spiders.

It was a disorganized mess. The half-orc was beat to hell. The mage is missing half his face. And tonight's Secure Shelter was blessed stone, but cramped, narrow, and uncomfortable.

(Why the Hades doesn't the Emacs spell-checker have "ichor" in it?)

Dinner was spaghetti, which was yummy. I contributed Redhook beer. It was pretty good and it's regional, so I approve, and the alcohol content isn't very high. I'd decided to give them my cash and try them out because of their new ad campaign, of which I approve.