What are people thinking? Or are they?

Today, in the course of normal workplace conversation, I told someone that we are planning to homeschool the Bumble Bean.  She responded with, "Oh my God! Why would you do that to your kid?  No one likes homeschooled kids!"

It had never occurred to me to have a popularity contest be part of my child-rearing policy.  Now that I think of it though, there are quite a few children I would like to vote out of the next round.  I wonder if that means sterilization or just a dunce cap?

I do wonder how prevalent this attitude is.  I think most people would be unlikely to say it to my face since to do so would be incredibly rude and offensive.  Even though I am very hard to offend and usually impervious to rudeness, it got me thinking, and this is what I thought:

1. Yes, a majority of homeschoolers tend to be some degree of elitist about and I do find it aggravating and counterproductive but I'll take it over vaster ignorance, helplessness, uselessness and waste.
2. I've never been like most people, even before I was homeschooled, and that has never noticeably stopped people from liking me.  In fact, maybe I should pro-actively tell people who seem inclined to be too glommily friendly.
3. I'm a LIBRARIAN for Christ's sake!  Mainstream is obviously not a primary concern of mine.
4. I'd rather my kid in be in therapy for years and years because he didn't have access to broadcast television than live in desperate mediocrity his whole life.  (Yes, I know that's elitist.)
5. As she left, she thanked me for the opportunity to think for the first time today...apparently not even realizing that she was illustrating my point that school prepares children for lives of dullness and drudgery: putting up with pointless exercises day after day; classes and homework when in school, meetings forever after that, ad nauseum (no barf-bag included).
6. A newly realized reason I want to be independently wealthy: I won't have to attend meetings.

Family means family. Where's the booze?

The Big Bad Bean wears his heart on his sleeve.  I don't mind at all.  I love being the wife of a man who is shamelessly, sappily in love with me.

The Big Bad Bean wears his heart on his sleeve.  He has no tolerance for fools, liars or other unworthy characters and it shows. 

As it turns out, he also has no tolerance for most of my family.  It also shows.  He graciously extends this to a hefty chunk of his family too, he's very equal opportunity in that way.

I can't say I blame him...about my family at least.  I can't quite drum up the same depth of feeling for the untolerable parts of his family since by and large they don't communicate about anything important so the chance of them ever saying anything to damage the Bumble Bean is pretty low.

On the other hand, I am dreading my family reunion in July.  Last February's visit for my brother's 40th birthday party was such a remarkably un-nurturing experience that it was anti-nurturing and I have no desire to repeat it.  Even less desire to repeat it to the tune of over $1000.

Picking my nose in the late night kitchen

Tonight was book club and I still have a cheesecake to make for tomorrow's party at the in-laws.  It is late and I am in the kitchen, not however picking my nose.  I have considered it, since we had determined in some fantastic and incomprehensible tangent that is fairly signature for book club, that picking one's nose in the kitchen was not OK, except perhaps for very late at night.  I have decided that I am in fact not in the mood to pick my nose.  It is fragile now and would probably bleed were I to use it in such a fashion.

Tonight's topics were supposed to be balls (I missed this discussion due to saying goodnight to Samir), weird occurrences and money.  I don't believe that we talked about money at all.  We talked about zombies, their attraction and apocalypses (apocalypsi?) and winter camping, survival and vegetarianism as it relates to cruelty v.s survival.  I think the only conclusions we came to are that bivalves are incapable of feeling pain and that pizza would be the greatest loss to humanity assuming any of us survived an apocalypse.  We also discussed celebrities, specifically that it is a terrible fate to befall a human being, that Harrison Ford is an Indiana Jones of wild animal welfare and that Tom Cruise, or perhaps Katie Holmes (who may or may not be from a family of Scientologists, Catholics or Masons or all of the above) is being investigated by the FBI for slavery.  I actually knew about the FBI investigation since I went to a normal-ish grocery store yesterday and read the headlines of all the rags.

In other news the Dragon Daisy was a big hit but the monkey ball, which had such great promise in my head, turned out to look more like a pig, though the Bumble Bean suggested that it looked more like a bird to him.  I can't really see it but the ears are rather fly-away.  Photo to be published (once I take it) on http://www.laughingatus-design.com/.

I'm not particularly looking forward to tomorrow.  I'm not really sure why.  Perhaps I'm just tired and know I will be tomorrow as well.

In case you have been wondering where I've been since mid-December

I feel somewhat responsible to this blog to keep writing it.  I don't feel responsible to Facebook.  While I took on both in a voluntary fashion, both I believe inspired by Martinis, I don't login to Facebook if I can help it, but do feel bad about not blogging.  Weird, since there are a lot more people who read Facebook than even know that I have a blog.  Also, because I am so strapped for time, I read my friends' blogs once I post an entry of my own and if I don't post then I don't keep up on the doings of my friends.  Bad friend, sit!

A whole lot of what I have been up to is the Bumble Bean.  I'm working from home 2 days a week now which means that on Tuesdays and Fridays I wake up at 4 am and work until 8 or 9, then start having fun with my little buddy and try to squeeze in a few more hours of work throughout the day as well as working through most lunches, going in early-ish, and leaving late on the other days. 

He is more fun than there is any reasonable way to describe, so here are some vignettes I have been jotting down meaning to blog about.

At the moment he is using the splatter guard as a "tennis racket" to launch a variety of toys down the back stairs and commanding the Berg-kitty, "go get it!" "no, you go get it."  As I write this the "tennis racket" has turned into a banjo, then a lily pad, and now abandoned for his true love - alphabet games & spelling.

We are in the kitchen.  I am cooking bacon.  On the table is a collection of toys representing two things for each letter of the alphabet.  On the counter next to me is another collection of toys, one for each letter of the alphabet.  The fridge is covered with magnetic word strips in runs like "moon cloud laughed" and "after one here cha cha is asleep."  On the floor are his alphabet blocks, abandoned for now, and a collection of foam letters which he is licking so they will stick to the side of the cabinet.  He is spelling rhinoceros.  He is spelling it wrong and I point out that it should be "os" at the end instead of "is."  He sounds it out for me, and sure enough, he is correct.  That is exactly how we all say it in this house.

The Bumble Bean is sitting on the floor of the kitchen while I'm making bourbon chicken.  He has his toys drum and is hitting it while flinging his head back and forth shouting, "Animal, Animal, Animal!"  It is really an amazing imitation of the great Muppet drummer.

The Bumble Bean started drawing stick figures this weekend.  he makes two circles for eyes, a big crescent for a mouth, then draws lines from the mouth to represent arms and legs.  I wonder if that means he's an optimist?

He has started arguing a lot more.  If I say no, he'll say, "the yes."  If I say yes, he'll say, "the no."  We will go on like this for a while, the Bean become more heated and then he will deliver, as the clincher in the argument, "the chipmunk."  So far, no one has been able to figure out what the chipmunk is, where it's from or what it means, but the Bean has decided that it trumps.  He is of course wrong in that but not because it is a chipmunk.

I do so use Wikipedia...

but only when appropriate and I always cross check.  I don't remember what I decided to look up in Wikipedia that caused this post to blossom in my head, but there it is.  I use Google too.  It's a great place to start. 

Wikipedia will infer for you that coconut oil and coconut butter are the same thing.  Google will seem to confirm that.  However, if you try shopping for coconut butter on Amazon, you find that several manufacturers insist that there is a difference.  I would agree since I now own both coconut oil and coconut butter.  Hands down, I'm using the butter when I start making ice cream, but the oil is key for lightly sauteed snow peas with ginger and sesame.

Also, I fully intend to use Wikipedia to further my promotion/distribution of the Peking Duck Style once I get it edited.  I got the raw footage captured last night so I'm further ahead than I was!

Bacon, eggs and juggling

There are quite a few things in cooking in which you simply can't take short cuts if you are interested in a particular outcome.  Eggs over easy with a runny yolk but no snotty white MUST be cooked over low heat with some kind of fat (I prefer butter.)  Bacon to be crispy all the way through but not burnt must be cooked over medium to low heat and turned frequently once it starts to crisp.

Just now, as I was making my bacon and patiently waiting for it to be what I wanted it to be, I picked up the juggling book that I bought in early January and started reading the introductory matter.  It went through the original edition from 1979, the encyclopedic edition, the current edition and then mentioned that if you started to have mystical experiences with your juggling you can always pick up The Zen of Juggling and delve deeper into this amazing art.  At this point I had to put it down due to the frequent turning of my bacon, but I kept thinking and what I thought was, "wow, people are amazing!  They can find depth of meaning in anything."  Followed immediately by, "wow, you can make money with pretty much any sort of nonsense!"

More snow...WTF!

I know this is not a very original post title, but it is very expressive of how I'm feeling about all of this.

At my last head examination, Dr. B. said that if there was still no change in the shrinking of my brain arteries and as long as the vascular reserve was still good, we would drop from a head examination every 6 months and go to every 9 months.  Huzzah, Huzzay!  Gooey, neck-breaking, eye-popping ultra sound only once a year (roughly, I'm optimistic.)  However, I got a call yesterday about my scheduled MRI.  Grrr.  I didn't realize the ultimate check would be an MRI.  I thought it would be more of the above mentioned horrible gooeiness. 

I hate MRIs.  They never end.  Well, they do end but it takes a long time.  They squeeze you in a tiny tube so you can barely see your toes way down there obstructing the light at the end of the tunnel.  Then they tell you it will be loud, keep very still, breathe normally, and then pump you full of toxic chemicals that make you sick for a week or more and also make you feel nauseatingly hot and like you just wet your pants.  Last time they were halfway through and stopped to accuse me of having a secret hair pin in my 1 inch long hair, dragged me out of the tube, felt my head and neck all over, and finally discovered that someone had woven a straightened paperclip into the neck of the johnie.  They looked at me like I might have done it, then clearly some form of logic cut in and they thought "why would anyone do that?"  My question exactly.  So it started all over again and I got a double dose of the toxic nasty pants wetting stuff.

Now that I'm done with my rant, I would like to say that when they first gave me the stuff and warned me that it would feel like I had just wet myself, I did wonder how you could have that sensation without, ya know, wet-ness.  But sure enough, just like they said, that is exactly what it felt like.  And no, I did not actually wet myself, I checked afterwards.  It does lead one to wonder if MRI techs, what with all the radiation and loud popping and straightened paperclips, inject themselves with that stuff as a form of entertainment?  Perhaps when they have been drinking profusely and haven't peed as a sort of contest of endurance?  A special rite of passage for MRI techs?