The Girl (Detective) Has Gotta Go!

I am a book fiend! There are books all over our house and if you ever look at the sidebar you'll see I'm usually barreling through 3 or 4 at any given time. My girl, on the other hand, is a reluctant reader. Not the classic definition of such though--when pressed she reads a full grade-level plus ahead of where she is in school. It's the pressing part that's the problem.

She'll occasionally pick up a book and read for pleasure, but the times are few and far between. When she does it's usually something digestible in short bites (kid's magazines), something way below her reading level (Dr. Seuss), or something that is all pictures with bite-size chunks of text (graphic novels or the Dorling-Kindersley nonfiction books).

These are all good, legitimate choices that have their time and place. That place, unfortunately, is not homework reading. She's in a charter school and last year in 2nd grade most of their assigned reading was done in class. She still had to read 20min a day at home--which she fought us hard on. Since the checklist from the teacher only had signature boxes for Mon-Fri she refused to read most weekends. Homework reading, though needs to be up to her level, i.e. chapter books; books that put the pictures in her head, not on the page.

She started school this past week and the homework battle began in earnest on Wednesday night. She CAN read longer works, she just doesn't want to put forth the effort and has yet to meet a skill-appropriate book that made her WANT to read. In desperation I spent my lunch hour yesterday consulting the children's librarian at my favorite library branch. I grabbed some of ~everything~ she suggested I try and several things she didn't and carted them home.

One of the suggestions was, unsurprisingly, graphic novels, which I enjoy, her dad loves, and I've reluctantly given her in an effort to get her to read ~something~. I grabbed this one:


because, like many of us, I grew up with the spunky girl detective--funny how the idea of a female character named "George" is no longer the oddity it was when I was young... Gawd I'm easily distracted.

As much as I love the original Nancy Drew, the books are a bit dated these days, even by my standards. Jay wouldn't even understand what a lot of the things ~are~ because the references are so out of date. This seemed like a good way to introduce her to a favorite character from my childhood.

While she was showing off the bounty of books I brought her to her dad, I started flipping through the above to see how badly the girl detective was mutilated. It was a bit vapid and shallow (sadly, this is somewhat expected in books aimed at girls these days) but basically harmless. I was going to put it back in her stack when I saw this:


Oh hell no. I showed it to Raidman and even he was annoyed by it, "you are father, eh?"

I tossed that sucker back in my bag and took it out to the car to return to the library posthaste. As much time and effort as I know goes into lettering and inking graphic novels this is, to me, an unforgivable oversight.

That and my girl has trouble with apostrophes. For the last six months she's been creating plurals by adding " 's " to nouns. I think I've finally broken her of the habit, but it's taken months and this sort of thing will not help.

The girl detective had to go.

In case you're curious, she did pick a book and read it (mostly) willingly last night and tonight. Sadly, it was this.

Whee!

J has a friend over, a little girl who spent the night last night.

I confess, this is one of my favorite of her friends.She has just as strong a personality as my girl and won't let J run everything. Also, she's more rambunctious than most of J's friends, and, frankly, I think my girl needs rambunctious 'cause heaven knows her Dad and I are anything but.

These two girls in combination create more mischief in 24-hours than my house sees all week most of the time, and I wouldn't have it any other way (so stop wigging Crystal! It's fine, really, I even like it!).

While walking by J's room earlier I decided to open the door and assess the damage to improve the upstairs air flow.

Imagine THIS:


Only where it has chains and chairs, there were scarves (shut UP Candy!). Where it has people there were small stuffed animals tied into the scarves. Where this has a big pillar and lots of mechanical stuff I don't understand in the slightest, the girls had the ceiling fan. Thankfully on LOW, but still.

I just stood there with my mouth hanging open for a couple minutes---then yelled the girl's whole name and instructions to come upstairs, "RIGHT NOW".

I ~wish~ I'd taken a picture before I lost my temper and made the girl take everything apart.

"But mom... it wasn't ~my~ idea..."

Yea? So what? If you take part in, or do nothing to stop, something that you KNOW will get you in trouble, it's your fault. Teaching the kiddo that she is responsible for making sure her friends know our house rules is proving to be one of the hardest lessons to teach her and I can't seem to figure out why. I didn't yell at J's friend. By the time it was cleaned up I was giggling about it (and part of me was wondering why *I* never thought to try that!) and running out to the den to tell her dad all the details.

Oh, and I confiscated all items used to create this in-room carnival ride, except the fan, for a week.

PS --- For those of you who asked regarding this tweet from Thursday night:

Ignore the date, I always forget to reset the camera clock when I put in new batteries...

Yes, I really did paint the mirror in the girl's bathroom blue. I told her if she tries to tamper with it it will be repainted an opaque black. And if that doesn't work I'll just take it down.

I am really, really tired of how much time she wastes staring at herself and posing in the mirror. If it was a new thing it'd be different, but she's been like this since she was 4.

On the plus side, she was dressed amazingly fast & had time to eat breakfast at the table on Friday morning.


Swing Ride image courtesy of Stock Exchange.

In Living Color aka why you should just pay the colorist and not pretend you can do it yourself at home

Let me start by saying that I strongly suspected this was a bad idea when I started, and I did it anyway.

I have very, very dark brown hair. It is not black, but it is not any of those fun colors like golden or auburn. It's just brown. Really, really brown.

my natural color

In high school I wanted to be a redhead and took to coloring it myself. I even went so far as to upgrade to semi-pro products--Hello Sally Beauty Supply!--to get the lightening I wanted before covering it with red dye. This (bad!) habit carried on into my 20s. Which means when I met Raidman, I looked like this:

Yes, that's my other half, the cute one grinning on my shoulder. This picture* just doesn't do the color justice. I looked like a 20yo female version of Carrot Top with straight hair. And yet, he married me in spite of my insane (and badly dyed) hair color. That's L O V E people.

*There's one of those goofy Internet stories about how I acquired this picture, but I'll save it for another time.

I've been playing with funky hair colorants for a year or so now (blue, red, magenta, etc). All temporary because I'm a chicken. And disappointing. My hair is so dark most of them don't show up, or they're visible, but only to me because I'm looking for them.

About the only thing that does show up is the temporary hair makeup (think neon-colored mascara and you've got it about right).

Monday I hit on the ~brilliant~ notion (can you taste the sarcasm here?) to use a highlighting kit to lighten the hair I wanted to make funky colored. That way the color would show up. In my defense, this part of the plan was sound.

The part about me applying lovely streaky highlights that I could then Punky Color in a rainbow of shades as the mood hit me? Less sound. My recipe for disaster involved incredibly thick hair, an utter lack of hand-eye coordination, and the mistaken belief that anything that promised to lighten my hair could also be "demi/semi-permanent."

This is me fresh from washing the product out of my hair. I went to cry at Raidman about the result. He came after me while I was blowdrying it with the camera or you would NOT have this shot.

Actually, looking at it again, I think it looked better wet. Like all hair, it lightened as it dried. :-( Ligtened MORE I should say.

So my head looked like I'd spilled bleach on it. Crunchy looking orangey-yellow all over the place. Since I couldn't really afford to call in sick over a (granted, Extremely) bad hair day, I tried to fix it in the most non-damaging, non-permanent a way I could think of. Bring on the red mascara!

Yea, I tried to down the screaming yellow (think yellow lines on the highway here) with a red mascara wand. It kind of worked. I still looked like a bleach accident, but I looked like one with multi-tonal color. Enough to make it look like I mighta done this to myself on purpose.

Trust me, in Austin, that's all it takes. Living here, even the librarians didn't look at me funny when I was at the library Wednesday afternoon looking like this:

In my defense, this picture is a quite a bit warmer than the actual result. One of the things I lost in my computer switch in February was my photo-editing software, so you get what you get and you don't throw a fit. And no, I had NO idea how spotted that mirror was--the lighting is not all that good in there. For those of you who worry about such things, the mirror is now clean :-)

The moral of this story?

That $6.99 highlighting kit is probably going to cost you a LOT more than that. My stylist, Jennifer, will be telling me just how much more tomorrow afternoon at 1pm. New pics after, I promise.

I'd love to, but...

I've been reading Jaden's Steamy Kitchen blog intermittently since my Stumble button sent me to THIS recipe a couple years ago. I still haven't tried it, but I made the peppercorn salt and Jaden was nice enough to respond to my comments (as a first time commenter on her blog) when I was trying to figure out if I'd bought the right ingredient at the Asian market.

Fast forward to last month when I finally figure out how a feed reader (Google reader) works and subscribe to the jillion blogs I've had bookmarked forever and never make time to check. I rediscovered Steamy Kitchen, along with Ree's Pioneer Woman site, Housewife Barbie (though Merritt's renamed this again since my last bookmark) and others. Heck, I even found some of them on Twitter (I am sucha twitter junkie!)

Then along comes THIS.

Jaden at Steamy Kitchen is a food blogger, yes, but she's also an all around food pro, with a food column in the Tampa paper, a cookbook author, and does cooking and food guest spots on TV. Sony contacted her about some special food blogger oriented pre-release events they are doing in LA for Julie & Julia this week and wanted to bring her out there to cover it. Jaden can't go, but is picking a guest blogger to do it for her and report back.

Gawd, I'd like to do this. Except I'm not really qualified.

• I've only read Julie/Julia once or twice.
• I've never read Julia Child
• Heck, I don't even ~like~ Julia Child. The few times I saw her on TV when I was a kid she struck me as (a) nigh onto impossible to understand what she was saying and (b) incredibly snobbish.
• Ummm... I can't cook and therefore wouldn't know how to ask an intelligent question on the subject at hand.

So I did what all underqualified and envious kids do---I forwarded the link to my mom. Who does know Julia (though she's not a huge fan, either, I don't think) and cooks. Well and often. Like I drive an hour each way JUST for the food at my mom's Christmas Party (I used to skip it til I tasted the leftovers one year--haven't missed one since!)

Good Luck Ma!

My Kid Rocks!

Made a new CD for J this week, at her request. She picked all the music that went on it herself. Check out the playlist. My kid is just plain COOL. Though this will probably mean more therapy when she's older...

Whoop it up!

I got to spend a whole day home alone with my girlchild on Monday. Just the two of us.

I swear I did my best to make up for the past 10 months of not being home to give her hugs in the afternoon, etc. We spent most of the day cuddling and doing craft projects--I started a new afghan for my aunt, she made a stepping stone to honor a family cat we had wander off and not come back in 2005. It was lovely.

I have my friend E and her totally cute kids to thank for this day of maternal contentment. Why?

Well, because her kids--unintentionally, and I know she feels bad about this--came to a huge group playdate with a cold that turned out to actually be pertussis (whooping cough). Woulda been awesome for the kids that DID pick it up if the pedi's office had called a little earlier in the day, but oh well.

Bright and squirrely Monday morning (at an hour when I'm not usually dressed!) I was bleary-eyed in my office (@ Mega Corporate America) emailing everyone that I would be out for the day. Take a lesson kids: These are the draconian measures you are forced to if you forget to put your boss' phone number in your cell!

9:20am - Well, 9:08 to be honest. I know it's hard to believe, but I/we were ~early~ for the doc appointment to explain the exposure situation and determine if they wanted to do a culture, etc.
They did not, since it turns out if she doesn't have any active symptoms (J did not) then they can't culture it anyway.

The girl is on UBER antibiotics for a week and the doc told me to take her home, wrote me a note for my boss, and promised if I took her to daycare on Tuesday I would ~not~ be irresponsibly passing on a contagious disease in a location that provides infant care.

Since I never came into contact with E's kids I got the all clear (woot! No Zithromax for me--have you SEEN the size of those pills?). My bud Candy didn't get as lucky -- her dh picked it up as did her niece who is visiting. Basically their whole house is quarantined and taking antibiotics for a week!

I started to go off on a tangent about vaccinations and whatnot, but I gotta go shower and go to work, so this is it for now. Probably a good thing. I'm the grandchild of a doctor, I like vaccs and don't really feel like having the anti-vaccination posse come try to change my mind.

Ka-runchy Mama

Jenny Gniadecki, who I had the privilege of meeting at a VA industry conference a few years ago, recently asked, "How are you a crunchy mama?"

I started typing the reply below in her comment box, then realized I needed to just blog it.

Why?
(a) it was getting ridiculously long for a comment
(b) I need all the blog fodder I can find

I am a little crunchy, but not much.

--I've started seeking out hormone-free milk and eggs. I don't like the word games food labels play "No Artificial Hormones" means they can still add all the darn extra natural hormones they want to the food. So I'm going hormone-free on the two products most likely to have hormones added that we consume most heavily, particularly the girlchild.

--I recycle. A lot. Glass, plastic, paper, aluminum... I keep a bin on each floor, one in my office and one in the kitchen so no one has to walk too far to recycle stuff (probably since I know some members of our household will NOT walk far to recycle, lol).

I love this picture! It's somewhere in Europe and there are bins for (L-R)
Paper, Plastic, Glass, Metal, Organic Matter, and Batteries.
The ugly grey one on the end is for cigarette butts.

--I buy green dish soap for the dishwasher. Yes, not using the dishwasher would be greener, but that is just not going to happen. So I buy the soaps that promise a smaller impact when they wash down my drain.

--I buy many of our clothes at thrift and consignment stores. Well, Me & J's clothes anyway. Hers because I can't bring myself to spend $20 on a shirt she'll outgrow in 4 months and mine because I still have delusions of losing weight and it's okay to buy more fat clothes if they aren't new fat clothes. That and fat clothes are ridiculously more expensive for what amounts, often times, to less than a 1/2 yard of fabric more--totally unfair!

--I buy brown (unbleached) coffee filters. I know, it's a stretch, but I'm trying.

--I used cloth diapers with my kids. Not exclusively, cuz I couldn't handle carrying the leftovers around in public and hoping the ziploc didn't leak, but I did use 'em. The baby in the fam is 8 now, so this no longer applies.

In many ways I am ~less~ crunchy than I was when I was younger.

Sometimes this makes me sad, sometimes it makes me feel practical; depends on which side of the coin is up after the flip.

- I used to cut my hair and the kiddo's until the entire family begged me to stop. I'm being literal here--Raidman begged and my other relatives, in desperation, got me a decrepit 70's book called, "The Guide to Home Haircutting." If you're interested I have it on my paperback swap page, lol.

- I used to compost, then the rats moved in. I'm in the burbs near a cow pasture and it's an open compost pile cuz no one told me that open compost here is different than at my old house in the city proper where all we had was squirrels.

Weird, right? I'd have expected rats in town but it's been the other way round. Still have the pile, but won't go near it cuz of the rodents. This one, incidentally, still fills me with guilt. Composting is so simple anyone can do it, and I FAILED. And I hate throwing away food trash.

I was a bad composter, though, possibly the origin of my rat trouble. I figured compost was supposed to be an artificial duplicate of the rich loam and rot from a forest floor, right? Which will occasionally include dead animals, right? I was not too particular about making sure protein scraps/fats didn't go in the compost--baked potato skins with butter & sour cream debris? Sure! Why not!

THe ginormous colony of rodents that moved in under the shed immediately adjacent to the compost bin (another egregious error I realize in hindsight) is the visual aid answer to the, "Why not?" above.

- I use a pest control company. But, I use their organic product/service plan. Do I get, like, half credit?

-I use a clothes dryer. I have hung 3 different clotheslines in our backyard in the nine years we've lived in this house and every one has been a disappointment. The retractable one didn't, the plain one lost tension all the time, etc. Hanging large items like comforters over the open railing on the 2nd floor is more practical than any of the clothes lines I've tried. Sad really, I miss the smell of clothes dried outside.

Rain in Central Texas. Sorta

Woo hoo!

I deleted an old blog last year, lock stock and barrel without backing up my old content in the midst of a personal crisis. I've since regretted the impulse, but it's too late now.

One of the things I thought I'd lost was a short video I shot of Raidman and J singing, "It's Raining Men." Wonder of wonders, I'd used Google Video to upload it and the GV account I'd forgotten I had still had the file. So, without further ado, the mighty duo does karaoke:



PS - Please don't tell him I put this back up. It's just too damn funny, though, and I was unable to resist. It's not my fault, really!

Brings Me Round Again

My husband. He's funny and knows me pretty darn well. That's a good thing, since we celebrated the 14th anniversary of the beginning of the madness last week.

I was in my office being totally useless after the girl was in bed last night, round 10ish--hey, it's Summer, or will be this Sunday. I was randomly surfing--yea, okay, Stumbling--the Internet for writers' sites when I hear the new (to us) Singstar crank up downstairs. When the man isn't trying to hit the weird notes on Rock Band (read semi-falsetto too much of the time) he's got a pretty nice voice and I do like to listen to him sing. But I was ~not~ going to join him.

It's a Freudian thing. I'm totally blaming my mother.

My mom told me from puberty through last month (cuz I haven't sung around her since then) that I couldn't carry a tune in a bucket. Casting directors for any of a number of musical theatre productions from 5th - 12th grade concurred, though they were more polite about it, so I don't sing. Not in public and not around other people.

My one public karaoke experience involved so much alcohol that it was a miracle I managed to stay vertical. Two hours and lots of bad bar coffee to sober up after ONE song. Any wonder I skip this particular form of entertainment?

The ironic and cruel twist to all this is that I love to sing. I sing along with music I love for my own pleasure all the time because it makes me happy. (And I play the music loud enough I don't have to hear myself much!)

I was firmly boycotting the karaoke last night in favor of discovering new blogs to say I'm going to follow then fail to follow through on. So what does he do? He starts singing an Elton John song. Does he know me or what? I am such a sad little fangirl when it comes to Elton.

I tried to resist. I may be a little slow, but I know an obvious ploy for my attention when I see hear it. I'm weak. Before he got to the part in Rocketman where it goes, "I think's it's gonna be a long, long time..." over and over, I was downstairs singing along.

And there I stayed for the next two hours. Oh, and did I mention that the painters painted the front door late yesterday evening so we were unable to close it? Yea, I bet the neighbors loved that last night, especially when we dug out the 90s disk for a little "Baby Got Back*" action.

It's a silly little thing, but it tickled me. Incidents like this remind me why I married him and why, after 14 years and a lot more crap than any two people should ever have to endure, we're still HERE. He knows me well, my Raidman.

* FTR -- I may not be able to sing, but I can rap like a mofo when I want to and totally kicked his ass ;-)

Taking it Down a Notch

I'm not a food blogger. Really, I'm not!

But... I had to work on the salsa today so I can take the leftovers to a family birthday party this afternoon. 4 jalapenos is normally not all that much, and turns out I had closer to 5 cups of salsa last night when dh got out of it long enough for me to tell.

I cannot figure out why this stuff is so damn hot. It's hot enough that Raidman, who is generally way tougher than me when it comes to spicy food, didn't eat much after it had been in the fridge for a while. And that was when it was fresh.

After a couple hours in the fridge it was Really Hot.

By the end of the evening last night it was making me cry, literally (I really did try to salsa my infections away--to no avail, sadly).


So today I added two more whole tomatoes, a can and a half of diced tomatoes (but the whole can was Mexi-style and may have actually added more peppers), a couple of rings off a large onion, and more lime and vinegar.

Now it's a tad sweet and just BARELY mild enough to eat without tearing up. I'd water it down more but my food processor isn't big enough and I'm out of 'maters. HALP?

Could garlic be contributing to the heat? I used a garlic minced so fine it was more like paste, but I've used it in other things without this problem. Okay, so I used four jalapenos. I usually use serranos, and about twice that many. Did I get mysteriously super-hot jals, or are we just wusses this weekend?

Dunno, but the birthday party I'm taking it to is for my lil bro and my aunt--both of whom consider themselves conossieurs of fiesty food, so Imma see what they say.