Pandora

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I’m in a relationship with Pandora radio, and it’s complicated. Not just the relationship, but the entire system. In theory, Pandora only plays music you like, and it determines your desires by keeping track of your “like” and “dislike” clicks in “stations” you create. It sounds simple, but it isn’t in any way ingenious, even when attached to something with the name “The Music Genome Project”.  

Here’s how it works. When you first login, you search for an artist or song you like. Based on that search, Pandora plays a song it thinks you’ll enjoy, not necessarily the thing you actually searched for. Somehow, copyright law prohibits formal playlists. Whatever. Let’s say I search for Belle and Sebastian. I love them. So then, if I “like” the song that pops up (probably by someone else entirely), Pandora adds its identified characteristics to my “Belle and Sebastian” station. Which will, in the end, have almost no Belle and Sebastian in it, but will, instead, be populated by songs Pandora thinks are similar to things Belle and Sebastian might play. Which means that somehow all roads lead me to the blandest songs of the70’s and 80’s, because, as far as I can tell, Pandora thinks ALL the bands I enjoy engage in the same three behaviors: mellow instrumentals, intricate melodies, and vamping.

Vamping. Let’s talk about that. I don’t think this means what Pandora thinks it means. Vamping is musical improvisation.  That’s oversimplifying it, but anyway, it’s something that, depending on how you consider it, pretty much all artists engage in or one that only live performances can really achieve. In either case, it’s a completely useless criterion for deciding what type of music someone enjoys. About the only thing it excludes are symphonies, and even some of those include improv (though I’m thinking the term ‘vamping’ is a bit too mod for the classical world).

The other criteria are equally lacking in worth, although it would really seem like they would be more helpful. To continue my Belle and Sebastian example, qualities like mellow rock instrumentation and intricate mean I should, at the very least, expect only soft rock on the Belle and Sebastian channel, right? RIGHT? I shouldn’t have anything by, say Aerosmith or Tom Petty creeping in there, should I?

Well I do. Why? Because Pandora  dropped in some Sara McLaughlin, and I made the mistake of “liking” it. That added the qualities of her work to my list. And she led to another artist I enjoyed and so on. Simply by “liking” the music I heard, I inadvertently turned the Belle & Sebastian station into the “Sting, Police, R.E.M., Eagles” station.  And the same thing happened in reverse to my Aerosmith station, as it slowly shifted from heavy rock to mild 80’s.  You don’t even want to see what Pandora came up with for my Philip Glass request. Now, I like Sting, the Police, R.E.M. and the Eagles. But I do not want to hear “Witchy Woman” or “Losing My Religion” a thousand times (or waste skips on them). To regain any semblance of the station I originally wanted to create, I had to start DISliking songs.

Clicking “dislike” on a song leads to it being dropped entirely from the station with a stupid message about never playing that one again. None of the criteria associated with the song are dropped, though, and it can still crop up on other stations. So adjusting Pandora based on “dislikes” is a much slower process, and it’s an annoying one, too. This may be just a matter of semantics, but I don’t want to click “dislike” on a song I enjoy. I do realize that doing so only bumps it off of that one station, and that I can create pretty much an infinite number of stations. But, quite frankly, I want to reserve those “dislikes” for songs I hate. Because I hate a lot of songs, and Pandora only gives me a certain number of skips based on the fact that I don’t pay for their services.

If I paid, I could have more skips (but still not an infinite number), and I would not have to endure insipid health insurance commercials every third song. But I’m not likely to pay for a service that I find of limited utility. Of course, I could just take off my headphones and suffer through the hated tunes, then click dislike AFTER the fact, thus getting the song off the station while retaining my skips.  But if I’m listening to the radio, it’s usually because I’m so stressed out that my own rather enormous collection hasn’t got what I need, meaning I’m unlikely to sit through annoyance music just to save a skip.

I have friends who love the service, and I can’t decide if they’re just less picky than I am, or if they have some secret “like/dislike” magic that will control the process more effectively.  I find Pandora chaotic, probably appropriate for something named after the mythological woman who opened the jar that released evil into the world.

My overall conclusion is that I want Sirius. Satellite radio has a lot more options, and I’m willing to pay for a service that, from what I’ve heard, really works.

Flight of the Preschooler

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Sam is the kind of child for whom clichés like “look before you leap” mean exactly nothing. He is very much a leap-then-look kind of boy. I’ve got some ideas about where this tendency came from. Scott and I were both pretty cautious kids. But my Dad has these reel-to-reel tapes, extremely early home videos, that show him wearing a sheet for a cape while he leaps off of a picnic table. There’s no sound on this  footage, but I’m pretty sure the boy in those pictures is yelling “Superman!”.  Which is just one of the things Sam likes to shout before he pitches himself forward into the unknown. Or, sometimes, the altogether too-well-known.

Mostly, he doesn’t say anything at all. He just jumps, and I either turn around just in time to see it, or just a second too late to see it. If I do turn in time, I invariably squawk something like, “Sam!” or “Sam, no!” or, if there’s enough time, and as I’m running to prevent the damage, “Scott Allen Merriman, Jr., don’t you dare…!” I try not to give him the satisfaction of these reactions, but the things he does have the potential to be so deadly that my shock invariably overrides any rational restraint.

And he’s not the type to call out “Mom, look!” either. For all that he’s an attention hound, stuntman Sam appears to be acting entirely on impulse. Yesterday morning, he leapt across a three foot gap from his sister’s bed to her rolling, revolving office chair, bringing himself to within a hair of crashing head-on into the corner of her desk.  Last week, he climbed to the top of the kiddie slide at the pool and jumped straight into the air. I had time to shout, “Sam don’t you…” before he was in flight. He came down in the middle of the slide, where his feet shot out from under him and his back and head bounced as he finished his ride down the inclined plane. The lifeguard and I reached him at the same time. His face never submerged, and he skidded to the bottom screaming in agony .

But this did not stop him from standing on the slide again the next climb up, as if he could have the experience painlessly if he could just stick the landing. That time, I was watching more closely and treated him to my dragon voice “Sam Merriman, you sit down now!”

He has a yellowing bruise on his cheek right at the moment and three stories of how it got there. Any of them could be true. “I fell in McDonalds” refers a recent episode when he was sitting on his knees in his seat, violently twisting it back and forth and suddenly lost his balance, ending pinned between the chair and the play-area window. “I landed on a stick” happened in the backyard, when he was zooming back and forth between the tree house and the swing set. And “I went splat in Miss Amber’s room” addresses a gallant escape he made from his own class into the one across the hall that would have been perfect except for the face-first landing.

And yet it was his sister, who is careful to a fault, who fell off the monkey bars and broke her arm on her first day at a new school last year. Go figure.

I think the hardest part of all this for me to accept is that natural consequences have no effect whatsoever  on this child. He knows that jumping in the air on the slide leads to cracking your skull on the landing. He knows that running on slick floors leads to falling down hard. He knows that sharp corners mean painful bruises. And it doesn’t stop him. As soon as the initial pain has passed, he’s ready to resume whatever daredevil stunt led to his getting hurt in the first place.

I prefer to be the kind of parent who lets her kid learn by interacting with the world. Even Caroline has a basic instinct to avoid repeating activities that get her hurt, and she learns a lot faster from doing than being told not to do. But Sam seems to need a parental reality check before he gets hurt. “Sam honey, remember last time? Remember when you stood on your trike? How you fell and hit your head on the concrete.”

“Oh. That didn’t feel so nice.”

“No dear.”

“OK. I won’t do that.”The classic "oh" face

This time. But next time? He probably will.

When he was two, he jammed his finger into a hanger hole in a metal dustpan, then jerked it out again when he saw the panicked look on my face. Twenty two agonizing stitches later, he had genuinely learned not to poke his finger into small places. But seriously, I hope he learns some of these other lessons without the reinforcement of the lidocaine immunity he shares with me. (He didn’t have to be sedated for the twenty two stitches, and the numbing agent kept wearing off, leading him to chant “Ow, ow, ow,” in a monotone until the doctor put on more. Which is about like a typical dentist-filling trip for me.)

The finger

Gruesome, isn't it?

 I’m not looking forward to his first broken bone. (And if Caroline got one, he’s sure to do so.) Or his next set of stitches. Or the tearful call from school when one of those things happens on a loving teacher’s watch.  I honestly don’t fear for his life in these situations, but I certainly do fear for my sanity.

An anachronism in The Sound of Music

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Oddly, nobody else made this mistake...

A few weeks ago, I went to my first Sound of Music sing-along. Several people described it as a sort of Rocky Horror Picture Show for the post-college set, and they were quite right. Of course, that meant it was right up my alley.  My friend Star dressed as oldest daughter Liesl after she found the perfect pleated skirt in Goodwill. Star’s Mom went as Mother Superior, and her friend Diane was a nun (Sister HollyWood).

I went as a drunken pirate. Oops.

I loved The Sound of Music as a kid, but I only saw it maybe twice all the way through. And then, too, I had no idea the sing-along was coming to Montgomery until the day before, when I attached myself to Star’s party. I didn’t have a costume, so I ran through the songs in my head, scanned a website, and looked over some of the pictures on Star’s DVD set. And then, the next morning, still without any ideas, I thought of the song that goes:

What do you do with a drunken sailor,

What do you do with a drunken sailor,

What do you do with a drunken sailor,

Ear-lie in the mornin’

I completely remembered a scene from the movie with this song in it. It was part of the marionette section. Julie Andrews had to maneuver the puppets by herself for some reason.  Of course, the marionette sailors wore the white navy-boy uniforms, but I thought I could work with that. After all, I had a bandana and my Gypsy-Pirate-Jester-Queen Halloween costume, and I thought I could run with parts of that, striped socks, and three-quarter pants, and that it would be cute to change the sailor to a pirate.  Yeah.

I have no idea what Star thought I was doing, but she totally went along with it, helping me find a striped shirt and roll the white pants, and even dropping by Target, where I snagged the striped socks.  In Hobby Lobby, in addition to the finishing touches for her Liesl, we grabbed me the supplies to make it look like I was a string-puppet.

This last bit was possibly the only true-to-the-movie piece of my costume.

We got to the Capri theater, where I got some weird looks. I did notice that I was the only drunken sailor. But I went up for the costume contest and acted silly onstage. And I felt it my duty to act my part, since the Capri was selling champagne and I wasn’t driving.

Besides, the nuns were drinking, too. Mother Superior assured everyone that this was completely historically accurate. “Where do you think they got the word ‘habit’?” she asked.

The Capri’s owner, a surly fellow if ever one walked the Earth, said he hated The Sound of Music and Rocky Horror, and pretty much anything he had to clean up after. The event was a benefit for the Montgomery Chorale, and I got the real sense his arms had both been twisted to get his theatre’s involvement.  We laughed at him, too.

The movie began, and so did the interaction. We sang along, we talked to the screen, we booed the baroness, and had a generally glorious time. I kept waiting for my scene. The “Lonely Goatherd” came on and went off again, and I thought, “Oh, that’s right. The drunken sailor part isn’t until Act II, in the second marionette show.” I was still convinced that I remembered this.  However, by the middle of Act II, it had become clear to me that there was no drunken sailor to correspond with the lonely goatherd.  I was, in fact, a total anachronism.

I went home and Googled the drunken sailor only to find that it was an old American folk tune. While Burl Ives appears to have covered it, Rodgers and Hammerstein do not. I have no idea where I got the idea that it was in Sound of Music. But I can still hear the song in Julie Andrews voice. And I can still see her maneuvering a sailor puppet down the hatch of a puppet ship to the tune of “Put him in the brig until he’s sober”.

Oh well. Until next time, Way-hay and up she rises…Gotta give me credit for crazy creativity...

In cars

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We’re getting ready to buy a car, and I feel awkward admitting it, but we’re comfortably enough in the middle class that we can afford to buy the vehicle brand new.  Until I met Scott, a “new” vehicle to me was “less than ten years old with fewer than 100,000 miles on it”. I grew up in a family of used cars, and the only new one we ever owned was obscenely expensive and broke down more frequently than the used ones it supposedly outclassed. 

The first car I recall us having was a 1968 Oldsmobile. I may be wrong about the car’s year, but that’s how I remember it. (I was born in 1976, to give you some perspective. ) It was the kind of gas guzzling vehicle that, today, would be an open invitation to pimping out.  But I’m pretty sure it was just a rust bucket in our hands. The gas gauge was broken, so Mom tried to keep its tank pretty close to full. But we still ran out and had to rely on strangers and friends to rescue us from time to time. She called it the Millennium Falcon, and I loved that car.

Our other car at that time was Dad’s green Dodge truck. Its color was too dark to be properly considered a John Deere green, but entirely too violent to be the color of grass. Instead of anything like a booster seat, I rode around in the truck sitting on top of an old silver toaster oven I called my box.  Hey, at least I had on the seatbelt. Most of the time. Except when I was riding around in the back, often sitting up on the wheel wells.

In case you hadn’t guessed, we were rural.

With the exception of the brand-new disaster, a truck that replaced the Dodge when I was about ten, all of the subsequent cars my parents owned were used. My first car was used. Very used. In was a 1972 Plymouth Valiant given to me by my grandparents. (Again, I was born in 1976.) I hated that car. The heater coil didn’t work, so I froze in the winter, and it would have laughed at the idea of an air conditioner, so I broiled in the summer. I loved the freedom it gave me, though, so I’m not complaining now. Much. I kept waiting for it to die so I could replace it with something functional, and I thought that when the engine block cracked, I was home free. But the mechanic, God love him, told Dad “This car’s a classic. You won’t see another one like it”, and a neighbor with a broken down Dodge Dart (which ran on the same engine) sold us the part we needed. The ball joints in the steering column couldn’t hold up to the strain of actual use, and I guided it by driving very slowly using a combination of controlled weaving and wild-eyed panic that served me well when I got pulled over like I was some drunk.

“Officer, I’m going so slowly because I’m weaving and I’m weaving because the ball joints are out of alignment again.”

I was so glad when the second engine block broke on that thing.

My next car was a deep blue 1987 Toyota Corolla SR5. It was a standard shift with those awesome pop-up headlights that they don’t make any longer.  And I loved it. I loved the stereo, and the fabric upholstery (the Valiant had cracked vinyl and duct-tape seats), and especially the way it shifted gears. So smooth.  When I got into an accident that bent the frame, I was devastated and replaced it with the next best thing, a white 1990 Toyota Corolla SR5. Also standard shift.  That car lasted me through a rear ending and quite a lot of grad school before its engine started giving out.

By that time, I had what I considered a real job, paying me ten dollars an hour as an administrative assistant. And I was living with Scott, who was also in the market for a new vehicle. He convinced me that buying new was more money efficient because there were rarely any added costs outside of scheduled maintenance, which was good for budgeting.  He liked Mazdas. For my part, I wanted to test drive a VW Golf, but the sales ass pissed me off and I decided Mazda was fine.  So we bought matching Mazda Protégés, his in blue, mine in green. A few years ago, we traded his in and bought a Honda CRV, because our family had outgrown the compacts for long travel.

And mine has just now, some eleven years later, reached the end of its useful life.  I really didn’t like it much when it was mine, so I wasn’t sorry to see it become Scott’s “around town” car when we moved to Montgomery. But he was definitely right about the maintenance. We kept up on the routine stuff, and the only cost outside of that came when the A/C went croakers on us right before we moved to Montgomery. The Lexington mechanic who fixed it gets full marks for craftsmanship, because the air in that car is still superb.

So now we’re looking at new vehicles. Test driving them and combating the new car stink that dealerships spray in because they think we like it. It looks like we’re going to have to go with an automatic, which annoys both of us standard lovers. And it looks like we’re going to have to either compromise on space for gas mileage or surrender gas mileage for space, neither of which makes for fun decision making. But it will be another new car. The third to have my name somewhere on its title. And considering my roots, I don’t know whether to find that delightful or appalling.

The Programmable Child

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We call Caroline our programmable child. It’s one of the more amusing aspects of her Asperger’s Syndrome, for her as well as everyone else.  Given the right mindset or circumstances, she can be made to repeat a message almost verbatim. It’s fun to set this in motion and watch the reactions. Mostly, I program her with information for her teachers and appropriate responses to social situations. But sometimes, I’ll stick a phrase in her head and wait to see when I hear it back again. And, on rare occasions, and always by accident, others will program her with messages for us, not knowing the power they have unleashed.

When she was very small and had almost no language, I could still get her to echo me to others in my own absence. I’d say “Tell Miss Kristi I’m going to pick you up early today.”

She would echo, “Miss Kristi, I’m going to pick you up early today.”

Whenever I made that particular mistake, it was difficult to change her program. On those days, I’d arrive to pick her up early and see the dawn of understanding in Miss Kristi’s eyes when I let myself into her class. “Oh! Caroline kept saying she was picking me up early, and I couldn’t tell …”. Oops.

On better days, my message would have to go like this. “Caroline, I have a message for Miss Kristi. Are you ready?”

Silence, but she usually looked at me, which for a child who had mastered staring over the left shoulder by the age of 9 months, was a true sign of attentiveness.

“Say, ‘Miss Kristi, my Momma will be picking me up early today.’”

That worked out a little better for everyone.

Even after her words came in, I was able to send her with word-for-word instructions. And by that time, she had less trouble with pronouns, so she could switch “me” into “her” in her renditions of my orders.

But my favorite programming effort has to be the one made by her sitter in Lexington back when I was pregnant with Sam. Caroline really wasn’t sure what the whole pregnancy thing meant. She grasped that there was a baby in my tummy. But when people asked her if she wanted a brother or sister, she smiled sweetly and said odd things, like “macaroni”.  Because “brother” and “sister” were abstract concepts to her, much like “boy” and “girl”. She didn’t know what those things meant, and wouldn’t have grasped the difference even if somebody had shown her that boys had different plumbing. She used to try to get up to go potty with both genders until her teacher developed a category called “Carolines”.

But I digress.  Miss Sheri had (still has) a little brother whom she adored (still adores). So right after we found out Sam was a boy, she programmed Caroline to say, “I want a brother. No sisters allowed. Only brothers.” It was precious, and it got her attention not just because she could suddenly answer a direct question and do so consistently, but also because she was adamant about wanting a brother at an age when most kids request siblings of the same gender. Of course, she still had no idea what brothers were, but she adored Sam to pieces when he joined the family anyway.

The things we tell her nearly always come back. A couple of years ago, we had this exchange:

Me: “Tell Mr. Brent he needs to send me a Paypal invoice for June, sweetie.”

Her (at school): “Mr. Brent, sweetie, Mom needs you to send her a Paypal invoice for June.”

OK, so it’s an imperfect system.

But she remains quite easy to program, and we all have fun with it.  I’m especially fond of dropping  clichés and song lyrics into her head and waiting to see where they surface. She has Sam singing “Knock on Wood” right now, courtesy of the radio’s constant (hyperfast) playing of the Amii Stewart version of the song. (I might add that Caroline has perfect pitch. Sam does not.)  Verses, and especially the chorus, erupt at completely unexpected intervals throughout the day.

A few weeks ago, I gave her some money with the instruction, “Don’t spend it all in one place.” By the way she repeated that back to me, I could tell I’d be hearing it again in the future, completely out of context but still oddly appropriate. It hasn’t happened yet, but I know it’s coming. We’ll be paying at the grocery store or grumbling about the price of gas, and suddenly this little voice will pop out “Don’t spend it all in one place.” It’s coming. Guarantee it. No need to knock on wood.

Happy Birthday to…

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Happy May first everyone! Please, keep voting for me at

http://neilgaiman.bookperk.com/engine/Details.aspx?p=A&c=29933&s=7776799&i=1

Right now, I’m at 500 even, a number I never imagined reaching. Today and tomorrow are the last days of the contest, so please, keep bumping that number up!

Today is a birthday blog. Not my birthday, but the birthdays of three awesome women in my life. I want to tell you a little about each of them by way of wishing them the happiest of happies. I’m going to present them to you in the order they came into my life, with a note that it would be impossible to classify them in order of importance. They’re all amazing.

Judy

Happy birthday to my sister-in-law, Judy.  Judy was the first of Scott’s sisters whom I got to meet in person, at her son Ryan’s 1st birthday party. (Ryan is now turning 13, for the record.) Scott and I had been dating for all of not-quite two months, and she had the grace to extend me an invitation to come up to her house in the Cleveland area all the way from Lexington. This meant she was inviting her brother’s girlfriend, a total stranger, to spend the night, when she was already going kind of crazy trying to plan her son’s first birthday. That right there takes some courage.

 A full-fledged-card-carrying-feminist, at that first meeting she was as interested in making sure that Scott didn’t pull anything sexist in front of her son as she was in the birthday party. In other words, I’d never met her before, and from day one, she had my back. She wanted to be sure her brother treated me well in front of her family.

She had an outside-of-the home job until her daughter Meghan’s birth. Then, she did a short stint as a stay-at-home Mom and ultimately obtained a position that allows her to work from home. She fights the battle that all work-at-homers face – convincing the outside world that the tasks completed in her office are yet real work that must be scheduled and completed. And she still has to juggle her kids’ active school and sports schedules! I’ve gained so many parenting and life-skills from her that I long ago lost count, and I look forward to our entirely too-infrequent get-togethers.

She and Scott have this teasing relationship that makes me laugh every time they see each other. They both think fast on their feet, so they’ll sling zingers and keep the rest of us in stitches. Scott mocks Judy, who deflects him with her own humor, and they get along well. For that matter, Scott and his three sisters all get along well. And they get along with me, too, for which I’m so grateful.

So happy birthday, Judy. I hope your day is wonderful and filled with laughter. I hope you get a few stress-free moments and a glass of your favorite wine at dinner. I hope your husband and kids are sweet to you, and I hope you aren’t too swamped in work to celebrate. I’m grateful to have you for a sister-in-law, and I hope we see each other soon.

Melanie

The next May first birthday belongs to my favorite Montessori teacher, Melanie. Melanie came into our lives when Sam was in her class. Sam was a biter. OK, that’s an understatement. Sam had gotten mixed up about his sports somewhere down the line, and he thought biting was the national pastime. The kid bit everyone, and no amount of gentle consistency from the rest of us made it stop. Melanie reassured us, “I have ten years of experience at this.”

I told her,  “but you haven’t got any experience at all with Sam.”

I think she was mildly appalled when we invaded her classroom before the start of that year to replace all of her electrical plates with ones Sam couldn’t defeat yet. She had a couple that simply had childproof plugs in them and a couple of others with the plates that could only be opened using an appliance’s electric cord. But Sam had mastered those already, and the only thing he couldn’t stick his dexterous little fingers into were the ones that had to be twisted before they could be used. Melanie went with the flow and allowed us to make the change without complaint.

And as for the biting, we started having parent meetings about it right away. “He’s not being mean about it!” she said. “I’ve never seen a kid do this before.”

We nodded.

“He snuggles up beside me all loving, then all the sudden just chomps down!” The day we had that particular conversation, he’d taken a hunk out of her thigh at circle time.

Yup. That was our Sam.

“He’s doing it to get attention,” she said.

Un-huh.

So she started heading him off before he could bite, finding other ways for him to get attention and express love. She adapted her teaching style to Sam’s learning needs. And she does that for every single kid who comes into her classroom. It doesn’t matter what behaviors the child displays, and it doesn’t matter how long she has known the child. She loves them all, and we parents love her in return. A mutual friend calls her the toddler-whisperer, and I can’t say I disagree.

So happy birthday, Melanie. I wish you a peaceful day with your husband and sons. I hope the sun shines and you get to play with them. I want you to know you are one of the best people I’ve ever met, and your gentle nature and caring personality are truly unique and wonderful.

Linda

The third May first birthday I’m celebrating is that of my friend Linda. I met Linda because our sons are in school together. The first time I really noticed her, she and Melanie were talking. I invited myself to the conversation and realized the three of us thought a lot alike. Several months later, Linda and I were moving our sons to the same new preschool, and we went through the enrollment process together. We clicked instantly, spending as much time laughing as filling out paperwork and keeping the new school’s administrator giggling, too for the whole forty minutes that it took us both to complete four pieces of paper.

We soon became workout buddies, and I have Linda to thank for my newfound obsession with Zumba. I hated the first couple of classes, but she kept me coming out of loyalty, and as I learned the songs and moves, I really started getting into the process. I find it a lot easier to turn Zumba into real-dance in my head than I do my other aerobics class, dance party.

Linda is also teaching me how to decorate cakes, a skill I yearn for but have never even thought I could possess until now. She’s got mad skillz with an icing bag, and enough patience to teach basic competency to even an impatient student like me. Sometimes, she’ll just look at me, and I’ll know I’m rushing some essential process, and then we’ll both break up laughing, because that’s what good friends do together.

So happy birthday Linda. You are mentioned last in this list, but you are far from the least of my friends.  I wish you a day of fun with your husband and son, and I hope your son behaves for you. I hope you get to continue the weekend in the same style you started it, with friends, family, and treats. I hope every calorie you consume evaporates instantly by way of wishing you birthday greetings, and I hope you find lots of calorie-filled noms to devour. My life is richer for having you in it, and I hope to know you for a long time.

To conclude this birthday edition of my blog, I want to say there are many wonderful people in my life. Even if I never write about them, I think they know who they are and how special they are to me. Having three of them born on the same day seemed too much fun to pass up in writing, and I hope they all have marvelous celebrations.

I Think I’ll Just Stay Home and Wash My Hair

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Good morning everyone. I’m at 484 votes today, and I had the neatest experience.  A newer entrant has set herself the goal of listening to and commenting upon each and every one of these 1,300+ submissions. Wow. She left a comment on mine, and it felt so good!  Please, check out her comment and keep voting at:

http://neilgaiman.bookperk.com/engine/Details.aspx?p=A&c=29933&s=7776799&i=1

I’m at 484 today. Let’s keep this thing moving forward until the end.

To the blog!

I washed my kids’ hair Thursday night. Both kids. Right in sequence and quickly. And I actually washed it, too, as opposed to just smearing some shampoo around like I often have to do. This is big. It’s a whole new level of freedom for me, since I’ve been dancing around kid-hair since Caroline was a baby.

Let me back up. When Caroline was newborn, I read a book that said babies don’t get into routines until they’re around four months old, but that it’s a good idea to establish the routines anyway, for your own sanity, especially around bedtime. The book, Elizabeth Pantley’s No Cry Sleep Solution, also had lots of comforting stuff about how you could put the baby to bed at the same time, even if you were having to get it right back up at first and so on. Anyway, one of the routine suggestions the book gave was a nice soothing bedtime bath.

When Caroline was a little under three months old, I decided to give the routine thing a try. (And anyone who has ever had to meet me for an appointment can tell you that I don’t do routines well at all.) So I snuggled up and read Caroline a little story, then I plopped her in the tub with me. She floated contentedly on her back (with my hand under her head) for awhile before we got out, I got her dressed, and I changed her into a little bedtime onesie, read her another story and tucked her in. She was up right away, but it was only the first night. The bath was a hassle, so I made a note to skip it the next night.

Only the next night, after I read Caroline her little story and tried to change her, she screeched until I put her in the tub. In a single night, she had glommed onto a routine that I had thought was experimental. That baby loved her baths. Especially at bedtime. And, at that age, she would just float on her back, happy and relaxed. I got in the tub with her, washing various baby parts as they needed it and causing no unhappiness.

Right around the time she learned to sit up, though. Caroline got funny about her ears. She didn’t like things touching them at all. It didn’t help that she had a lot of infections, so they hurt. But she stopped enjoying that back-floating sensation and loathed having water poured on her face. Suddenly, bath time became a battle.

Naturally, my solution was to wash the child less. I mean, I never sent her out reeking to face the day, but I waited several days between screeching scrub downs. She would still play happily in the tub, but only sitting up, and as soon as she saw me coming with that shampoo, the howling would begin. I tried spritzing the water on, but mist freaked her out just as much as water dumps or dipping back. I got her a bath-hat to protect her eyes and ears. She ripped it off. And then, I hit upon the solution of brushing the water into her hair. This, she allowed.

So, from the time she was one until she learned to swim in 2009, I brushed the water into her hair, carefully lathered her up (even mild soap in her eyes was disastrous), then arduously brushed the suds out. It was time consuming and frustrating, and it only got the hair marginally clean. So when she finally learned how to dip back in the tub, my life got a whole lot easier.

Except that barely a month after she started dipping back, Sam had a bad experience with water up the nose and he stopped dipping back. So I started having to brush his hair clean. It was a no-win for me.

And washing Caroline’s increasingly long hair in the bathtub is no easy task. For one thing, she thinks she can do it herself. So if I leave the shampoo, or even the bar soap in her reach, she’ll use an entire container or bar to coat her scalp. Let’s pause to consider that last image. She will use the entire bottle of shampoo. I’ll ask “are you ready for hair?” as I head down the hall, but the scent of mango essence will hit me before the question is fully formed, and I’ll know that she’ll be completely covered in bubbles when I get in the room. I’ll have to draw her a new bath to rinse the soap out.  All the while keeping her face covered with a washcloth so the soap doesn’t drip down in her eyes. Or, if she doesn’t get a whole bottle of shampoo in there, she’ll scrub in bar soap without realizing it isn’t shampoo. And that’s even harder to get out.

Once again, my solution was to wash the kids less. Often, I let them soak in the tub and clean off the rest of their bodies, skipping the hair for a day when I was filled with fortitude and parental purpose.  And Sam was just as likely to transform the shampoo into bubble bath as his sister was to dump the whole thing on her head, so I couldn’t leave the stuff within five feet of the tub when either child was in it.

While all this was going on, though, Caroline was slowly discovering the shower. Last summer, we spent some time in Naples, Florida, with Mom and Kaylee. Kay loved showering off before she got in the pool down there, and after we got out of the Gulf. She got Caroline in the habit of rinsing, too. I still wasn’t allowed to wash the hair this way, and Sam still wanted nothing to do with the whole experience, but it at least made cleaning the rest of Caroline off a little easier.

And that gets us almost up to the present tense. This month, Sam has been taking swim lessons at the Y. And he has gotten comfortable with a wet face. He also spends a lot of time at the Y’s Child Watch program while I work out. Last week, he had an accident while I was in the cardio room, soaking himself with urine pretty completely. I had a change of clothes in the car, but the kid was disgusting, and I had to get him clean. I had planned my own shower anyway, so I just dragged young Oedipus in with me, breast questions and all.

To get him to quit staring at my nipples in loving fascination, I clapped a washcloth over his eyes on the justification that I didn’t want him getting shampoo in them when I washed my hair. And then he demanded that I wash his hair, too. So I did. And he loved it.

Then I bided my time until a swim lesson day when it was chilly getting out of the pool. A day like last Thursday. And I pounced, promising both cold children warm showers when they claimed they were freezing to death as soon as they left the pool. I put on my own swimsuit entirely to shower them off. And they both let me wash their hair in the YMCA locker room. It took me two minutes total for both kids’ hair. I may have to bathe my children at the Y for the next four years, but I’ll do it if it means I can keep washing them this fast. Tolkien’s hobbits may sing hey for the bath at the end of the day, but I’m cheering huzzah for the shower.

Storm Damage

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Good morning, everyone. I have got 457 votes as of this morning. Talk about wow! I’m just so amazed that so many people are willing to support me in this. I think that when it got to around 200, I realized I probably would be OK with it if I don’t win the popularity contest, and by yesterday I was so astounded that I had decided I am actually really content with the outcome, whatever it may be. But don’t stop voting! I’m in this thing until the end, and I’d still seriously love to speak with Neil Gaiman.

http://neilgaiman.bookperk.com/engine/Details.aspx?p=A&c=29933&s=7776799&i=1

 Today, I want to talk about the devastating tornadoes that eradicated parts of Tuscaloosa and Birmingham.

The loss of life in north Alabama is just horrible. I can’t properly express the sorrow I feel for those who have lost loved ones and property. And I want to start this post there, because I’m about to get on my soapbox in a big way. I’ve got two pieces of laundry to air, so bear with me. I want to bitch about the television scare tactics that numb us to the existence of real threats.  And I want to bitch slap the people driving around filming these tornadoes on their cell phones and digital cameras.  

Come on people. When the tornado is right there coming towards you, the appropriate response is not “hit record and move the car around to get a better angle”. It’s “Take COVER”. And I don’t mean stealing blankets here. Seriously. One of the many viral videos circling the net right now is of this monster wall of whirling wind attacking a mall in Tuscaloosa, ultimately ripping off the roof. And the video is shot from a moving vehicle, the driver constantly reshuffling to allow the camera operator a better angle. What we have here is not brave eyewitness reporting. It’s a couple of Darwin Award candidates attempting to collect their prizes.

And yes, I did watch that one, gaping in horror alternately at the storm’s ferocity and the idiots’ stupidity. There are dozens of videos like this, and they’ve been picked up and circulated by respected news agencies whose camera persons were, quite sensibly, TAKING COVER.  It is not acceptable to endorse the risks these thrill seeking fools were taking by assigning their videos the same label as the amateur footage of, say, the protests in the Middle East. The tornado freaks’ submissions need to be labeled “deadly obsession” and their distribution ought to be limited by massive refusal to pander to stupidity.

Yeah. Like that’s going to happen. Even I was completely riveted by the sheer enormity of the whole experience.

To understand why these people will continue filming in storms, we need to look not only at our perpetual need to see proof with our own eyes (preferably in real-time), but also at the media agencies helping the danger-films gain notoriety. Because these are the same agencies that whip the countryside into chaos over thunderstorms. Eyewitness StormVision Reporters break into TV shows and set off panic attacks over even mildly inclement weather. The county officials in charge of the weather sirens feed into this, setting off the horns with outrageous frequency when nothing is really wrong and then failing to blare them when danger is real and imminent.

And this isn’t limited to Alabama. I can remember sitting in the basement in Lexington, KY trying to adjust the rabbit ears so I could see Jeopardy and getting interrupted by news anchors in a pother over the pouring rain. In the last set of these Alabama storms, the ones before Easter, I spent most of one afternoon listening to the tornado sirens, because all of  Montgomery County had somehow earned an undeserved tornado warning status,  even though the sensation-crazy news anchors were clearly bleating that the action was South of town.  But night before last, when the whole damned state should have been under a warning, because those funnel clouds were sighted fucking everywhere, the sirens in Montgomery were silent.

I’m pretty numb to the anchors’ antics and even to those bloody horns.  When the pre-Easter storm cell blasted South of us, we were sitting in a frozen yogurt shop listening to the news anchors try to present the message “stay calm” in such a way as to incite the most fear. My husband and I looked at each other and shrugged the whole storm off. Two days ago, we had to do a combined 20 minutes of research before deciding to take the potential threat to our area seriously and hello, if the threat had materialized in that time, we’d probably have been toast.

I’m not suggesting that taking shelter isn’t always the best option. Really, it is. My attitude is entirely too blasé, and it probably should not have taken much research to decide the kids were sleeping in the hall the other night. Tuscaloosa had already been hit by that time, and by five PM, I had already heard that four people in Birmingham died. Plus, I could feel the cloying humidity even in our air- conditioned home.  But at the same time, Birmingham and Tuscaloosa are roughly 90 and 110 miles away, as the crow flies. Their weather isn’t automatically destined to land in our laps, even if we wind up getting hit by the same storm cell. I wish I could trust the weatherheads to tell me the truth about what to expect.

Instead, now that there has been a real live worst case scenario, it’s a reasonable bet that the vultures in charge of notifying us about the situation will be on red alert for the foreseeable future. They’re going to be jumping at cumulus clouds and honking their damned horn even more than they ever did before (though not necessarily when doing so would be helpful). 

A tragedy of this magnitude should really make people stop and consider what went wrong beforehand. Instead of protesting that warnings went out hours in advance, news stations, and even NOAA ought to consider why that made little difference. They ought to consider the culture of indifference coupled with thrill seeking that news outlets and the internet fully cater to. They ought to figure out a reliable system that only sends out alerts when the threat is both real and reasonably imminent. Maybe then, people would take it seriously. I doubt it would curb the damned fools with the cell cameras, and I know it wouldn’t have prevented a lot of the loss from Wednesday’s storm. But it might get a few of the skeptics to take cover or get some mobile home dwellers to head for a more stable structure in time.

Speedy Music

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Thanks to everyone who keeps voting daily. Please keep voting, and rope in anybody else you can think of through 5PM May 2: http://neilgaiman.bookperk.com/engine/Details.aspx?p=A&c=29933&s=7776799&i=1

I have 420 votes right now. When I entered this competition, I could have never imagined NEEDING that many votes, let alone RECEIVING THEM. Wow. I’m just stunned. Thank you all so very much. Right now, number twenty right now has 730 votes, so I’ve got to keep drawing new people in every day, but I’m in this thing for better or worse, and I’m grateful for all of your support.

Before I get into the blog, I want you to know that if you’re reading this, it means we weren’t blown away. We moved the kids to the hall (which is our interior ‘safe place’) when we went to bed, and stayed there for about an hour ourselves while the loudest bits blew over. Fudge spent his time between the kids’ two couches on his bed, and we all fit (barely) lying head to toe. But Scott and I went back to our room in the end because we could not sleep on the purloined couch and chair cushions, and the worst had passed. Anyway, much of the northern part of the state got hit hard. To my Ohio friends, I say “think Xenia”. This morning I’m seeing a death toll in the hundreds for Alabama. To quote Caroline, “Eeks”.

Now, to the blog.

One of my biggest pet peeves, inherited from my father, is when radio stations speed up songs to fit their schedules (which is all the time). They have little tempo dials that allow them to push the beat so they can fit in more material.  By which I mean “more commercials”.  I yearn for satellite radio, but have yet to convince my husband of its benefits. It’s an ongoing debate made worse by my current efforts to become physically fit.

Because they give aerobics teachers the same damned control. So in the dance party class, when Lady Gaga sings that she was “Born This Way”, I have to wonder if maybe “this way” was “at warp speed”.  And when JLo sings “Get on the floor”, I think maybe she’s going to wind up on the ceiling.  To put this into some kind of proportion for those who don’t even notice this kind of thing, if the radio stations or aerobics teachers turned their tempo dials the same number of clicks in the opposite direction,  these songs would be absolute dirges. Gaga’s birth would occur in agonizing real time, and JLo would actually move backwards in time, approximately to the cave era when records had to be chiseled out with a hammer and wedge. 

And I don’t get the point. Want more room for commercials? Fine. Play fewer songs. Now that you don’t typically advertise a certain number of songs per hour, doing so wouldn’t interfere with your “forty five minutes of commercial free rock”. (And on a tangential note, yes, I have figured out that means fifteen minutes of commercials per hour, which means a quarter of your programming is advertising.) What good does it do me to hear my favorite song played so fast I can’t even sing along?

And as for aerobics, it’s not like these are slow songs to begin with. This is uptempo music written for the dance floor. What do you gain by increasing the speed by a full fifty percent? If the little beat pusher knobs weren’t so sophisticated, all these singers would sound like Alvin and his chipmunk pals. So that means we’re flailing around out there at greyhound pace, racing to keep up with music that’s being forced to leave us behind. Worse, it’s like the dance party instructor is some kind of failed sports coach who has to dump all that drill-sergeant pseudo-encouragement on her adult students since nobody would turn her loose on a field full of eighth graders. But my classmates love it just as much as the teachers. I swear every time I hear “Let’s pick it up here people!” , I want to just sit on the floor and stage a protest. But the others seem to like being talked to this way. They respond with comments like “Yeah let’s go!” and answer empty threats like “If you people don’t move it faster, we might have to do this one again,” with “Come on guys, speed up and work it.” And “work it” always sounds like it’s coming out of some Valley Girl’s mouth. There are even moves called “cheerleader arms” and “majorette arms”. And I enjoyed both of those until I knew their names.

I’d like to know what a dance routine to Gaga’s “Born This Way” feels like at the right tempo. Hell, I might actually enjoy JLo (feat. Pitbull) if I were trying to dance to it, not do this weird move involving my knees bending in opposite directions while I try to touch the floor. But then, I’ve  never been a real fan of the hyperdrive school of workout. I prefer dance party to the days I spend in the cardio room trying NOT to see the TV set to Fox News. But that doesn’t say much for it. What I really like is Yoga, where the music is peaceful and slow and, as far as I can tell, set at the right tempo. But the Y doesn’t have that every day, or even Zumba, where the songs are so fun that I don’t care about the speed. So I just have to make due with what I’ve got and do dance party twice a week. And since I’m stuck in this rut, do you think it’s possible to help me get these damned songs out of my head?

Up On the Rooftop…

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Thanks to everyone who keeps voting daily. Please keep voting, and rope in anybody else you can think of through 5PM May 2: http://neilgaiman.bookperk.com/engine/Details.aspx?p=A&c=29933&s=7776799&i=1

Every vote counts, and I’m grateful for all of your support.

Now, to the blog entry…

Last week, I forgot the keys on top of the car. Again. I’m getting to be notorious for this, and those damned things are expensive. They’re the ones with the beeper ON the key head that cost eighty bucks to replace. Though they’re certainly not the only things I leave on the roof, they are by far the most costly.

Or anyway, so far they’re the most costly. It’s not like I discriminate. I leave trash up there all the time, only noticing it when it flops off my roof as I back out of the garage. I forget drinks, which often wait until we’re barreling down the highway doing seventy to dislodge into somebody else’s windshield. I forget books, which usually slide down the side of the car as soon as I start moving. I’ve left Caroline’s backpack up there a time or two. Basically anything I have in my hands when I go to buckle or unbuckle Sam’s seat or open the car door from the outside is liable to wind up on the roof. And unless I’m having a highly cogent day, I’m unlikely to remember to get them off again. Sam’s still in that awful five point harness which, while presumably great for keeping him alive in the event of an accident, is a pure nightmare as far as installation and removal of the actual child are concerned. I need both hands to do it, and it resembles a medieval torture device when hooked correctly. Half the time, once I’ve won the battle of the car seat, I’ve forgotten completely that I had anything in my hands to begin with. Which means it will remain there until Scott happens to see it or one of us drives off and it flies away.

I think my favorite car roof story involves Caroline’s lunchbox. The school office called us at around eleven one morning saying,  “We wondered if you were planning to bring in Caroline’s lunch later.”

“I sent it in,” I insisted. “I remember packing it up this morning!”

“Let me look around again.”

It didn’t turn up, and Scott took in a replacement meal. We were baffled as to its whereabouts, because we could both remember getting out of the door with it. But we searched around, and it wasn’t anywhere in the car, and nobody could find it at the school. We had just about written it off for lost when we were driving out of the neighborhood later that evening. It was trash night, and I spied something pink propped on top of a neighbor’s can. I slammed on the brakes. “Scott, did that have princesses on it?”

“What?”

I started reversing down the street. “There! Go get that.  Just … go see what it is.”

By then, he understood, and he popped out to retrieve what did indeed turn out to be the missing lunchbox. As soon as we found it, we realized what had happened, and we knew who the culprit had to have been.

The simple solution, of course, would be for me to never put things on the car roof. Only that’s so impractical as to be laughable. When I haven’t got free hands, I have to put things up there. It’s not my fault the roof is over my head and I therefore never look up there naturally. And remembering such a simple detail is completely beyond my intellectual capacity most of the time. Particularly because we lose things other places far more often. For instance, in spite of our having a key hanger right inside our garage door,  Scott and I both perpetually forget to use it and lose the keys everywhere in the house. We know they’ll turn up eventually, so when a quick search doesn’t produce them, we tend to just use the spares.

I think we’ve temporarily solved the issue as far as the keys go, though. After Scott replaced the most recent victim, which flew off while he was driving down the highway, he put the new key on a wristband keychain. I find it completely annoying to wear the thing, but it DOES seem to be working. I seem capable of slipping my hand into the bracelet when I take the keys out of the ignition or head out to the car. But who knows if it will last. At this point, I’m just kind of grateful that the kids are too big to put up there. You know what I’m saying?