Schoolless

Sunset Junque

Up for a day trip?

Just two hours from Chicago, Sunset Junque offers great fodder for anyone's sense of silliness, as well as genuine treasure-hunting opportunities. Architectural salvage, kitchy garden ornaments, lots of rusty metal objects and plain old junk abound.

Whenever our family travels to Michigan, we never miss the opportunity for a little detour to see what the proprietor of Sunset Junque has in store for us. Last weekend, I dragged my friend Mary over there. Well, "dragged" isn't really the right word. She actually went quite willingly. We had driven to New Buffalo to stay at her brother's cottage and enjoy the beach for the day. Since the beach isn't very enjoyable in 50 degree weather with light drizzle, we opted for a little road trip up the coast to the town of Glenn.

The poor lady named Josie manning the establishment was frozen stiff, trying to warm up by the light bulb, the only available heat source in the decrepit and musty shed that serves as Sunset Junque's main office. She wanted nothing more than to go home and curl up with a nice, stiff drink. She demonstrated remarkable patience as Mary and I perused the wares, took our time comparing the various types of aged terra-cotta finials and cast metal garden animals, and the kids ran around using old, rusty farm implements as swords (eeek...). In the end, she gave us generous discounts on two garden bunnies, a flying pig, a pair of those finials, and some miscellaneous metal railing. I'm sure it was with great relief that she bid us adieu as she pushed the gate shut behind us, and went home to enjoy a good book and her hot toddy.

Should you decide to take a trip to Sunset Junque this season, you may want to round out your day with a nice country meal, at Kalico Kitchen, just a few miles north on the Blue Star Highway. Chicken fried steak, cooked greens, corn bread & a tall glass of iced tea. Mmm...

Playing catch-up

It's been that kind of week. Not enough time for anything, yet I can't quite account for what we have done. You have such weeks, don't you? I think they usually happen when outside duties, appointments and obligations intrude on the things that you want to do. And you have to scramble to fit your life around them.
A camera is a great thing to have when you want to chronicle your comings and goings without having to write anything down. So, in reviewing last week's snapshots, I realized that we actually got some things done.

Nadia made necklaces following mathematical patterns.

Peter drew a scale plan of our kitchen, and Nadia helped him decorate it with pictures of our cats, hypothetical mice, not hypothetical ants, and even an anteater.

We made a stab at our family tree using stamps cut out of an eraser. As the above kitchen plan, the family tree included pets, both living and deceased. (Note that we are straight line descendants of Adam and Eve.)

We spent a day at the beach.

We made bone models out of drinking straws, and tested them for strength.

Drinking straw bone models are fun to look through.

Oh, let's see, what else? We also stained our teeth and tongues pink with disclosing tablets while studying teeth and plaque, we dropped out of math class, but we did do a lot of work with fractions while studiously avoiding worksheets, and helped an imaginary but very dull-witted farmer add up the feet and tails of his livestock. The kids also discovered the Klutz window art kit, so we now have beautiful stained glass throughout the house.

Move over, Dilbert.

Have you ever received an Employee Handbook?

Dull stuff. The first draft of ours, created for our bike shop operation, was 46 pages of pure, unadulterated boredom. But we really wanted our staff to read it. So, we decided to crop the text, and let our kids illustrate it.

(No, you don't have to read it, just look at the pictures.)

This created an opportunity for a discussion about working with employees, rules and regulations,and personal responsibility. In other words, it got the kids involved in our business in a tangible way. And, I believe, the pictures provided a measure of amusement for our staff.

Maybe it's a little unorthodox, but I think it works. Whadaya think?

Worksheets be damned

I don't know where math anxiety comes from in our house, but it may have something to do with worksheets. My kids, especially the older one, think of worksheets as gratuitous torture which force them to do mental contortions just for the heck of it (I think the unbridled use of Saxon worksheets in my son's third grade classroom was responsible). For my part, I have been conditioned over the years to think of worksheets as a good way to get a handle on math facts and operations.

Everyone in our house has a pretty decent math sense. Which is not the same as knowing their math facts. Though, is knowing math facts a good way to learn to love math? What if math facts could come gradually through the love of math?

As adults, we know that facility with math facts helps us at the bank, the gas station, at the store, and in the kitchen. To kids, it must seem that math facts only help you do math problems. It's hard to see how they can help you solve any other kind of problem. And I've discovered that, more than anything, my kids, and many other kids I've observed, want to solve problems.

So, here's a problem for you (straight from Marilyn Burns' I Hate Mathematics):
How many popcorn kernels can fit in a mailbox?

This problem captures the kids' attention immediately for two reasons: it is completely silly ("Are we really going to stuff popcorn into a mailbox?!"), and it requires making popcorn ("Can I, can I?").

After the popcorn was popped, I found a smallish lightbulb box and asked the kids if they had any ideas about how to guess the number of pieces of popcorn that would fit in it without counting every one. Nadia's plan was to figure out how many were in one layer at the bottom of the box, then count how many layers the whole box could accommodate, and add them all up. Peter liked the idea of measuring the average kernel, then measuring the sides of the box, and mathematically (!) figuring out how many kernels the box could accommodate. Both perfectly good solutions, both arrived at independently, and not a worksheet in sight.

We considered both solutions, decided on Nadia's for the time being, and established that the box would hold about 412 kernels of corn. Now the problem was to translate the contents of the box into the contents of the  mailbox. Peter suggested that one way to tackle it was to see how many layers of boxes would fit in a mailbox, how many boxes were in each layer, and multiply it out. Not a bad plan. We went to check it out. Just in case, I brought along a tape measure.

First, we measured the mailbox using our small box. We omitted the curvy top of the mailbox, because it was non-conforming, and also, if we really stuffed popcorn in there, then it wouldn't open. We discussed the fact that so far we have been using non-standard units of measure: kernels of corn and lightbulb boxes.

For comparison, I suggested we should also take standard measurements, and that's where the tape measure came into play.

Back at home, we tabulated our findings, and came up with the following results:

• Using the non-standard units, the mailbox could hold about 101.25 lightbulb boxes.
• If each lightbulb box held 412 kernels, that the mailbox could hold 41,725.
• Using the standard units, the mailbox had the volume of 135,675 cm3, while the lightbulb box had the volume of 1,200 cm3.
• The mailbox volume was 113 times that of the smaller box.
• Thus, by this method, the mailbox would hold 46,556 pieces of popcorn.

So, if you really want to turn your mailman's day into a nightmare, you need about 50,000 corn kernels, which translates to roughly 75 bags of corn, at maybe 50 cents each, or between $35-40. Is it worth it?

earth

a little of this

and a handful of these

turn into these

then these,

and finally: this!

Love your Mother.

The bumpy road to commitment

The ranking, competition and rewards system inherent in Tae Kwon Do instruction are a bit at odds with our laissez faire approach to personal achievement, advancement and life in general. Yet, we like and respect our instructor, enjoy the challenge, and find that the structure provides a valuable counterpoint to our otherwise disorganized lives.

Peter, who was the first one in our family to take up the art, is on the verge of earning his black belt. And we are asking ourselves whether reaching that milestone is consistent with what he wants and who he is.

Lately, he's been avoiding Tae Kwon Do. I've asked him if he wants to continue with the practice, and he insists that he does, but his actions don't support that claim. "Oh, let's not go today, let's go tomorrow..." and tomorrow "can we go on Saturday?" I have also offered to discuss with his instructor the possibility of taking a break for a number of weeks to let him regroup, and come back to the practice for his own reasons, whatever they may be. Unlike many other kids, he's not motivated by the potential rewards of reaching a higher rank. He's not competitive. While he is physically agile, he doesn't have the perfectionist streak that would drive him toward achievement.

Last week, we were working on personal histories, pasting important milestones from our family life into a timeline. To my surprise, Peter took some photos of himself doing Tae Kwon Do, and put them on his personal timeline, alongside his Playstation, and getting his cat Freddy.

I bit my tongue. But if TKD ranks up there with PS2 and a kitten, then there's hope for us yet.

It's coming down...

A nest for birds
there ain't no words
for the beauty
the splendor
the wonder...

OK, not my hair, my tree! My elm is coming down today, and I'm sad...

How many steps ago was that?

One of my favorite recent acquisitions is a nearly complete set of Brown Paper School Books. Since the weather was cooperating last week, we did a really fun activity from the Big Beast book of dinosaurs. The cool thing about the Brown Paper books is that while the title suggests you may be learning about one thing (in this case, dinosaurs), you're really learning about a whole bunch of other stuff at the same time. I think in this activity, we were able to combine a little writing, math, crafts, PE, geology, history, a break at the park, and practical skills, like a small grocery shopping trip, using an automated check-out clerk.

We started out making ten signs for pivotal periods in the earth's history, including the present, the appearance of first true humans, last dinosaurs, first dinosaurs, first land animals, etc, etc. Each sign included the name of the period, it's chief characteristic (along with an amusing illustration), and the number of steps we would be taking back in time. Each step was to represent a million years. We had some notion of what a million years looked like, because we had also completed an earlier activity comparing our age, represented by about 1/32" on a ruler, to a million years, represented by a football field. So the steps we would be taking were the equivalent of one football field each, or 1,000,000 years. Got that?

We located a suitable field not too far from our house, and started planting signs. We attracted the attention of a Middle-Eastern grandma with two kids, and a gentleman and his dog, but other than that, no one bothered us.

This is what it looked like after Nadia planted the 7th sign (The first two ones are really close together, so they look like one. Believe it or not, only two measly steps separate the civilized creatures that we are today from our early human ancestors.) We continued to plant signs 8 and 9, and celebrate the milestones along the way.

After sign number 9, we only had one more to plant. But it presented a problem:

To go back to the beginning of time would require us to take an additional 4160 steps (about 2 miles?) for the total 4600 required. So, we decided to cheat a bit. We walked an estimated 1500 steps to the local Jewel, bought some snacks, and supplies for the Jello geology project (there is a bad pun in there somewhere), took a few extra steps around the store for good measure, went outside, and planted our sign.

So the beginning of the earth is now officially at the Jewel-Osco at Foster and Pulaski in Chicago.

Who's there?

The other day we decided to go and find the dang woodpeckers. For a few weeks now,the neighborhood has reverberated with their incessant t-d-d-d-d-d-d-d-d-d! T-d-d-d-d-d-d-d-d! In stereo!

It stops people in their tracks. They stand there, with their noses pointing up at the sky, searching. They get off their bikes and look up, hoping to glimpse the source of the noise. "I can sure hear'em, but I can't see'em."

It took some effort. Peter and I clambered over heaps of dead leaves and broken logs, being careful not to get swallowed by the bog that the recent thaw created on the edge of the woods. We craned our necks this way and that, we peered into the thicket of branches over our heads, and - lo and behold - there it was. Way above our heads, pecking furiously, pausing only to give my camera the evil eye...

On a nearby branch, we could also see the ample evidence of his labors.

The guy at the other end of the block wasn't such a good sport about being photographed, so this is the best I could do:

Even now, as I write this, I can hear them. While other birds sing their hearts out in search of love, the woodpeckers work away.

Secret life (sort of) meme

Unlike Lori of Chicagolo, I don't have a secret life. Which doesn't mean I don't have secrets. The secret I'm about to share is perhaps not so original. In fact, I suspect that many women my age share this secret. OK, here it is:

I want my body baaaack!

(at 25, with my dad)

Thing is, I never really had a body body. I'm descended from Polish peasant stock, "stock" being the operative word here. I've always had more width where I needed length, and extra curves in some places, but none to speak of in others. But there was one thing I had in droves: muscle. Quads enough for a few women my size, obliques, laterals, glutes, biceps, triceps, you name it. With the muscles came the assurance that I could do pretty much anything I wanted. I wasn't a daredevil by any stretch, but I never had any reason  to question my strength and stamina. I swam several hours a week, rode my bike to and from work, hiked mountain trails, paddled kayaks, and did charity bike tours with very little training or preparation.

The first child didn't stop me right away. In fact, my son-to-be accompanied me on the the Twin Cities to Chicago AIDS ride during our first trimester together, despite my doctor's hesitation. Since technically, I was still childless, I continued swimming right through my pregnancy. But somehow, between baby number one, and baby number two, and certainly after she came along, things started to slow down. I made faint stabs at keeping fit. I bemoaned the fact that I no longer had the leisure to disappear into the swimming pool for an hour and a half.

My body was never going to be the same again.

This stark realization came upon me one day while I was attempting to jump rope, and found that that the effort of propelling my body into the air and letting my knees gracefully absorb the shock turn after turn was something I was no longer capable of doing. Similarly, I found that I was terrified of hurling myself head over heels for the simple joy of turning a cartwheel. Was it the knee injury that knocked me off my feet one day in Tae Kwon Do a couple of years ago? Was it the babies? Age? Arthritis?

Was it inactivity?

I've always been an enthusiastic walker, often going on urban expeditions for several hours. On a trip to San Francisco last summer, I logged 17 miles in one day, just getting the lay of the land. But it never seemed like I was moving enough. Oh, I felt great after each walk: clearheaded and exhilarated. But it wasn't changing the way I felt in the long run. Maybe it was too familiar, or not regularly intense enough (I mean, I don't walk that kind of distance regularly!) to really make a difference.

After many months of feeling helpless, suffering the aches and pains, and mourning my loss of agility, I happened upon a book. The book was called Running and Walking for Women over 40 by Kathrine Switzer. I stood in a aisle at Borders eyeing it sheepishly, wondering if anyone would notice that I am, in fact, over 40, if I picked it up. Eventually, I reached for it and skimmed the table of contents. Oh, what's the use, I'll never do it! I thought as I replaced it on the shelf. After a few minutes of wandering through the store, I returned and picked up the book again. I read this passage:

Letting my mind free-float during a walk or run is therapeutic for me; it's another form of dreaming. The demons come out, the creative comes in.

I already knew that feeling from walking. If I could make that my motivation, I should be able to progress from walking to running. The book came home with me.

If you have never run (and, for all the physical activity I got in my earlier years, I never have), you can't do it for very long. This can be tremendously discouraging when starting a fitness program. The labored sound of your breath, and the pounding of your pulse reverberating in your ears often leads to the conclusion that you just can't do it. There isn't time enough in a lifetime to turn you from a sweating, heaving, out-of-breath heap of aches and fatigue into a runner!

Got ten weeks?

Switzer claims that's how long it takes. Oh, you won't run a marathon. But you may be able to sustain a comfortable 30-minute run. In another ten weeks, you may advance to 60 minutes if you choose.

I choose!

So, I made a commitment to take the baby steps recommended by the author. Because I'm already an accomplished walker, I began with the third week of her program, in which actual running is introduced. Actual running! Surely, no actual runner would be impressed by it: two lousy minutes, followed by three minutes of walking. Repeat five times. Those first two minutes of running were the longest two minutes of my life! But I knew that after those two minutes I could stop, and regain my breath (and dignity) during the walk portion of the drill. I survived the first week.

This was the first time in many years that I decided to go public with my athletic pursuits. I made up index cards for each week's routine, and posted them prominently on my refrigerator. After each completed workout, I made a big show of placing a checkmark next to it on the index card. And somehow, that was all the motivation I needed.

I am now five weeks into the program, and today I completed a sustained 16-minute continuous run, experimenting with a slightly faster pace. When I first started, I was only able to think about when the run will be over. Now, I am able to think about my breathing, modulate it, adjust my pace, or just let my thoughts wander. I find that I look forward to the run; it has become part of my routine. There are days when I come back tired and sore, but usually I feel energized, and my mind is alert. I am comfortable pushing the pace of the program a little bit, and I allow myself one or two days each week when I "accomplish" a little more than what is prescribed. My lungs have stopped hurting. So have my joints. I feel a tremendous sense of satisfaction, and more importantly, a renewed sense of faith in myself. My body may never be the same again. But when my 43th birthday rolls around in June, I will be able to run an hour.

Which is a heck of a lot more than I could do on my 34th. Or ever.