Tuesday, April 24, 2007

Why??? I Don't Understand This!

I caught this news story today.

http://cw2.trb.com/news/kwgn-csu-football-kid-hit,0,7112496.story?coll=kwgn-home-2

I can only imagine how horrible the player feels, but I am still perplexed and have yet to find an answer. Why was this four year old down on the field? He should have been in the stands and not on the sidelines. I realize the students say they have no plans to sue, and if they had said otherwise, they wouldn't have wanted me on a jury. I cannot understand why the parents allowed the kid to be that close and from the video I saw, I don't see a parent nearby either. If anything, they are more to blame.

Wednesday, April 18, 2007

Simon Is Right Again

I get tired of them always booing Simon. He's usually the only person up there with common sense. I would LOVE to hear Randy expand his vocabularly. My husband has taken to predicting what Randy will say and he's usually right. What's up Dawg, Yo, Dope... they all drive me nuts. Someone hand the man a dictionary please!

Last night was country night with Martina McBride--

Phil did Keith Urban and he finally got peppy. I liked that.

Jordin did one of Martina's songs "Broken Wings" if you have ever tried to sing it, you know there is a lot of holding notes and hitting higher notes. Jordin nailed it.

The drunken karaoke clown seems to think that "Something to Talk About" qualifies as country - in my book Bonnie rate is more blues. Whatever, he sucked anyway.

Lakisha - She did Carrie Underwood's "Jesus Take the Wheel." I liked how she started. Then she hit the chorus and to me it was all over the place. She yelled, she expanded words to make them last longer, shortened others, and I just didn't like it at all.

Chris did the one Rascall Flatts song that I don't like "Mayberry". He thinks his nasal quality was for the song, I'm afraid he does the nasal, Billy Goat note holding thing too often for my taste. He had a rough night given the V Tech tragedy, and I feel for him for that reason, it had to be hard focusing on music when your head was with your friends. I don't think he should go tonight, but I bet he will because the one who deserves to go won't.

Melinda did a newer Julie Reeves song. I don't know it, but she definitely pulled sassy off.

Blake - I wasn't horribly impressed. First, Blake picked this song, I'm certain, because it really isn't a country song. Ryan Adam's wrote and performed "When The Stars Go Blue" years ago. Bono and the lead singer from the Coors make it a hit a few years back. I'm betting Blake knew the Bono version better than the Tim McGraw version. I still say Bono's version is the best of the bunch and Blake left me feeling bored.

All in all, I'm betting it comes down to Phil, Lakisha and Chris tonight and Phil will be the one to go home only because someone else keeps staying in there undeservedly.

Monday, April 16, 2007

Is It The Weather?

Sick of rain and snow, my husband and I opted to spend all of Saturday doing errands and getting the kids and myself out of the house. I freelance write and had been completing assignments for IBS (Irritable Bowel Syndrome) and a travel guide for a city in Vermont. There has been nothing but rain and gloom for 9 days here, and this was topped off by a snow storm yesterday. Our basement is now flooding and in general I am sick to death of this weather.

Anyway, Saturday we are driving down Shelburne Road, not one of the best roads in town due to the congestion, and this woman on a side street decides she wants to ignore the red light and pull out in front of traffic. My husband didn't have time to stop, so he got past her okay by swerving into the other lane half way, but she was obviously pissed that he didn't stop and let her out ahead of him. A few miles down the road, she passes us on the right by using a turn-only lane and misses our car by inches as she cut back in. Now, my husband at this point is laughing at her stupidity--she was in a brand new (temp plates anyway) Pontiac Grand Am, our car is a few years old. Had she hit us, she was clearly at fault for passing us in a turn-only lane, and she would have owed us a nice little sum. She then proceeds to give us the finger repeatedly by slowing to a crawl. Meanwhile, there is this elderly woman in the car looking scared to death. I grabbed my cell phone and made it look like I was calling in her license plate number (don't really think that would do any good around here, but it did the trick) she flipped us off once more and sped off until she was on another car's bumper.

Usually this would tick me off more than it did, but the speeds were slow enough that I know any damage caused wouldn't have hurt any of us. This was apparently only the beginning however. We then ran into a real jerk who kept pushing his cart into my daughter anytime she wasn't tucked right against my cart. Instead of apologizing, he would comment that she needed to get out of the way of adults. This store, Mr. G's, doesn't have huge aisles, I understand that, but at the same time, he seemed to be following us around. I would see him go into an aisle and bypass it and all of the sudden he would be right there again, so I'd backtrack to an area I missed and he'd be there again.

At another store (a Bouyea Fassetts Bread store), the clerk insisted that a sale item wasn't on sale until the manager came up front and told her he'd discussed it in the staff meeting and that if she looked at the sales notice pinned to the register she would have seen it.

It just seemed no matter where we went, the people were extremely pushy and argumentative. With this in mind, I wonder how much of this is weather related. I know I deal with SAD from time to time, but this long dreary period when we should be much warmer must be affecting lots.

Monday, April 09, 2007

Fate's Twisted Humor

Growing up in VT, Ben and Jerry's has been a staple of my life for decades. Unfortunately, in the past decade, their quality has gone downhill in my opinion. It's mass produced now and you can tell it.

So a couple weekends ago, I came across another locally made ice cream, Island Ice Cream, that is made about 15 miles from my house. We drove over to the islands in Lake Champlain to buy some. http://www.islandhomemadeicecream.com/

On the drive to Keeler's Bay Variety Store, we saw a smooshed rabbit in the road. Now, obviously my kids are older so this wasn't too disturbing to them. Nonetheless, my daughter did have to ask about how many kids were seeing this dead rabbit and thinking Easter Bunny... It was rather twisted to think about it being the day before Easter and there was a bunny dead in the middle of the road...

The Feminine Mistake?

So I recently heard about the major debate over author Leslie Bennetts' book "The Feminine Mistake." Apparently, the author brings up points about why becoming a stay-at-home mom is a bad thing. My immediate goal was to find out more about this woman. She is a mom, so she gets minor points there.



I have been a stay-at-home mom for thirteen years. Sure, I rely on my husband for money, the government told me long ago that I'm useless to them and that as a "non-working" entity, I am entitled to NOTHING, I do some writing from home to supplement our income and to earn enough credits to qualify for any social security benefits that may or may not be around by the time I am of retirement age. I will not argue the author's points regarding the financial aspects of being a stay-at-home mom.

However, I would not change my life. I'll take the lower pay scale having been out of the actual work force for more than a decade. My kids are well-adjusted, do not touch drugs or alcohol, they have not had sex by the age of 13 like many of their peers, and they are both straight A students. To me, that is far more important that money.

In my childhood, almost every mom in the neighborhood stayed home until the kids were in middle school. We are all well adjusted. The one mom who did work. Her son has been in and out of jail, beats his wife, and is raising his children by ignoring them unless they've done something wrong and in that case he'll smack them around too.

In my own neighborhood now, I look at the homes where the moms either work from home or stay home. Those are the children who never get into trouble. Across the street, we have girls who actively do drugs and are dating boys much older than themselves. In other homes, one boy was dating a girl 10 years older and his mom was at work and seemed not to care "she's slow and seems to be mentally the same age..." A kid down the road almost went to jail for destroying headstones in the cemetary because his mom was working and he was "bored." Some former neighbors used to kill time when their mom was at work by having sex with the neighborhood boys. For these girls it became a game to see how many times they could have sex before the mom came home. Sadly, and far too often, I'd see the mom pull into the driveway and then the boy would be climbing out the bedroom window. Where are they now? Both girls are now in their early twenties and both girls are moms. Each had a child by her 19th birthday.

This isn't what I wanted of my kids. I'll take the loss of pay and stay home until they have matured enough to know right from wrong. My kids know that we could be in a much nicer place financially had I not given up my job as the assistant to the president of a mailing company, but I was willing to sacrifice everything to raise children who know how much I was willing to forego. Eventually, I will be returning to the workforce. In the meantime, I am tired of those who do think that SAHM's are going against the ideals set by feminists years ago. Perhaps the freedom to choose what you feel is right for yourself and your children is the ideal goal.

Would I buy this book? Never. I don't feel the need to pad someone's pockets when they are not showing both sides of the issues.

Wednesday, April 04, 2007

Unseasonably Cold

Global Warming... I am sure there is some merit to it, but suddenly I find myself in the throes of winter again and given that the weather pattern has shifted oddly like this for hundreds of years, I begin to doubt that the change in weather patterns are truly based on global warming. According to my morning news, the warmest day on record happened more than 20 years ago. The coldest according to the grid at Weather.com occured in the 1920s.

So far our winter started off incredibly warm. Through early January we had little snow to talk about. Then something shifted. We started hitting sub-zero temperatures regularly and this was followed by a pattern of holiday snow storms. Valentine's day dumped more than 20 inches on most of Vermont. The same occurred on St. Patrick's Day. My neighbor jokingly asked what Easter would bring. I really wish he'd kept his mouth shut. They are saying that those of us near the lake will be spared the worst of it, most likely sticking near the 2 to 6 inch range. Those in the mountains, enjoy your 3 to 10 inches! This weather sucks! I've had enough and am extremely ready for spring

Sunday, April 01, 2007

Education Today

My daughter is in the 4th grade and has been struggling (very frustrated) with math this half of the year. Our school uses a program developed by the University of Chicago and in my opinion it is worsening the way children are learning math.

In the past month, I have kept notes regarding what she is learning from day to day, week to week. In mid-February, they switched from learning multiplication to division. They started by memorizing basic division (the tables). It hasn't come horribly easy to her, but she's working on it.

The first trouble came when the unit jumped into long division in mid-January. They still didn't have their tables memorized and this suddenly became a huge challenge to many of them. My daughter learned this odd way that I can't see how it helps and now the frustration is kicking in because she cannot understand my way and I think her way is making the paperwork and time involved triple.

So to divide 7 into 320, the kids have to guesstimate how many times 7 would fit into 320. My daughter did a problem similar to this, guessed 30 and that leaves you with 110. She then has to figure out how many times 7 fits into 110, etc. At the end, she adds all of her "guesstimates" and gets the correct answer eventually.

Most of us learned to divide 7 into 32. Subtract, bring down the 0, and continue. It is so much faster, and neater!

Anyway, a week after this assignment, they jumped to geometry and started working on triangles. A week later they were working on surveys/polls. The next week they worked on fractions. Supposedly this breaks up the boredom. Meanwhile, we are back division now, but they are learning how to turn fractions into decimals and she's utterly confused because the division wasn't enforced for long enough that she can get the problems done. Come to find out, not that it was on the homework papers at all, they are supposed to be using a calculator now until they have learned division.

Why not just learn division before you start showing children how much easier and quicker it is to use a calculator? I think it is sad that they are teaching kids to use a calculator before they are teaching them how to do the actual math.

I'm working with her now to teach her my way of division and we are working daily so that it sticks. Sadly, I know many schools started using this "Everyday Mathematics" and I don't think that this system is truly going to help children in the long run!