Scurvy knave

Mr. McP was in a tizzy this morning because I was supposed to sign his report card. I assumed signing was unnecessary, since the signature acknowledges that I, the parent have received it, and in this case, his report card had been handed to me personally, by his teachers, and we had discussed it. He INSISTED that has teacher said that I had to sign it. Why not just sign it then and let the poor kid stop worrying? Because I had already lost it, and now, I'd have to write a note, saying I'd seen the report card, and the note--scrawled on a scrap taken from the recycling--would be proof of my carelessness. No, I don't save my kids' report cards. Isn't that what the transcrips are for? Actually, I do make an effort to save the last report card of the year, since it has the full year's grades on it. This is one of the many idiotic public school policies that make me nostalgic for our homeschooling days.


This weekend, my kids and a friend from the neighborhood went into the park across the street and raked themselves a huge pile of leaves. A random dad who was in the park with his small child joined in, and my kids welcomed him, and they were all planning to have a grand time jumping in their pile. Then other parents arrived, who, not understanding the spirit of the leaf pile, acted put out that my children were playing in it. Their plaintive requests: "Can my child have a turn now?" implying that they were somehow entitled to it. I know it's a public park, and I know that leaves are free, but, judging from my children's description of the encounters, it seems these parents thought the leaf pile had been provided by the city, much like the other playground equipment and that my children, in wanting to jump in the pile they had raked themselves, were being selfish. My children, having been brought up to be polite, deferred to the other parents and hardly had any time to enjoy the fruit of their labor. Am I being petty here? It's too much, perhaps, to say, "Go rake your OWN leaf pile." My kids didn't mind the dad who helped, and then let his kid jump, but I don't think they're wrong for being annoyed at seeing their pile destroyed by others who didn't even have the courtesy to thank them.

I'm still reading The Arctic Grail by Pierre Berton. Much of it is devoted to John Franklin's tragic1846 expedition. His orders were to find the elusive Northwest Passage. He and his entire crew died, most likely of scurvy, and the British navy (and later some Americans) searched for twelve years before finding conclusive evidence of the crew's fate.

If scurvy was the primary cause of their deaths, a secondary cause was snobbery--not of John Franklin personally, but of the British Admiralty in general whose attitude influenced most arctic explorers of the period. A handful of explorers realized that the diet of arctic natives--fresh meat and blubber--was what prevented scurvy, but most refused to eat the native diet, and granted, it does sound singularly unappealing. Another problem was the navy's refusal to listen to arctic whaling captains, who were more competant with ice, but, since whalers had lesser social status, and were not British Navy officers, their expertise was rejected. Inexplicably, none of the explorers had the least idea of how to hunt and had no intention of learning. Instead, they lugged mountains of provisions through areas that had plenty of wild game. Sometimes they hired natives to hunt for them. Sometimes they were forced to resort to cannibalism. They also refused to use dogsleds. Instead, they built massive sledges designed to be hauled by men. Indeed, the explorers of the time actually believed that man-hauled sledges were somehow nobler, and that using dogs was a form of cheating. The result of this attitude was men who were completely worn out and taken by scurvy all the quicker. On the one hand, we had men who endured unimaginable hardship in order to map the arctic and contribute knowlege of the region--and they made many important contributions. On the other hand, The Arctic Grail is, among other things, a catalog of stupendous incompetance.

Baggage

I started blogging in 2005, and yesterday I went through my archives and deleted a ton of posts. It felt good to weed the mental baggage: the memes, the "today I did this," the "bitching about my co-workers" posts. There are, however, a some posts that I deemed worth saving: most of my book and movie reviews, for example, the chronicle of the winter we spent building the addition onto our house, some other things. The original bunk bed story is pretty funny, though I say it myself. There was the time my nipples accidentally ruined one of Creigh Deed's campaign ads. There are some good Mad Scientist stories: the time we were in Sears and he thought we were in the Gap, the time he hacked through the security on the library's computer and got a stern tap on the shoulder from the librarian, the time he and his friend were giggling over a paperback book that I assumed was obscene that turned out to be short stories by Isaac Asimov, the time he used Celtic Runes to spell out the message "JESUS, YOU'RE AN IDIOT" to his science teacher and she translated it. There is also my post about Adele Davis and how I suffered because my mom followed her nutrition philosophy. That entry, written in 2005, brings multiple visitors to my site, daily, and is still generating comments. Indeed, just yesterday, someone claiming to be Adele Davis' son contacted me. His message was somewhat incomprehensible and I didn't understand why he mentioned cowboys until I realized he was referencing my profile picture. Ick.

All of that is on my old blog at a different hosting site. I don't back up my blog entries. Is that what most people do?

One series of posts I might republish is a recap of the novel Clarissa by Samuel Richardson. Clarissa is the longest work of literature in English. Written in 1748, it tells the story of a young woman's determination not to give in to the man who goes to great lengths to have her. The themes of Clarissa are so foreign to modern sensibilities, and the plot is so ridiculous, it comes across as a farce, although I gather that eighteenth century readers took it seriously. It was also made into a movie, starring Sean Bean as Lovelace, the wicked man who's after Clarissa, and a forgettable actress in the title role. I'm considering rereading it and writing an improved snarky recap, but the thought of devoting months to rereading a book that drove me crazy isn't appealing right now. On the other hand, some people who read my recap liked it enough that they bought Clarissa so they could read it themselves.

Speaking of lengthy books, I am currently reading The Arctic Grail by Pierre Berton--631 pages, but well worth the effort. Many non-fiction historical accounts are very dry. I sometimes read them like medicine; good for me, but so hard to get down. The Arctic Grail isn't like that. If it isn't the most entertaining and readable work of history I've ever read, it's definitely in the top five. The title sums up the subject matter: the 19th century quest for the Northwest Passage, and later, the North Pole. Highly recommended.

I'm also reading A Lecturer's Tale by James Hynes. A standard academic satire. Why are academic satires always set in English departments in the Midwest? Is it because writers are most comfortable with English, or is it because English departments are guilty of the worst crimes of puffed up, deconstructionist, post-modern, academic nonsense? Still, Hynes is a good writer, and his satires are more entertaining than some I've read, and at the very least it makes me glad I didn't choose that career path.

House of plague

Mr. McP has returned to school but now Miss G is glassy-eyed and feverish, and Drama Queen and Mad Scientist are complaining of sore throats and cough. I think we're lucky to get this thing over with early in the season, although I worry about my girls because they have asthma. Drama Queen got pneumonia last winter after having the flu, but there was not a lot I could have done to prevent them getting it, since the vaccine takes two weeks to provide protection, I've been told, and the schools were supposed to start distributing after my kids were already exposed, and anyway, I've learned that they have run out.

As I said, I'm not too worried, and I'm glad that the people who commented on yesterday's entry feel more or less as I do. Let's hear it for common sense! Then again, I was thinking about my great-great-grandmother who lost four of her five children in the same week in an epidemic. Ironically, her surviving child, my great-grandfather, died at age 38 during the 1918 flu pandemic.

I feel well. Perhaps I'm immune. I was seven years old during the earlier swine flu outbreak in the 1970s, and maybe I caught it then, although they're saying it doesn't necessarily confer immunity for this outbreak. I don't remember being sick, but I do remember hearing about it on the news, so I imagine the coverage must have been frequent and obsessive, because what seven-year old pays attention to current events?

That's my handsome husband in the photo, btw.

Corn phone, H1N1, and Nursing Students

We got the phone situation cleared up. After being totally frustrated by the Sprint store, we went elsewhere. I am not a big fan of Best Buy, but this can be said of them: they will sell you a phone and not barricade themselves behind invisible fortresses and/or pretend that logging into their computers is a process that takes fifteen minutes of unbroken concentration. While being ignored at Sprint, we browsed among their phones and found a cute one that is made of corn. Everything is made of corn nowadays. When we went out to dinner the other night, our "plastic" cups were made of corn. I think the expansion they're building onto my hospital is made of corn. So at Best Buy, when the salesman asked which phone we wanted, I said, "I'd like that stout, squat one that's made of corn." (And it does have a square profile, so "squat" is an appropriate adjective. I don't remember saying "stout" but Drama Queen and Miss G both insist that I did.) Apparently the Best Buy guys aren't educated about their products because our guy clearly thought I was crazy, but he was polite about it and he sold me a phone anyway, because, you know, it's his JOB. Equally important, I now have proof of being fabulously modern and enlightened since we buy phones made of corn now.

H1N1 has invaded my family, via Mr. McP who developed a fever of 101.8 and other classic flu symptoms. Several of his classmates had confirmed H1N1. He is now recovering, and so far no one else in our house has gotten sick. It really wasn't too bad and he was far sicker when he had the seasonal flu last winter. Everyone I talk to in person about H1N1 seems to have the same attitude I do--some mild concern but nothing approaching panic. Then the TV news does stories implying that our entire nation is in the grip of mass hysteria. One segment--I forget on which network--showed people lining up for hours to get the vaccine. They all talked about how frightened they were and how they would endure any hardship, just so long as they could get vaccinated. They interviewed one mouth breathing meathead who bellowed, "The side-effect of not getting this shot is DEATH!" Really? Consider this, Mr. Meathead: A "side-effect" of getting in your car and driving to your Swine Flu Vaccine Fiesta is also DEATH. (Potentially.) It amazes me how Americans freak out about any imagined threat, and yet blithely hop into their cars fifty times a day without a second thought.

Nursing students. I often felt out-of-place and unwelcome as a nursing student in hospital units, so I was looking forward to being helpful and supportive of any nursing students I encountered. The ones on my floor are first years, and some of them are terrified. I guided one through assessing our patient, something I always wished one of my co-assigned RNs would do with me.

At one point, a nursing student told me my patient had a question about a non-urgent matter. I was just going into that patient's room, but was addressing her more pressing issue, pain, so I forgot about the non-urgent question. Later, the nursing student reminded me, and I told her I'd forgotten but that I'd follow up with the patient in a few minutes, which I did. A little later, I noticed the nursing student had written in the chart: "Again, reminded co-assigned RN, Patience, to address patient's question about the [non urgent matter]." The "again" is a nice touch, no? It's more funny than annoying.

Stoopid cell phones

Cell phones themselves are nice to have, but everything connected to them is a pain in the ass of the highest order. Can you tell I've been having a frustrating day? I'm working night shift this week, and it isn't agreeing with me. Daytime sleep feels so unwholesome, like I've been drugged, and it gives me nightmares. Then, since yesterday was my day off, I slept until 3:00pm, having worked all night the night before thinking I'd have to stay up late to stay on a night shift schedule, but I ended up falling asleep at 11:30pm and sleeping all night, so now I'm back on a "day" schedule, but I have to work all night tonight.



Anyway, last January we became a modern, technological family with cell phones for all, and it has been an endless headache. Everywhere, there are receptacles of water--the dogs' bowls, toilets--in which my children have dropped their phones, which causes the phones to act funny or die entirely. Not only that, they're buzzing and lighting up constantly, and I mean constantly. Our first bill showed we'd sent and received 50,000 texts. FIFTY THOUSAND TEXTS. And this month's bill had an extra $92 charge for "data" because Mad Scientist wasn't aware that it's not free to connect to the internet with your phone.

Now, Miss G's phone has died, mysteriously--no water involved--and we went to the Sprint store to see what we could do about it. Only we never got to actually talk to anyone because the associates were helping other customers, but when a customer finally left, the associate who had been helping him, and who had told us someone would be assisting us soon, disappeared. The other customer was having a very long and complex interaction with her Sprint associate, so long and complex that her pregnancy became visibly more advanced while I waited for her to finish. A different Sprint associate appeared on the floor and busily logged onto her computer, but she put up such a strong "don't approach me" vibe, she might as well have erected a force field around herself. It is not an exaggeration to say it was impossible to approach her. When I realized we had been waiting for nearly half an hour, I walked out. The same thing happened the last time we went to the Sprint store too.

Remember when all you did to get a phone was call the phone company? It would take about a day for them to set it up, and then you would call your friends and tell them your new number and they'd write it down in their address books. Remember when phones served solely as a means of communication and not as a device for storing information so no one fussed about losing their contacts, or needing "wireless backup" or whatever to be able to preserve their contacts because everybody had a HANDWRITTEN ADDRESS BOOK? As you did yourself. Remember that?

A while back I heard a story on NPR about how the practice of saving all your numbers on your cell phone means that you no longer bother to memorize important phone numbers, and that this is becoming a problem for people who are arrested because when it's time to make their one phone call, and they don't know the number because they didn't memorize it because it was saved on their cell phone. I am sure that is a useful lesson for us all.

Politician's book club

Election Day will be so anticlimactic, compared to last year. Be that as it may, we are preparing to vote in our local elections here in Charlottesville and people are fired up about various local issues. I like the intimacy of local elections, when the candidate himself (or herself) will turn up on your doorstep, or you bump into him at a neighbor's party, or your kids' school's open house, and you exchange the URLs of your respective blogs. Charlottesville is small enough that the local politicians are truly accessible to the people.

Anyway, our weekly paper does a mini interview of each candidate, and I was happy to see that one question they asked each person was "What are you reading now?" I love to hear what other people are reading--or in this case--what they want us to think they are reading. But who knows, maybe these books are what they are actually reading, although I noticed that no one admitted to Three Nights of Sin by Anne Mallory or even something by John Grisham (who lives here).

I tend to judge people by what they are reading. It's not that I can't forgive the occasional mindless book--I like brain candy as much as anyone--but there are some books it is best to distance yourself from. For example, this same paper once interviewed a man who, at the time, was the principal of Charlottesville's only public high school. He was asked to name his favorite book of all time, and what did he say? The Bridges of Madison County. Eee gads. Of all the books in the world, he picked that one? He couldn't have said the Bible, or War and Peace or even freaking Pride and Prejudice? Luckily, he was no longer principal by the time my kids got there.

So, what are Charlottesville's political candidates reading now? I present a list:

The Tipping Point by Malcolm Gladwell
The Seven Storey Mountain by Thomas Merton
Rant: An Oral Biography of of Buster Casey by Chuck Palahniuk
Lift Every Voice: The NAACP and the Making of the Civil Rights Movement by Patricia Sullivan
The One Minute Manager by Kenneth Blanchard
The Bible
Moon Shot: The Inside Story of America's Race to the Moon by Dan Parry
Thomas Jefferson on Leadership by Coy Barefoot
The Facebook Era by Clara Shih
The Steel Wave by Jeff Shaara
Biographies of Cicero and Winston Churchill
Shoveling Fuel for a Runaway Train: Errant Economists, Shameful Spenders, and a Plan to Stop them by Brian Czech
Keeping the Faith by Richard McKinney
The Lost Symbal by Dan Brown
The Lords of Finance by Liaquat Ahamed
A biography of Stonewal Jackson
The Hemingses of Monticello by Annette Gordon-Reed
Game Plans: Sports Strategies for Business by Robert Keidel.
The Restorative Practices Handbook: Building a Culture of Community Schools by Costello & Ben Wachtel
The Story of Edgar Sawtelle by David Wroblewski
Leaderless Jihad, Terror Networks in the 21st Century by Marc Sageman
Five Minds for the Future by Howard Gardner
Team of Rivals by Doris Kearns Goodwin

Heavy on the non-fiction and a lot of dull business books, but maybe this is what we want our politicians to read. I'm not even sure what use I am getting out of this information. At least no one is reading The Bridges of Madison County. Wouldn't it be fun if Obama had an online book club?

What am I reading?
The Wedding of the Waters: The Erie Canal and the Making of a Great Nation by Peter Bernstein
and The Wild Colonial Boy by James Hynes, which is about the IRA.

The Erie Canal book is good, although I realized--and this fact actually kept me awake for a considerable time the other night--that I have never really seen the Erie canal. This would be excusable if I were from Kansas, but since I'm from Buffalo, it is not. Oh, I've seen it from the New York State Thruway, whizzing past at 65 mph, and when I did crew we used to row down the Black Rock Canal, which I always assumed was the Erie Canal, but I I'm not sure if that's correct. Part of the book's interest for me was the rivalry between the two small villages of Buffalo and Black Rock, NY, each of whom wanted their town to be the terminus of the canal. Buffalo won, and became a great shipping city, and Black Rock was eventually absorbed by the city. My brother lives there. It's a gritty neighborhood of 19th century cottages, railroad tracks, drawbridges, abandoned shopping carts, and weedy sidewalks. The sort of place where you can be pregnant and smoke publicly, and no one will bat an eye.

That's part of the Black Rock canal in this picture. I used to love rowing under that drawbridge when it was up. It's kind of exciting to be in a skinny shell, with a lake barge looming over you.

Anyway, one of the most impressive parts of the Erie Canal, according to Wedding of the Waters, is in Lockport, NY where a series of five steep locks haul boats up the cliff down which Niagara Falls plunges. I grew up thirteen miles south of Lockport and I have never been there. According to Bernstein, these locks are still functioning today, much as they did 200 years ago. I think that may be a project for next summer: to take my kids to Lockport and view the locks. Maybe we can take a cruise down the canal, and I can bore my children to death by rhapsodizing about western and central New York.

For lack of anything else

I am eating a meatloaf sandwich. The only excuse for meatloaf, really, is that its leftovers can be consumed in sandwiches, with lots of mayonnaise.

Later, I will go running. I've been running the same route through downtown Charlottesville for the past ten years, only recently I've been running a mountain trail once a week. It's a trail that starts at the foot of Monticello, and ascends, gently but relentlessly--350 feet-- for two miles to the Monticello Visitor's Center parking lot. Then you get to run the whole way back, downhill, but even running downhill takes a considerable amount of energy.

The trail is very crowded on weekends, because it was built for the use of adventurous tourists who might like to hike to Monticello instead of drive, and lots of local people use it for exercise too or take their out-of-town guests there. I prefer weekday mornings on the trail when the only other people you encounter are serious exercisers and everyone is courteous. On the weekend, many of the trail users seem to have agreed beforehand to waddle five abreast and turn to glare reproachfully at anyone who attempts to pass them. And if they're not waddling, they're sneering. What's it to you, oh Northface-clad People of the Mountain, if my running clothes are sloppy and not of the Best Brand Name?

Now that I am full of all this meatloaf, I will probably have a bad run, anyway.

People wanted to see my new boots and dress, so here they are.



I love the Donna Reed retro look of the dress but I don't have any occasion to wear it to. I'm sure one will present itself eventually. It's a bit too "notice me" for the grocery store.