The RedMolly Picayune-Democrat

Birds

We've been a wee bit obsessed with all things winged here at the Jedi Temple Academy. The boys' fascination with World War I aircraft continues apace. Rhys is in D.C. with Grammy and whiled away several hours looking at the vintage planes in the Air & Space Museum. Fisher draws ever more elaborate (and crowded) scenes of aerial battle, and just informed me that the SPAD XIII was "the most durable plane in the war. And Fokker DR-1s were slow, and if you tried to dive them, their wings would pop off." (Sounds like a design flaw.)

But it's not just metal-winged, human-piloted contraptions that have been holding the boys' interest. Since moving to a house that's surrounded by mature trees, we've had much more opportunity to hear and see birds of every sort first-hand. From darting, jewel-throated hummingbirds to the murders of crows that croak and flap at us as we pass, our neighborhood is packed with feathered friends.

And like all good secular homeschoolers, we're also overly fond of David Attenborough and his canon of well-written, gorgeously filmed nature series. Fisher and I recently started watching The Life of Birds, revelling in the slo-mo footage of peregrine falcons diving (at 200 mph!) down upon sparrows, crossbills delicately extracting green seeds from pine cones, flocks of thousands of swifts spiraling and diving in incredible precision.

Yesterday, we woke up early (oh, so very early) to join a group from Portland's Audubon Society on a walk around the Oaks Bottom Wildlife Refuge, looking at all manner of birds through binoculars and spotting scopes. (Our friends Howard and Suzanne let us borrow their awesome Nikon binoculars; the trip would've really been kind of a wash without them, especially since I'm bat-blind and can't see a damn thing.) We saw two nesting osprey families; one nest even had chicks visible in it, and the male of the other pair spent several minutes flying around with a huge carp flopping in his talons. We saw a peregrine falcon perched hundreds of feet up on a TV tower, surveying his domain. We saw (and heard) great blue herons in the swamps; we learned to identify the shrill calls of peewees and towhees and the rolling warbles of song sparrows and golden-crowned kinglets.

The trip was three hours long, and I was afraid Fisher would poop out before we were done--but he stayed engaged, fascinated and polite the entire time. He had questions for our guide ("What is the little gray bird with ruffled feathers that hides under bushes?" Most likely, our guide told us, a bushtit.), he looked at bird after bird very carefully, he made admirable tries at copying the bird calls. In short, he did a great job.

Then yesterday afternoon, as Fisher and I were walking home from the library, we saw something tiny and squirming on the ground under a maple tree. It was a baby bird, fledged but still very small, with a broken leg, peeping in distress.

I knew we should probably spare ourselves the trouble and leave it where it was. But Fisher's eyes were so sad, and he looked at me so hopefully, that there wasn't really much else I could do. I scooped it into a paper cup (thank goodness we'd stopped at a front-yard lemonade stand a block before!) and we carried it home. We made it a bed of a folded towel in a cardboard box and shut it safely away in the bathroom, planning to take it to the Audubon rescue center today.

Fisher checked on it obsessively throughout the early evening. And at about seven o'clock, he came out of the bathroom with wide, shocked-looking eyes.

"The bird... I think it's..." He trailed off.

"It's not alive?" I asked him, not wanting to say "dead."

He nodded. A tear spilled down his cheek. "It's not moving at all."

I went in and looked; the poor thing was definitely no longer with us.

"I'm sorry, Fisher." What else can you say? I felt all the feelings that every mother in that same situation--I think every mother at some point--has felt. You did what you could, and it wasn't enough, and you knew going into it that it probably wouldn't be enough.

We buried the bird under the tree in the park strip in front of the house, where we thought it wouldn't be disturbed by future gardeners. Fisher picked a red petunia and a pink rose to decorate its grave. Then he went inside and silently rampaged through the house, knocking over furniture and sweeping everything off the bathroom counter. "Life is F'in SHITE," he scrawled on a piece of paper.

What can you say? What can you do? The bird is gone, and only having had it for a few hours doesn't seem to do anything to dull the little boy's pain.

Do you remember this Calvin and Hobbes series, when Calvin found the injured baby raccoon? Yeah.

I'm leaving today (as soon as I finish this post, in fact) for four days in Salt Lake. I think when I get back I'll see what other birding walks are coming up; it's worth it, even if it means prying myself and Fisher out of bed at some hideous ungodly hour.

Will work for food, or, y'know, money

Things are expensive.

Expensive and numerous.

Even though we're doing our best to make things less numerous, the things we can't avoid (groceries, utility bills, the stupid freakin' payment for the stupid freakin' Land Rover that we can't sell because nobody's dumb enough to buy a 15-mpg car in this economy) are still expensive.

So I'm pounding the pavement (virtually, of course... I can't afford to actually drive around looking for jobs), sending out resumes and crossing my fingers that somebody will really really want to hire someone whose only marketable skills involve stringing words together and staring at computers. Not programming computers or doing anything else worthwhile with them, mind... just kinda staring at them. Does that count as research? "Highly developed Internet research skills. Also familiar with spreadsheet and database creation and management. And not prone to getting embroiled in long chats at the water cooler." That's me!

Oh yeah, and of course it has to be part-time, because there's no way I'm giving up my high-quality gig at the magazine. Love the job, love the co-workers, love the working-from-home bit. Not to mention that it pays more per hour than anything else I'm going to find around here.

So, yeah, cross your fingers for me or something. Blah. Snarl.

Music notes

I got an e-mail from a previously-unbeknownst-to-me person the other day who'd stumbled across the Pic-Dem via a comment I'd left at another blog:

While scrolling down the page, I noticed the cover art of Mastodon’s Leviathan on display.  Can I take this to mean that you are personally endorsing this album? Would I be safe in assuming that you believe as I do that this album fucking rules?

Regards,
[redacted]

So I figured I had a great excuse to spend some time nattering on about music.

First of all: yes, in fact, Leviathan does in fact fucking rule. I listen to it a lot. It's loud. It's metally. It's about Moby Dick, for crying out loud. And Remission is almost as good. But I haven't had it as long, and it's growing on me.

After a lengthy-ish hiatus from metal--I dropped out when "nu-metal" became the misbegotten spawn of the day--I've been picking up the pieces recently and listening to a lot of, er, progressive metal. Seriously. It's like the best thing ever for listening to while writing. Except for film soundtracks... but see Fantomas' The Director's Cut for a doubleplusgood rendering of both, sorta, in an inimitable Mike Patton sort of way, featuring Slayer's Dave Lombardo on drums. And the two genres have quite a bit in common, what with the loud-quiet-loud intervals and the deeply atmospheric arrangements. (Hee hee. I said "deeply atmospheric arrangements." Whatta douchebag.)

Anyway. What I really wanted to tell you all about, in case you've been living deep under a rock and haven't heard yet, is the new Portishead album, Third. Oh. My. Heavens. Beth Gibbons' voice has gotten only more gorgeously anguished and shivery during their decade-long hiatus, and the new songs all feature a more brittle, less trippy edge that gives the whole record an incredible sense of nervous immediacy.

So basically, even if you just completely skipped over that whole semi-nonsensical last paragraph, you should go out and buy (or stay home and download) Third. That's Third, by Portishead, and it's their Third album.

Also: did you get your CD yet? I made it to the post office. Actually, that's a lie. Long-suffering Beloved Sweetie made it to the post office. I have been trapped in the midst of self-loathing deadline-looming depressive freakout and haven't really gone much of anywhere... except to Summerfest at Village Home today, where I worked the concession table and repeated the sentences "Pie is two tickets a slice" and "The drinks are in the cooler by your feet" approximately 10¹⁷ times each. Good times, good times.

Roll of thunder, hear my squeak

I'm not afraid of thunderstorms.

Even when I was a kid, they didn't frighten me much; rather, they signalled that it was time for my sister, my brother, my mom and me to crowd around the living room window and look out, waiting for the too-infrequent lightning bolts to jag across the sky. When one finally lit up the night, we'd count together: "One-one thousand, two-one thousand, three..." until the thunderclap unfolded in a long echoing snarl. "It's three miles away, Mommy! Only three miles!" we'd chorus in delicious half-fear... and on the rare occasions when the bolt and the crash came right on top of each other, we'd cling to each other like scared field mice and wait for the storm to roll on by. (And then the power would usually go out.)

Today was, per the forecasters, supposed to be grey and drizzly and meh. Kind of like the weather we've had for the last few days weeks months freakin' years. Instead, it dawned clear and lovely and so we went to Recycled Gardens (they're closing--waah! but all 1-gallon plants are only $2.50 and the lavenders are a buck a pop--hooray!) and then on a hike and then back home to putter about doing gardenly stuff. I got an Early Girl tomato and a pickling cucumber plant into the ground. (So looking forward to making refrigerator pickles this year. So hoping I can keep this wee cucumberlet alive.) And my personal splurge--a "Nick Shaylor" peony--has replaced my poor sun-hating "Endless Summer" hydrangea, which has been relocated to a nice shady spot.

Then, about half an hour ago, I was fixing dinner when a sudden burst of thunder came growling out of nowhere and made me jump. I put down the knife and went to look out the window. It was just the beginning of what's turning out to be one of the most spectacular storms I can ever remember. The lightning is dashing fast and furious, and the thunder is right on its heels. The rain is sluicing down like monsoon season; the underbellies of the clouds are glowing faint orangey-pink from the city lights, intermittently lit up by the lightning's vast crooked strobes. And I'm not frightened, exactly--more like exhilarated, tinged with that same shivery suspense I felt when I was nine and bundled up with my family in the rocking chair. It can rain all it pleases, so long as it thunders too.

(And now the power will probably go out. This post may be more ephemeral than most...)

Hey, these guys went and usurped my life mission, darn them

The Typo Eradication Advancement League (TEAL), that is.

They've even been to Portland, whacking errant uses of the possessive and correcting the too-frequent misspelling of "nonpareil" (a thoroughly nasty candy in its own right). And I didn't even know they were here! I could've given them an eyeful at WinCo, I'm sure.

Well, that does it. Someone else has taken my calling (and, er, my mom's, and I suspect my sister's and Helena's as well). I guess I might as well just retire to the front porch with a twelve-pack of PBR and consider myself washed up.

Baby steps, baby steps; or, when the Universe speaks, perhaps one ought to listen

So last night I was chillin' at Mississippi Pizza Pub* with the fam, my friend Suzanne and her husband Howard. Suzanne is a writer, formerly a lawyer; a comic book and SF fan; and an all-around swell geeky kind of person. And the conversation turned, as it is wont to turn wherever two are gathered together in geekdom's name, to comics.

I told Suzanne and Howard about my nascent-yet-languishing comic project, "Living Dead Girl." (Brand-spanking-new two-sentence description: "It's about a young woman living in a crummy old apartment in Portland, working at a boring barista job and coping with the stresses of romance, family and housemates. Oh, and she's a zombie, and her housemates are, respectively, a pirate and a ninja.") They seemed to think it sounded nice. We talked about comics and comic book stores and the upcoming Stumptown Comics Fest.

Then, this morning, I saw a posting on craigslist from someone looking for writers who would like to be included in a "talent pool" of local comic artists & writers looking to produce fine indie stuff. Heck yeah, I would! Might be just the kick in the butt I need to finish the first issue's script, yes?

So I e-mailed this fellow, and am hoping very much to hear back...

*Portland Spelling Bee, Round Two! Ding ding! Guess who spelled "iridaceous" correctly and came home with a fine new $20 gift certificate? I should've asked if they had any shirts in a size that fits me, 'cos my original shirt looks rather like a burqa on me.

You know you should see, but you look away

He was old, white-bearded, stoop-shouldered and dressed in a tattered green overcoat. But somehow he seemed cleaner than most of the other forgotten souls who linger on Portland's corners, as if maybe there were someone somewhere looking out for him, someone who took him home and washed his clothes and gave him a shower whenever he could bear to be brought indoors.

We were hurrying past on the way back to the car from Powell's. I was carrying a banker's box containing the two books I'd just bought and the two books I hadn't been able to sell. It was cold, and it looked as if the rain would start again any time.

He straightened up as we approached. His eyes--red-rimmed but with an almost wizardly kindness and wisdom in them--met mine.

"Could you spare a quarter?" he asked, in a British-accented voice that had no rancor in it, no whining, only a quiet and somehow hopeless dignity.

"Sorry," I mumbled, as I always do, and looked at my shoes as we hustled the children past him and down the street.

Three minutes later, as we were zipping toward home in our safe, warm (with heated seats, even!) car, I thought of what I wished I would have done. Given him a dollar--not that I had any cash--or, better yet, taken him down to the diner on the corner and bought him a cup of coffee and a grilled cheese sandwich. Asked him, if he wanted to tell me, how a man with such a cultured and gentle voice, with Gandalf eyes, had come to be standing in the rain and asking passersby for a bit of charity. Learned something from this odd old man who, for whatever reason, stood so distinctly apart from the masses of homeless people who wander through Portland's downtown streets. (But not sitting or lying down--no, that is evil and must be punished.)

You know you should see, but you look away. But even when it's out of sight, it's never out of mind.

You bring questions, I bring answers...

...you bring cake, I bring tea. And we'll all snuggle up together in the cloudy dark and, as promised, I will tell you about what you wanted to know, but maybe not enough of it, and maybe too much, and I might mention the wrong bits and leave the wrong bits out.

Anyway: it looks as though most of you are interested in hearing about homeschooling, and also about red wine, and even cats, and there was one oddling among you who wants to know what I'm wearing. (Doc: jeans and a long-sleeved thermal shirt with a black t-shirt over it. Socks, no shoes. Foxy!)

So, duly:

Homeschooling, our routines thereof, and our political opinions pertaining thereunto.
"Routine," unsurprisingly, is not a word upon which our family particularly thrives. We have really nothing resembling a daily routine, but we do have something of a weekly rhythm.

• Monday. Miss Eryn, our capable and game-for-anything nanny (Yes! We have a nanny! Two days a week! So Mama can work, and Papa can work too!) arrives at 10 a.m. sharp. This is the one day of the week when, without fail, the boys have some "book work" to do. Fisher works in Wordly Wise, a vocabulary development program that he doesn't seem to hate too much, and Rhys works in Explode the Code, a phonics-ish program that he actually seems to enjoy. Each boy does a little bit of math. Fisher usually has a puzzle, a brainteaser or a page of standardized test prep to work on. During the term at Village Home, Rhys has a few pages of homework for his Math Fun-damentals class. Once their workbook stuff is completed, they usually go to the park/the zoo/the coffee shop where Eryn works/for some other entertaining excursion. Sometimes they do science experiments. Sometimes they hang around and play with Legos. Eryn is here until 4 p.m., and after she leaves, the boys and I just kinda hang out depending on how much work I still need to get done.

• Tuesday. A day of flux and adaptability! Which usually means that I have lots of work to do, the house needs to be cleaned (Tuesday is sheet-washing day) and the boys are pretty much left to their own Lego-centric devices all day.
   
• Wednesday. Miss Eryn returns! Today, the boys have classes at Village Home: Rhys' are math and "Messy Science," Fisher's are Nature Detectives (with the indomitable Miss Misty!) and art. Afterwards, they pretty much always go to OMSI for a couple hours of science-based fun.
   
• Thursday. More Village Home, this time in the company of Mama! We listen to audiobooks on the way there and back again; right now, we are listening to (and thoroughly enjoying) Gombrich's A Little History of the World. I can tell the boys are paying attention because now they pretend to be such figures from history's great pageant as Alexander the Great, Julius Caesar, Spartacus and Nero. (Guess who always has to be Nero. I need to get that kid a fiddle... no, I don't think we need anything burning.) How come nobody ever wants to be Lao-Tzu? Each of the boys has a fantastic multi-age, multi-disciplinary class today; Rhys' focuses on countries of the world, while Fisher's theme last term was holidays & celebrations around the world. Fisher also has a drama class which involves indescribable amounts of silliness... but he loves it, and he's got to be silly sometimes, right?
   
• Friday. A day of jolly family togetherness! We usually go to the library on Fridays--usually to the North Portland branch, but sometimes all the way down to Central Library. The boys inevitably bring home stacks of Calvin and Hobbes books, plus oodles of nonfiction on whatever their current object of obsession is. (Currently for Rhys, it's Vikings and animals. For Fisher, World War I. For both boys, ancient Rome, especially Pompeii. We've spent the last couple months reading aloud the Roman Mysteries series at bedtime, and hey, who doesn't like plaster body casts and pornographic murals? No, we haven't looked at the pornographic murals together. That's for Mama and Papa only.)

• Saturday & Sunday. These days used to entail extra-jolly whole-family togetherness, but Jim is going to be working every weekend starting in April, so the boys and I will be left to our own devices. Whatever shall we do?

I realize, after writing this down, that our "rhythm" sounds remarkably loosey-goosey... and yeah, maybe it is. But one of the greatest things about homeschooling is the freedom it offers to put aside schoolishness and all that entails--textbooks, tests, attendance sheets and grades--and focus instead on learning whatever, wherever, whenever we choose. And we will wax poetic about all that stuff after the jump, 'cause there are lots of accompanying pics. Also some more stuff about cats and wine.

I put a spell on you

\Noc`ti*lu"cous\, a. Shining in the night.

Also, coincidentally, the word I had to pronounce, spell aloud, then pronounce again to win the weekly Portland Spelling Bee at Mississippi Pizza Pub. We weren't even planning on going, but Elizabeth invited us so persuasively (thank you, Elizabeth!) and then Hibi and Paul talked me into signing up to spell (thank you, Hibi and Paul!) and next thing I knew I had a $20 gift certificate in hand plus a fetching shirt.

Love that Fisher. Always keeping me from getting too big of a head.* And that shirt would totally be funnier if it said "Spelling Bee Champoin."

The boys are leaving tomorrow for a week--no, nine days--in Colorado. It's going to be quiet. A little too quiet. It's already a little too quiet, since it's only 11:35 pm and they're already (unaccountably) asleep. Maybe tomorrow I'll blog about homeschooling the YouTube way, just to assuage the loneliness a little.

Also: if you haven't seen the episode of Metalocalypse where Murderface enters the Celebrity Spelling Bee: um, here.

*Who am I kidding? Muah**-ha-ha-hah! I'm the queen of the world! The empress of all matters linguistic! Few or no words can remain unspelled in my presence!!

**yes, it is totally spelled/pronounced "muah," not "mwah." "Mwah" is for evil Disney stepmother pretenders who can't get that proper umlauty drawl in there.

Happy Prohibition Repeal Day!

On December 5, 1933, after thirteen years of what Herbert Hoover called "the noble experiment," Franklin Delano Roosevelt signed into law the Prohibition Repeal Act. His signature officially ended the reign of the Eighteenth Amendment to the Constitution, which had prohibited "the manufacture, sale, or transportation of intoxicating liquors within, the importation thereof into, or the exportation thereof from the United States and all territory subject to the jurisdiction thereof for beverage purposes."

Though anti-alcohol activists and temperance societies (most famously, the Women's Christian Temperance Union) had predicted that Prohibition would usher in a new golden age, free of poverty and vice, the opposite proved to be true. Organized crime, a minor concern in even the densest urban areas before the 1920s, became a major force from coast to coast. Gangsters and thugs acquired a new glamour, and "the feds" became objects of fear and contempt. Prohibition did little to curtail drinking, especially among young people and fashionable society. As Al Capone said, "When I sell liquor, it's called bootlegging; when my patrons serve it on Lake Shore Drive, it's called hospitality."

After thirteen years of spiraling crime rates, and with the Depression weighing heavily on American society, even former ardent Prohibitionists such as John D. Rockefeller, Jr., had become disillusioned with the movement and its failures. Rockefeller wrote, "When Prohibition was introduced, I hoped that it would be widely supported by public opinion and the day would soon come when the evil effects of alcohol would be recognised. I have slowly and reluctantly come to believe that this has not been the result. Instead, drinking has generally increased; the speakeasy has replaced the saloon; a vast army of lawbreakers has appeared; many of our best citizens have openly ignored Prohibition; respect for the law has been greatly lessened; and crime has increased to a level never seen before."

Roosevelt campaigned on a platform of economic and social reform, including the promise to repeal Prohibition. He kept his word, and the Twenty-First Amendment was ratified just a year after his election. A long national nightmare was finally over. The Constitution, by virtue of its flexibility, had been adapted to correct a serious mistake.

Yet even today, seventy-four years later, the Prohibitionist mindset persists in America. This is the thought pattern that continues to bring you such winning ideas as abstinence-only sex education, mandatory minimum sentences for nonviolent drug offenders and opposition to needle exchange and condom giveaway programs. Apparently, Prohibition wasn't a serious enough failure--or, more likely, our historical memory isn't good enough--to teach us that outlawing personal vices does little or nothing to get rid of them. Rather, it simply drives them underground, creating a shadow economy and underground culture which are made all the more damaging by their secrecy.

But enough of the serious politicizing. Join me today in raising a glass to FDR and the end of Prohibition... and enjoy these alcohol- and temperance-related tidbits while you're at it.

Best old-school style drink: the Sidecar. Invented in Europe near the end of World War I, it offers the irresistible opportunity to drink up like a flapper. It's a simply delicious blend of sprightly spirits. Just combine equal amounts of Cognac (or brandy), Cointreau and lemon juice, and serve up in a martini glass with a well-sugared rim. (Thanks to Chelsea, of the late lamented Cafe Biltmore tapas bar in Grand Junction, for introducing me to this tasty treat!)

The Women's Christian Temperance Union, despite their rather unfortunate focus on Ridding the World of Vice, was actually a pretty cool organization in some ways. They promoted civic involvement and suffrage for women and managed to get many middle-class housewifely women interested in the fight for women's voting rights. Their early leader, Frances Willard, was a fire-breathing Methodist who, after many years spent crusading for temperance, had a change of heart and decided that unbridled capitalism, rather than drunkenness, was at the heart of the world's evils. Then she moved to England and shacked up with Lady Henry Somerset; and, one hopes, developed a nose for fine claret and port. Rock on, Frances; I hoist my glass to you.

The WCTU lives on! Now "the oldest continuously extant non-sectarian women's organization in the world" (per their Web site), they are still seriously down on drinking. And smoking. And pornography. And, sadly yet unsurprisingly, gay rights. They were alive and well in 1962, too, as this extraordinarily funny article from Time makes clear. (The "hour of social freedom" is a ritual I predict my household will not adopt.) Now, they're just kind of a low-rent Concerned Women for America. Except I think the WCTU still only allows, y'know, actual women to join.

Good places to celebrate Prohibition Repeal in North Portland: Billy Ray's Neighborhood Dive (or, as Jim and I call it because of the large neon sign out front that is the only verbage about the place: "Tavern." The most metal bartender in PDX works here.) on MLK and Sacramento. Lupa on Mississippi (I've written about Lupa before, yeh?). The Florida Room on Killingsworth (my brother: "There are a lot of lesbians in here." Me: "Yep.").

How we're celebrating Prohibition Repeal, since we have neither a babysitter nor sufficient funds, yet still possess a backlog of tasty wine: A 2005 Seghesio Cortina Zinfandel, Dry Creek Valley, I think.

Hooray for democracy and rationality! Cheers, y'all.