New art in progress

Bo King is making a new elevator for the random-links page. He doesn't mind me sharing the draft bits he left here. There are some notes if you click those.

I sent a tumbleweed to Florida

http://familyrun.ning.com/profile/HeatherGreek

I'll come back and add a photo of it when it was here, and some comments, but for now, people might be able to go there and see the photos of it in Florida, IN the house, on the mantle. Yikes!

Contest Reminder, photo of monkeyplatter

I have a few entries and would love to have more by March 15. The things people see in those photos of monkeyplatters will likely go onto real kids' plates before long, and for years to come!

http://aboutunschooling.blogspot.com/2009/02/food-freedom-chat-and-contest.html

For prizes, I'm figuring first place gets to pick from a copy of Moving a Puddle, a set of Thinking Sticks, a Learn Nothing Day notebook, a bunch of morningglory seeds or mint plants (mailed ready for you to plant when it's warm enough where you are, or in a pot inside). Second place picks next, third place picks then, and I sell the other two things at prices exorbitant enough to cover the cost of the chatroom this month! (Also, I'm open to requests for chat times and topics. The next scheduled one is not until March 25.

Very tired, Holly, and three-things thing

Having a two-day conference in one day is very, very tiring. Now I know. I was exhausted. I've slept a LOT since dinner Saturday. It was a good conference, though (HENA, in Tempe) and Kirby Dodd was there! And getting to hug and smell he-who-was-once-my-only-baby is energizing.

It's Tuesday and I still don't feel recovered. Holly has a new job. Now she has two jobs. One is half job (unexpected) and half learning a craft (which is what I requested, and offered to pay for). So I offered to pay a flower shop near us to let her work there, or to train her. I gave them links to some of her online artsiness, and asked whether she could somehow hang out and maybe help with the Mother's Day/prom season. I didn't hear for a few days, and then just heard "I'll get back with you." On our way to Phoenix I talked to Keith and he said the owner had called, very enthusiastic. He told her to call on Monday, even though she had wanted to call us on the road.

So yesterday she called me, and then talked to Holly a while, and we walked over for a tour and Q&A session, and then back to take Holly's paperwork and copies of two forms of ID, and she'll be working for money on Monday afternoons, and going in to help and learn a few other times each week, at two different flower shops! One has a designer who's American and trained for a month (plus lots of on-the-job experience), and the other shop has an English designer who trained for a year. Both are willing to show Holly some of what they know, in exchange for her assistance. WOW! More than I expected.

She still is working at Zumiez, too. She's there right now. And then there's another possibility:

When we were in the Phoenix area, we went to visit an unschooling family that needs live-in help. They're thinking it might be helpful to have an unschooler rather than the professionals but not-unschoolers they've had. Holly is under consideration for that. It would start in June and go six months. How do I feel about my youngest possibly moving away? Depends whether I'm being selfish or not. Unselfishly, I see it as a great opportunity for her to learn and to stretch her wings. Selfishly? I might be cheated out of the last few months of her being 17, and when she comes home she'll be 18, and all "nanny nanny boo boo." (Oh, did I mention that my selfish feelings are all about my childish feelings?)

If she does go to Arizona for six months, it would be after the spring floral rush season, and Zumiez might want her back for Christmas rush, if she were to want to come home instead of staying there. (All if/if iffy on that situation.)

But enough about Holly. Here's some more about me! (Meme-thing from Frank, who got it from Ronnie:)

THREE NAMES I GO BY
1. SandraDodd (like it's all one word, since Kirby was little)
2. AElflaed of Duckford
3. Mom

THREE JOBS I HAVE HAD IN MY LIFE
1. English teacher
2. Office manager and trainer of data input people in ancient days
3. CEO/ED of a non-profit organization

THREE PLACES I HAVE LIVED
1. Fort Worth, Texas
2. Española, New Mexico
3. Albuquerque, New Mexico

THREE TV SHOWS THAT I WATCH
1. Desperate Housewives
2. Eli Stone (I hope I get to watch some more of that)
3. CBS Sunday Morning

THREE PLACES I HAVE BEEN
1. Bonfield, Ontario, Canada
2. England (mostly Cambridge and Kirk Ella)
3. Juarez, Mexico

THREE PLACES I WANT TO GO
1. San Francisco, with Holly maybe (she hasn't been; I have)
2. England again, in July, and maybe more if I get the chance!
3. Austin to see the house Kirby has moved into

THREE OF MY FAVORITE FOODS
1. potatoes
2. chicken
3. green chile chicken enchilada, egg over-easy on top

THINGS I AM LOOKING FORWARD TO
1. going to London in July
2. going to San Diego in September
3. the Symposium on Unschooling in Santa Fe in January (this is the first public mention of it)

THREE PETS THAT YOU HAVE OWNED
1. Rat (Biggie)
2. Dog (Awshoo, and others later)
3. Cats (Sam and Pippin, and others later)

THREE FAVORITE BANDS/ ARTISTS
1. The Beatles
2. Weird Al
3. Flight of the Conchords

THREE FAVORITE TEAMS TO WATCH (The teams I watch most frequently, not necessarily my favorite sports or teams per se)
1. Skating pairs (each pair's a team, I guess)
2. American Idol last ten or so (kind of a team, by that point; a cutthroat last-man-standing team)
3. Dallas Cowboys (I don't watch them much, but when I watch I think "Jeff thinks this is wonderful" and I try to understand why)

THREE FAVORITE DRINKS
1. Tea (hot or iced)
2. Dr Pepper
3. Chocolate milk made with Hershey's syrup and whole milk. Not skimmed down; not storebought chocolate milk.

If I get to visit Frank someday, I'd like to taste "Hot malt Ovaltine with a generous slug of Bailey's topped with a healthy goop of marshmallow cream."

If alcoholic drinks was the real question:
1. Margarita with more orange base than other citrus
2. a regular margarita
3. Bailey's

Memory (I think...)

Lately there have been discussions hither and yon about how to learn, how to remember, what's worth remembering and what isn't, how some people remember things and how others do and what might cause the differences. To paraphrase Hamlet, when he was standing in a hole full of memories:

Now get you to my lady’s chamber, and tell her, let her remember an inch thick, to this favour she must come.

This came in the e-mail a minute ago:

An elderly couple had dinner at another couple's house, and after eating, the wives left the table and went into the kitchen. The two gentlemen were talking, and one said, 'Last night we went out to a new restaurant and it was really great. I would recommend it very highly.'

The other man said, 'What is the name of the restaurant?'

The first man thought and thought and finally said, 'What is the name of that flower you give to someone you love? You know... The one that's red and has thorns.'

'Do you mean a rose?'

'Yes, that's the one,' replied the man. He then turned towards the kitchen and yelled, 'Rose, what's the name of that restaurant we went to last night?'

Office-HumorUK.co

"Where I'm From"

A mad/lib type meme from this template after reading Madeline's poem first.

I am from guitars, from Jello instant pudding and a yellow kitchen.

I am from the old adobe house at the lower end of Petra Lane...brown, rounded, cool to the touch.

I am from the apple trees, lilacs and rocks; the alfalfa, irises and sunsets.

I am from singing and talking, from Mary Lou Hathcock and Yates and Adams.

I am from the planting and the sharing.

From "We love you" and "Get your nose out of that book."

I am from hymn singing and no bad-words, from "women don't cut their hair," and "only savages poke holes in their bodies."

I'm from Texas and Texans (though I was by some fluke born in Georgia), from biscuits and gravy.

From the cotton picker's daughter who cared for her younger brothers in the shade of the wagon, the fried potatoes taken to school for lunch, and the fifteen year old Rotan boy who went to San Francisco to work in the shipyards early in WWII, and rode his motorcycle home to get his parents' signatures, to enlist at seventeen.

I am from cigar boxes and shoeboxes of saved papers with images of faces and words remembered and forgotten.

---

Okay. that was depressing.

It's not where I am now!

Bears and life and stuff

This is a photo of the inside of a "cubby" (cloth fort) at Tammy's house in Australia.



I was adding this and some other cubbies at SandraDodd.com/youngchildren and Holly mentioned the middle bear was like Kirby's bear. I think she's right:



In the past week I've thought about England every day, for hours if it were all counted together. I'm quietly excited about getting to be there in July. This will be my third trip to England and sometimes I wish I had figured out a way, years ago, to just go there and stay there.

Yesterday morning, though, in the midst of a headful of England, I walked out on the deck to feed the birds, and I smelled the air and I felt the sunshine and I thought there is no better place to be than New Mexico at this moment. And that is my problem. I love where I live. If that's the worst problem I ever have, WONDERFUL!

Kirby is moving this week, from an apartment with one roommate to a house with that roommate and two others. They've been packing things up and cleaning. The real move is Wednesday and Thursday, his days off. Friday he flies to Phoenix to be picked up by the Sorooshians. I ride out with Holly and Brett to have dinner with Brett's grandmother and then go to the hotel and see Kirby, Pam and Rosie.


Keith's mom has tumors on bones and other places, has gone through three courses of chemotherapy and decided no more. But this week she's having her right arm amputated, whether below or above the shoulder they won't know until they see. The bone just broke itself—a tumor just ate thought the bone. They put a plate in a few months back, but the bone on either side of that just went away.

Keith's back ruptured or bled out or hemorrhaged (I don't know the word for it—a pool of redness showed under the skin about the size of the palm of my hand, stayed red instead of turning bruise colors, and after a week or so turned to blisters). it happened when he was camping in Arizona on President's Birthday weekend. Instead of going to an emergency room he came home and went to the nearby clinic, figuring they could get him in for an MRI and a specialist. Things have dragged slowly on. He's in pain almost all the time, but he's crazily strong and has a high pain threshhold, so what would have taken another person down just slowed him up and put him into the kind of pain most other people want to be made unconscious about. After being with Keith for 30 years, I'm used to his reaction to injury. It's odd, but he can still move when others wouldn't be able to. He says "ouch" when others would black out.

Holly read in MySpace comments of people she worked with that all the Zumiez employees in New Mexico had been fired and replaced. It wasn't true, but there was truth in part. At the store where she works, six were fired and four were retained (one of whom was a very new hire). Holly was kept. So she's been working more than she had wanted to, and will need to reschedule a routine appointment with the doctor Monday. If we weren't going to the HENA conference, they would likely want her to work two or three of those days next weekend.

I read that someone wanted a tumbleweed, in Florida. I had a cardboard box I couldn't decide whether to keep or flatten. A tumbleweed came into our neighbor's yard and was right half in our front yard, and I picked it up thinking I'd shove it in the hot tub's wood-stove, and thought *maybe* it would fit in that box. It does. It's a little tight, but that might (might) keep it in better shape for the journey.

My nephew Elijah spent the night because he came to town to see a Mystic Roots show and left us copies of his CD.