bearing blog

First day of school.

Deep breath.

Done.

We have two lengthy doctor's appointments on two days next week, so I backed up the start of school to today. I think it'll work out, actually -- we'll only have a two-day week, followed by a long weekend, a three-day week, and then another long weekend and a four-day week, before the five day weeks begin.

Oh, I'm tired, though.

The good news is that we got everything done about an hour earlier than usual, since for some reason all the kids got up before seven. I even had time to do an extra load of laundry (still catching up from camping), put dinner in the crockpot (emergency chili) and wash and cut up the salad, somewhere between morning stories and lunchtime. Milo did his first math lesson; when I told him he was going to write his name in his new math book, he did so -- m i l o, what do you know. I didn't know he could write his name, and it turns out he can.

In about half an hour, I am going to put the tea on, sit down with the kids, feed them crackers and banana pudding, and read some stories of their choice. If I were one of those homeschool bloggers, I'd take this half hour while the two-year-old is napping, make brownies or something, put candles on it, turn tea time into a party celebrating our First Day of School. And, of course, take lots of pictures. But I'm not one of those bloggers, and I'm taking my half hour as a welcome opportunity to plant my butt in this IKEA chair and type.

Number of subjects successfully taught, counting both boys: Seven.

Number of times I wanted to beat a particular child who shall remain nameless: Only 1 today.

That's a pretty good ratio.

Maybe instead of tea, I'll have a beer.

No wait, then the kids will ask for juice boxes.

Better stick with tea.

Frank.

Darwin, on finding that his fourth child is in a frank breech position within Mrs. Darwin with 3-4 weeks to go, and apparently no one willing to attend the birth unless it's a section, turns to musing about health care costs.

What, wouldn't you?

As it stands, our medical system is built around the assumption that cost is no object. And doctors are very heavily penalized based on any "avoidable" injuries or deaths that occur on their watch. The result is that instead of providing good, high quality "basic" health care, and using extreme (and expensive) measures only when necessary, we often require extreme measures "just in case". This makes it far, far more difficult to provide "basic" health care to all.

He's right, of course.  Let's hope Baby Boy Darwin turns soon.  And not just because it'll save everyone involved a heap of money.

Sitting.

I took Hannah's three kids for the day to let her get her school stuff organized.   Most of what I have to do today is a pile of laundry from camp -- perfect for having six kids over, as it's easy to sort, fold, and hang while keeping an ear out to distinguish the "bad" shrieking from the "good" shrieking.

Right now they're all outside in their swimsuits (thank goodness I remembered to ask Hannah to send them along) playing with the new feature in our yard:  a water faucet.  Mark salvaged the fixture, an old distilled-water faucet, from a lab at work.  What's great about the faucet is that the knob is spring-loaded; you turn it to let the water flow, but when you let go, it snaps back and the water stops.  It's really hard to rig it to stay open, too.  At least, the kids haven't figured it out yet.  

He fixed the faucet to the sandbox; when it's turned on, it pours onto our brick patio.  Mark put a large patio paver right under the stream to deflect it so it wouldn't blow the sand out from between the bricks.  It's a temporary solution -- theoretically, he'll get around to putting some kind of drain or gutter in.  The faucet is connected to one of the outdoor spigots via a Y-fixture, so we can still access the spigot if we need to use the garden hose or the sprinklers.  The spigot is outside the fenced back yard, though, so if we want to turn it off and prevent the kids from using it, we just turn it off and on at the spigot and lock the gate.

We started the day with a lovely breakfast (a little expensive --maybe we shouldn't have let each of the six kids order their own orange juice) at a restaurant I love that's halfway between our houses.  I had a fabulous fontina-roasted tomato quiche and Hannah had crab cakes benedict -- both of our plates were big enough that we each took home leftovers for lunch.  (I can tell you that the quiche was every bit as good straight out of the fridge for lunch, next to a green salad.)  The kids shared caramel rolls, bacon, and fruit cups.   Then I loaded everyone into my minivan and took them back to my house, while Hannah went home to print, collate, hole-punch and bind.  And, I hope, have a nice quiet cup of tea in there somewhere.

Just returned.

We've just returned from a week up in the north woods.   More later.

Successful bread.

I've just baked my first normal-looking loaf of whole-wheat bread in my bread machine.  The recipe is a little fiddlier than I'd like -- I'm going to experiment now with modifications of it -- and the structure is a little more open (the air bubbles are a bit big) than I'd like -- but this is definitely working now.

• 9 ounces water
• 1 egg 
• 2 tablespoons honey 
• 2 tablespoons coconut oil 
• 3 and 1/3 cups whole wheat flour 
• 2 tablespoons nonfat dry milk 
• 1 and 1/4 teaspoons salt 
• 1 and 1/2 teaspoons bread machine yeast 
• 3 and 1/2 teaspoons gluten 

I used the standard "wheat" cycle on the machine without the extended rise.  It turned out soft and very tasty, if a little bit sweet.  I used honey because I decided I don't like the flavor of molasses in my bread (haven't tried plain white sugar yet).  Coconut oil is the all-purpose fat that I use for most cooking.  

Things still to try:  I will try leaving the nonfat dry milk out, and then try leaving the egg out, and see what happens.  Then I may try some experiments that leave out the gluten but have different combinations of whole wheat flour and bread flour.  I'd also like to attempt a sourdough and a rye bread at some point, but I really think I need to get "the family's standard whole wheat sandwich bread" perfected as soon as possible.

I think this will be very useful.

I'm always wanting one to time a math test or something, and the kids have always run off with mine, and I don't like to wear a wristwatch and the microwave timer is in the kitchen... so...

Online Stopwatch

You're welcome.

Metric.

I didn't have much time for my swim workout last night -- I didn't get to the gym till quite late -- so instead of a workout I swam a time trial instead -- fifteen minutes, as fast as I can.

The last time I timed myself was in April, and I swam 375 yards in a little over 15 minutes.  Last night I swam 550 yards in just about the same time!

This still makes me a pretty crappy swimmer, but I am measurably less crappy than before.  Hurray!  Now I'm really going to be in the mood to watch the Olympics.

We are almost, but not quite, this nerdy.

Or maybe we just didn't think of it first. A reader writes to Eugene Volokh:

[Another former student] passed along your very entertaining piece for Slate.com on the case law of various funny names. I thought you might like to know that my middle name is "c" -- as in the scientific abbreviation for the speed of light....

I come from a family of scientists, my mother's maiden name begins with a "C," and I was born very very quickly. My father has this to add: "I don't think you have a middle name. You have a middle symbol. Something simple, ethereal, brief, fast, and different."

...[I]t's a pain -- class rings, diplomas, passports, etc. are almost always printed incorrectly, despite my efforts to get it right. I omit it from my resume, etc. to eliminate the possible perception that I've made a typo spelling my own name. On the other hand, it's a great ice breaker.

If you were going to name your child (okay, the middle name) a symbol from math or physics, or some other quantitative field, what would it be?

Payoff.

Last night we had steak and summer squash on the grill, salad, and a rare treat that I love in the summer: skillet-fried potatoes.  I had already minced the fresh rosemary and garlic, and had just drained two pounds of diced, parboiled potatoes when I remembered something that filled me with joy and anticipation:  I have a quart of home-rendered duck fat in the back of my fridge!

Sometime last year, I forget exactly when, I bought two frozen ducks at the grocery store.  Hannah had recently discovered that duck meat makes fantastic enchiladas, and I thought I might make some duck enchiladas of my own.  After I thawed them, I cut the breast meat off and made it into cutlets -- that was enough for us to have one meal of sautéed duck breast -- and then I carefully trimmed off most of the rest of the skin and fat, transferring it to a large sauce pan.  I left a bit of skin on the carcasses to keep them moist, and roasted them in a low oven; later, I would pick the meat off the carcasses and turn them into enchiladas (indeed, as tasty as Hannah had promised), and then, of course, the bones went into my next pot of meat stock.

But while those ducks roasted in my oven, I heated the skin and fat trimmings in the saucepan.  Slowly the fat melted and the skin began to frizzle and crisp.  I checked on it now and then as I went about my day's work.  After a while I had a pan full of hot fat and, after I strained it, some lovely duck cracklings.  

I wish I could say that I saved the cracklings for a rich salad topping, but, um, I salted and ate a sizable portion of them right there, and the rest of them the next day.  

There was more than a quart of fat from those two ducks.  Duck fat is lovely, luxurious stuff, and this had a very clean smell and feel, not vaguely porky like the natural lard I sometimes use in my pie crusts.  I used some of it in stir-fries for a few days, but then it wandered back to the back of my fridge where I forgot about it.

Until last night, when I used about a half cup of it to fry two pounds of potatoes with garlic and rosemary.  They were a revelation.  I gave myself one generous helping and was immensely satisfied -- these are potatoes worth eating.  Maybe even potatoes worth rendering two ducks for.

A run-in.

A neighbor called the cops on CJ from Light and Momentary for neglectfully letting her six-year-old walk 400 yards home.

At first the cop told me not to overestimate the safety of the neighborhood, saying that there'd been some recent issues with property damage and petty theft. I said, "Property crime is in a completely different league from kidnapping." He said, "Yeah, that's a good point." I said, "If the school district thinks this is a reasonable walk for a 6-year-old child [and they do -- there's no bus service for kids in our neighborhood], I'm inclined to agree." He said, "Yeah, that's true." He said he'd have to file a report, but there should be no further action. (I had a friend in the next town over who had the same thing happen last year with her 6yo, and had to be interviewed by CPS as a result.)

Don't we all have to worry about stuff like this, these days?

I live in an inner-city neighborhood which is, while far from the worst part of town, certainly not as safe and homey as CJ's description of her own. The school buses rocket (illegally) down my residential street at 45+ miles per hour.  The neighbors are pleasant and many of us recognize each other and wave, but pre-teen children are for the most part confined to their own yards.  We have occasional bursts of gang activity, break-ins, and the like (mostly after dark; I'm not afraid to walk down my street in broad daylight).  There aren't many walking-to destinations:  a corner convenience store, across the busy major-artery street, where I sometimes go to get an onion or a carton of milk; the pleasant, busy neighborhood branch library; a city elementary school playground; a Catholic church, a bit too far to walk with the kids; a couple of ribs'n'wings and taco restaurants, which I'm sad to say we never actually walk to.  I dream of the day someone will open a coffee shop in my neighborhood.

We like living in the city and have no plans to leave.  But -- thinking back to my own childhood in an urban-layout suburb -- I remember being allowed, not to cross the busy artery street alone, but to roam all over the block where I lived.  I played in the alleys and walked to friends' houses and back, I rode my bike around the block, I built "forts" in the little scrap of woods that bordered my street, all unsupervised, for hours at a time.  The trend now is for grownups to super-control young children's lives, and something about it seems very wrong.  Surely at some point, my son -- he'll be eight next week -- will be mature enough to walk three blocks to the library by himself.  Surely at some point I could send him to the corner store to buy a pound of butter.  It grieves me that I'm more worried about what the neighbors would think -- because what if they do call the police? That's a pretty big deal -- than about any physical harm befalling him between here and there.  

Everybody reasonable seems to agree that today's parental fears are far overblown and today's kids are far overprotected.  But that doesn't help us break the cycle of overprotection -- because if we're much less overprotective than the parents around us, we worry they'll call the cops on us.  

UPDATE:  Sounds like the neighbor called CPS on their family.  Stop over and wish her well.