Learning · with · us

For instance, granddad was away in India for five years during the first World War, Granny brought five children up on her own, in this tight cottage, without any money from the owners of the big house who could have supported her. She just lived on the soldiers wage that was sent through. During the flu epidemic of 1914 or 1915, they all got ill in the cottage and the doctor came to see them. He was a lovely man who was always willing to help out, although he should have charged a fee. The lady of the big house set down a blancmagne, but it was made without milk and without sugar and it was left on the front step, and this was the only thing she could do to help them. And they had a huge walled garden with fruits and vegetables and whatnot.- Shirley Collins

2. Eaglefiler (http://c-command.com/eaglefiler/) Daft name, but dead easy to use and organises files within nested folders rather than some proprietary database, so if it dies, all my data is still there. Just the metadata gets wiped. So far I have imported close to 3,000 files for my Riverkids library and it makes searching for particular files a snap. I'm scanning in documents as jpegs and tiffs, then making tags to sort bank files and so on without going all OCRish on them.

3. QuickBooks is not as terrifying as it seems, especially if you go online and look up accountancy for beginner websites. (http://www.dwmbeancounter.com/acctg.html to start) There are lots of them, and there's the Dummies guides, and really, it's not so bad. Especially when I compared last year's file to this years and realised the reason I was freaking was that last year's was like 20 lines and this year's is about 300 lines in multiple currencies and accounts and payroll etc.

4. Bento (http://www.filemaker.com/bento/). Still hasn't crashed, still pretty. Not as easy to cross-ref tables as Filemaker, but so much easier in every other way. Dropping data into it, and exporting to excel as needed.

5. Also, I switched from Azureus to Transmission (http://www.transmissionbt.com/) for torrents this month. I miss filtering a little bit, but the thing runs so light and fast that I can have it in the background all the time.

6. A Cook's Books (http://www.3caam.com/products.html). Tried out MacGourmet, but the mealplanning and shopping list was bleh or non-existant. They're thinking of adding stuff, but seeing both programs offer import/export to each other's formats, I'll take ACB's functionality over MacGourmet's prettiness. We have been trying out recipes from Epicurious and adding in tags their cost per person etc. So far, ten meals (we end up eating out a lot because hawker food here is so cheap) on, it's made shopping cheaper and better. The meals are - well, Jim and I loved the Ethiopian fish, not so hot on the Vietnamese Chicken. Epicurious' Asian food is sort of westernized Asian, so it tastes just slightly off. I'm sure the Ethiopian fish tastes weird to Ethiopians!

7. Even More - the CD game (http://www.amazon.com/Incredible-Machine-Even-More-Contraptions/dp/B00005KB3J). I got this as a diskmountable thingy, and oh my lord, so much fun. HIGHLY recommended to anyone with kids or who likes puzzle games. The boys and I have played only some of the lower levels because it's hard! But so fun. Works fine on OS X Leopard.

The girls had a grand time. Played outside in the backyard, played dressup, made some jewelry, went to a playground, had a picnic, danced to Hannah Montana.

Tonight was karate and Zoë's doing extremely well. When she stops looking at what the other kids are doing and just concentrates on her kata, she knows it. I'm quite impressed.

The other evening I went to a Girl Scout leader orientation. I met another mom who has a girl ready for Daisies, so we may end up doing the Daisy troop together. I'm starting to hit the "over programmed" portion of our lives though. If I'm taking a class, being a Daisy leader, and Zoe still wants to do karate (plus all her saturday morning activities) ... something's bound to need to give at some point. She had been talking about doing soccer, but the clinic registration is happening now, and when I asked her again she said she'd like to watch. So if I do sign her up for soccer, it'll be at the Y and not with the clinic. It's really hard to figure out what all she should be doing when she wants to do so many different things!

It was a really good day. I'm exhausted, and a bit stressed, but I feel like Zoë and I had an excellent and productive day together. Now if I can get one of those with my husband!

Thank you so much for not telling anyone that you were getting blisters from the gloves you wear at arnis, and taking it on yourself to switch them for bicycle gloves, because your father totally prefers taking you to the doctor for a broken finger to helping you put on some band-aids.

Your friend,
the Common Reader

PS - I HOPE YOU CAN STILL PLAY THE FIDDLE

I'm sorry to go all religious on you, but it seems to me that the FLDS families are suffering for all of us. Their refusal to fight with physical weapons is likely to lead to a real change in the way that CPS is allowed to act lawlessly and harm children with no oversight or accountability. If you're watching MSM coverage you may feel really helpless but I've been following this stuff for more than a decade, and this is the first time there has been national attention paid to these issues, the first time there have been coordinated letter-writing campaigns, the first time there has been regular, consistent mainstream coverage making clear what the conditions of group homes really are. The door has been blown open and people aren't going to forget. Things won't get better overnight and we are all in danger, more in danger from CPS lawlessness than from any of your or my favorite bogeymen: unvaccinated children, terrorists, bird flu, the Cascadian subduction event, or butt MRSA. If you didn't realize that you were in danger, it probably seems intolerable. But people survived child-snatching pirates along the Mediterranean coast; they survived a 50% child mortality rate; this is worse because we did it to ourselves, but it's possible to end it and make it a bad memory of a crazy time.

Whiny Europeans whine about not being magically rewarded with lavish lifestyles in return for exam results and years spent in school.

When I was in Spain, I used to come home at 4 or 5 am from partying with the West Africans because they were the only people in the whole country I could stand, and I'd be really hungry, and there was NOTHING TO EAT. I was not alone returning from debauchery; there were rivers, floods, oceans of people returning from the clubs, and no one to sell them bocados. How hard is it to make some sandwiches and stand on the corner and exchange them for currency? How hard is it to get a friend to stand watch if you're worried about the guardia shutting you down? Aha, see, if you're that clever, you sell drugs.

I understand things are different these days, but I bet it's all Chinese people selling stuff.