FACTS that are making my mind awfully full. I’m the kid raising her hand in the back row asking, “May I please be excused? My mind is full.”

One of my best friends is in the hospital, recovering from surgery. What they removed was not a benign cyst at all, it was cancerous. A rare one that they’re not sure how to treat, but surgery was certainly the first step, and she is recovering. I am really sad, and angry that this is happening to my friend, and I feel very powerless to help.

Meanwhile, a cargo ship hit the Bay Bridge, 58,000 gallons of fuel into San Francisco Bay not too long ago. I’m powerless to help.

Within the last couple days, a typhoon / cyclone in Singapore Bangladesh claimed the lives of more than 1500 people. Can’t do anything about that either.

I have a proposal to write, that was due yesterday, but didn’t get to finish because my grandmother in law apparently thinks I’m a free taxi service and calls me at random asking for rides… right now? Not powerless in this situation, just frustrated. I do not usually work when my gals are with me, so how will I get this proposal written?

My mom wants me to pop on over to the Italian Market (30-40 min car ride to south philly from where I live) in order to pick up a few christmas gifts for friends of hers, and some fresh pasta. Uh, in my copious free time.

There are way more dirty articles of clothing here in my home than clean ones. Gah.

My daughter wants me to take her to a nature center this afternoon. Sure hon, just as soon as we get back from the Italian Market?
My other daughter’s friends want to come for a playdate today, but my house is such an embarrasing heap of dirty things that I can’t bear the thought of their mom seeing it. Sorry honey.

The 100-days-of-flowers bulb assortment I bought sits on my front porch, and I don’t know when I’ll plant it or even WHERE I’ll plant it. Guess those bulbs will just sit another week. Hope it doesn’t freeze yet out there.

My yard and other outdoor spaces are in bad need of raking, but I don’t even have a rake because someone made off with ours. Maybe I can get a rake in the Italian Market.

I have two clients who require phone calls from me today. One is someone whose laptop I was supposed to have worked on sometime in the last month when it was sitting up in my office, forgotten and ignored. The other is someone who bought his computer from me over a year ago, and it’s now giving him some horrible error message and not starting up anymore.

My gutters REALLY need to be cleaned out. This is something that I can do, but it requires wriggling out the attic window onto the flat roof.

The cat litter boxes in the basement are so bad, that half my readers will want to figure out where I live and call the ASPCA and report me as a bad cat owner. Plus my wild, evil cat was out all night and she is still not back.

Plus, Swistle is going through her blog and deleting a ton of things that might offend her unreasonable and obnoxious relatives. Which is her right, but is so sad to me… such a good blogger, having to censor herself. Bleh!

I guess you could say I am a bit overwhelmed.

As jumbled as this post is, so many things of different weights roiling around together, that is how my mind is. Just not in a very effective mood, not an ideal way to be when you have a lot to do, people to call, proposal to write, friends to think of, and gutters to clean.

…so I went for a long walk today. It was one of those incredible fall days where the leaves are crunchy and the air is fresh. The sunshine seemed to cut down through the air, blinding me as I walked, and walked, briskly.

As I walked I noticed that there is a strange mental change that comes over me when out on a long solitary stroll. My mind sort of clears itself and I begin to feel kind of calm, and creative. Today’s walk was therapeutic, but I didn’t get buttkis done, unfortunately.

Now I’m letting my kids stall a little while before getting into the tub, so that I have a little time to write this post.

Oh, here’s a non-sequitor: do you know of the singer-songwriter dude named Mike Doughty? I went to high school with him and dated his younger brother for a little while.  Mike was in a band with my older brother and my first true puppy love, a guy named Dave. I’d hang out in Dave’s basement with the band, listening to their rock music. The band was called Free Spirit and they were pretty good… for a teenage rock band in someone’s basement. Ultimately, Free Spirit broke up (much like the Beatles) due to personality conflicts. (My brother being an asshole, most likely.) I think there was a fourth member (a drummer) to their band, but I cannot remember him at all.

Anyway, now Mike is a Famous Rock Star. I know because he was ON DAVID LETTERMAN. He used to be in a band called Soul Coughing, before launching his solo career. Now he tours all over the place and his show here in Philly is sold out so I won’t be seeing him. I did get to see him a few years back when he played at Temple University’s Apollo Hall. I waited in line and bought some CD’s from him, and chatted. He remembered me!

Well we might not be seeing Mike this month, but we ARE going to see THEY MIGHT BE GIANTS.  Oh boy, can’t wait.  It’ll be one of those fantastic nights out for me and D. Even better than that, it’s on a day of the year that we are usually held up with tedious family get-togethers– the saturday after thanksgiving. Instead of getting a slab of bullship from his relatives, this TG saturday we’re seeing a band we like. How cool is that!

Between our boycotting of the big family gathering, and seeing my old friend on LETTERMAN, I’m feeling pretty groovy. And the crunchy leafy walk helped too.

Now, if only I could get my accounts to balance.

I have to share this really fun thing with you.

On pbskids.org, you can use their Jakers!  postcards to create your own semi-animated postcards. It works like this: you use their limited palette of colors, and  brush sizes, and can draw and write whatever you like. Then you click Preview to see what you’ve drawn– it re-draws it for you, at a faster speed than you actually drew it. The effect is really neat.

Here’s an example (click to see my drawing animate before your very eyes):

http://pbskids.org/cgi-registry/postcard/read.pl?card_id=5497977 

Now that I’ve shared this extremely fun and addictive thing with you, I MUST. MAKE. KIDS. LUNCHES. FOR TOMORROW.

Stepping away from the computer as soon as I click Publish….

1. It’s the humanity.

2. The casual honesty

3. The connections

4. The cute pictures

5. The archiving of normal life  – women getting to tell their story, when so much of History has ignored Herstory

6. The endless opportunity to procrastinate

oh, speaking of which… back to work for me!

The trouble with standardized achievement tests is that scores on such tests are looked on by some as the tell-all number that predicts a student’s abilities.  Not so, if a student is one who for some reason other than aptitude for the subject does not do well on exams.  Meanwhile, scores on standardized tests don’t necessarily reflect an individual’s competency when put to task in real life situation.

While such tests often include time limits, we in real life, usually are able to consider things and think through a problem before jumping to a conclusion, and multiple choice is not an option.

So why are tests so darn popular? Well, I think it’s because some of us actually like them.  I know, I know, tests don’t really mean much and they are certainly over-used and over-valued.  But I realized something today: I actually enjoy taking tests – even when they’re not of a subject that I am very interested in!

All this was brought to mind today because my cousin sent me a link to a website that offers a Bible Drill.  Test your knowledge of the holy book — and you can take several different quizzes and it will pull up questions at random from its little database.  You get a score and everything! I actually went and kept trying again until I could get 100% correct.   And I don’t even read the Bible!

I can think of at least one other example of my perverse enjoyment of taking tests. In high school I was something of a rebel geek.  I’d cut gym class to hang out with my friends in AP Physics (a class which I was not taking). One day, in this class, the teacher told me I’d have to leave; go back to the classroom where I belonged, because he wanted to give a small test to the class.  Smirking, I asked if I could take the quiz, too.  And so he let me! It turned out that I did better on the pop quiz than a number of students who were actually taking the class.

Tests give a person who’s good at them another way to shine!

There’s something very satisfying about taking a test – you have to focus on the specifics of each question and there is a right answer in there somewhere. In real life, the answers are complex and the focus is broad; the answers exist with addendums and qualifiers, caviats and footnotes.  Worse, in real life, there’s no simple feedback to tell you how you did.  You don’t even to get take each test of life over again if you don’t like the answer you came up with the first time around because the darn test keeps morphing into something else, before you’re even finished with it.

Parenthood is not like taking a test. Running a business is not like taking a test. Building a website is not like taking a test.

Anybody think I should go back to grad school?

Nah.  Too many essays. Not enough tests. Maybe I should enroll in 4th grade at the local public school.

The toilet is stopped up after A went up to have a poop. (Wow, that’s something to put in her baby book : first time clogging the toilet with a big one!)

C suggested that we freeze the water and toilet paper (which is all you can see there) and bring it to a museum.

“It would be our art. Toilet Paper in Ice. We’d have to transport it in a frozen compartment so it wouldn’t melt. We’d show it in a frozen exhibit or it could be part of the museum.”

When I have a few extra moments on the computer, I try to click an ad or two to help others out. If you like doing this kind of carpal-tunnel-aggravating charity, you might like to check out thehungersite.com where you can help click away hunger, breast cancer, illiteracy, and more.

Or just support your favorite blogger by looking and and clicking the ads they display.

I really, really like being barefooted. I realized this a couple days ago when in the course of my vacation we made some plans to take a hike. Something which requires shoes, and good protective ones, at that.

Sure, it was a lovely hike through some pristine woods, and I enjoyed it immensely. But the sheer pleasure of taking off my shoes was enormous by comparison. How happy my little toes and soles to roam and sense the world! How pleased indeed!

Since then, I’m back to my usual barefooted summer routine. I am noticing more and more things about the house we are staying in based on the textures of the floors. There’s quite a lovely variety. Right now, I am sitting in the screened-in porch, the floor of which is tiled with what feels like some kind of genuine stones. They are smooth, but not too smooth, and quite cold. I don’t mind having my toes be a bit cold, as long as they are not too cold.

The majority of the floors are hard wood, and in wonderful condition; smooth and shiny, with a slightly springy feel to them. My feet walk along the surface of these wooden floors, taking in that comfort of smooth wood. There are two dogs staying here with me, and my feet tell me there’s little clusters of dog hair and this is sometimes irksome, so I did a bit of sweeping up not long ago.

The staircase has a soft and tasteful oriental carpet tacked down to it, which runs up the middle of stairs. There’s enough room on either side of the carpet to see and step on, if you like, the hard wood that runs underneath. Knowing that smooth wood is there makes me feel pleased.

Some throw rugs complete the flooring. This is great for when you get a little gunk on your feet and you just have to tread gently across a more absorptive surface, something that you can brush off the doggy hair onto. The floors in my humble home are far from fun to tread on. There’s cracked wood, even holes in places; and what’s more it seems to be pretty much always sticky.

Outside, there’s a lot of grass which is kind of dried out, but still pleasant to walk on. It hasn’t been watered much this summer, I guess, and that’s ok with me. There’s just too much lawn here to be wasting water on it. The result is a brownish lawn, but soft if scraggly on my feet. There’s an occasional pine cone that I have stepped on, but my soles are tough enough to tolerate that.

My soles do not like the rough gravel of the driveway, but the brick path to the  car is nubbly and rough in a good way. Across the wide lawn of grass there’s a place we’re calling the Fairy Glade. You walk on a soft, pine needled covered pathway through the trees, and there’s an Adirondack Lean-to, a rustic little stage that is made of rough-hewn logs. As long as you don’t get a splinter, the texture is also interesting to walk on. Barefooted.

There’s a hot tub under the deck, with a marvelously textured bottom. It is not smooth, but slightly studded, rough but not scratchy. It’s got to be the nicest hot tub I’ve ever had the privilege to be in. Barefooted. Bare naked, too, if you want to know the truth.

Someone not long ago, on a blog I read, pointed out that if you have twins, you have to learn to do stuff with your toes because your hands are full. I am not a mother of twins, but I have been known to have my hands full on occasion, and let me tell ya, using your feet for things is great! I pick things up with my toes a lot. So being trapped up in dratty old shoes is just not good for me.

It will be another story altogether, when winter comes and my poor little piggies will have to seek refuge in fuzzy warm socks and shoes.

The Grandest of Lists!

Chapter One:
In Preparation for Our Trip to upstate NY

Charge up those batteries for the camera
Make list of special items to pack (ie, do you want to do scrapbook stuff, art, sewing?)
Do not forget, that it gets cold in the adirondacks!
Any shopping for stuff you’d like to bring?
What snacks for the car?

Chapter Two:
Cleaning the House

When it feels this squalid, you KNOW it’s time to clean.
Method 1: The sweep it all into a heap method.
Method 2: I only give a shit about this ONE room. Choose a room. Clean, then choose another room.
Method 3: The obsessive-laundry-washing method. Wash, dry, put away, until you choke up a furball.

Chapter Three:
Oh yeah, the pets.

Clean out the cat litter
Clean the hamster cage
Feed the hamster something juicy
Play with the hamster
Call friend, beg for help with cat sitting (no, not you TBH, don’t even think about it)

Chapter Four:
Actually Packing for the Trip

Um, you know, the stuff.
Clothes, right?
Books?
Music?
Medication (have you even taken it today??)
Kid’s Blankies for the car (a must have)
They get to bring some lovies, too
A trash bin for the car would be good
How about a cooler with some stuff to eat and drink
Should we bring a gallon of our fav anti-biotic free milk? Or two even?
Bikes. Doesn’t D’s bike need a pedal repaired?
Where’s C’s helmet?

Chapter Five:
The Plants

Why did I just buy 5 new plants that need TLC and repotting? (BECAUSE THEY WERE ONLY 99 cents EACH)
Can someone water my garden?