Three lies and the truth

One of the Get-To-Know-You games that students play at Orientation at my college is called "Three Truths and a Lie".  Each person in the gathering states four facts about him or herself, and the other people in the group have to guess as to which of the four statements is false.

Of course, when you're raising children or dealing with shifty co-workers, figuring out which statements they tell you are the truth and which statements are . . . well, warped versions of reality . . . that's not quite as much fun, and there's usually no big "reveal" to help you check whether you guessed right.

Partly because I'm really interested in pop-psychology, and partly because I happen to be raising one or more reality-challenged children, I've had the fun of reading a series of books about why people get things wrong, why it's so hard for people to know that they're wrong, and how to increase the likelihood that people will tell you the truth (as they know it).

So I figure it's Book Report time; time to share a bit about what I've discovered and how those discoveries fit into rearing my kiddos. Get ready for Miser Mom's take on these three page-turners:  Spy the Lie, The Invisible Gorilla, and Being Wrong.  They're all about lies (or at least about mistakes and errors), and they all give me insight into the minds of myself and my kids.  Today I'll do a super-quick summary; over the course of the week, I'll blather on a bit more about the details.

Spy the Lie helped me -- in a major way -- work through how I talk with my children (particularly J-son) when I suspected he'd done something he shouldn't have: something he knew he shouldn't have done, and that he didn't want to tell me he had.  I found this book super helpful for these conversations;  I used the book to work past those instinctive cover-ups and toward a communication style where he'll confide in me, even when it's uncomfortable to do so.

Of course, when my kids distort reality, it's not always that they're deliberately lying.  Sometimes, it's just that they don't have a firm grasp on reality.  That's where the other two books come in.   Being Wrong helped me to finally get why my kids will happily tell me nonsense and then believe it themselves.  Also, why after they've been wrong over and over again, they never seem to remember that they'd made a mistake.  How the heck could that be?

And The Invisible Gorilla was just what I needed to hold up a mirror to myself, to enjoy the many ways in which I, myself, get reality all wrong. It's a book about illusions,  those versions of wrongness that somehow delight us rather than embarrass us -- even though the illusions the book describes can be embarrassing, and serious, and possibly even fatal.

Along the way, I'll make cheery noises about Make it Stick: The Science of Successful Learning. This book isn't as useful for parents as it is for teachers (and possibly for learners), but it is a good book for those two groups, I think.    

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And just a little side note; I'm not writing these posts about deceit and detection because of impending disaster.  In spite of our nervousness at the beginning of the summer, things are going swimmingly here.  My husband is doing lots of bike riding, which is what he wanted to do.  The boys seem to find lots of good things to do with their time (including Miser-Mom-School and chores, but other fun things as well), and I'm expecting that at some time this week I'll actually finally transition over from paperwork to mathematics.  Life is good in this neck o' the woods.

Storm window cherries

A few years ago, I bought a couple of fruit trees and planted them around my yard.  These trees have generally been a lovely treat . . . especially for the squirrels and insects in our neighborhood.  I haven't gotten to appreciate much--if any--of the fruit myself, except in the theoretical and aesthetic sense.   Still, I appreciate the general idea of having fruit trees around, even with no actual edible fruit.

So imagine my surprise when I went around the corner of my house this weekend and saw this:

Look a little closer . . .  see this?

. . . and this?

I decided to grab a canning jar to put the cherries in, but then decided, what the heck? why not just bring out the colander? And good thing I did, because I pretty much filled the entire colander up. Wow, what a surprise harvest!

Using a paperclip*, I pitted about half of the cherries in a half an hour.  N-son joined in the fun and showed me that he didn't even need any tools at all; he did a squeezing/squirting kind of motion to eject the pits from the cherries.  He was way more efficient than I was, and with me and my paperclip and N-son with his squirt-eject method, we finished the rest in 10 more happy minutes.   A bit of taste-testing made the shared time even sweeter.

* With many thanks to Brigitte for this suggestion!  

I like the paperclip method even more than the eraser-less-pencil method!

About a year or so ago, I loaned out my dehydrator to a former student.  I do like dehydrating food, but she needed a dehydrator and I was ready to share mine.   Why ready to share?  Well, I tend to get twitchy about (a) using electricity to (b) run an appliance that makes a blowing sound to remind me that it's on while it (c) simultaneously heats my house in the summer, so I have had a sort of conflicted relationship with that appliance.  But this past weekend, I just got the craving to dry the cherries for future granola batches.  I wasn't in the mood for a batch of canning (plus, we still have a few jars of cherries from last summer in our basement).

So I decided to make my own solar dehydrator.  Here's the design of my dehydrator, made in layers.

• Bottom layer:  a garden table, to keep everything off the ground.  
• Next, something black and flat.  (Day 1, I used a black garbage bag; after that I used baking pans that had turned black from years of use).
• Next, a frame of pieces of wood -- two-by-fours work well for the four sides.
• Then an old window screen, no longer needed, laid upon the wooden frame. I scrubbed the screen very well.
• Another frame of wood, on top of the first one.
• Put the cherries inside the upper frame of wood, on top of the screen, and top off  the entire shebang with an old storm window.

I didn't nail or glue anything; I just laid it on the table.  This dehydrator was not even remotely air sealed, which I figured was okay because a dehydrator needs some air flow.  It's just a pile o' stuff. Voila!

The cherries started out looking like this, round and red.  After an hour or so, I decided to slice them in half for better drying.

And how did it work?  After two days* in the sun, I had dried cherries!  

* Overnight, I brought the cherries in and stored them in the oven, 

mostly to keep them away from cool temperatures and also from potential bugs.

Whoop!  These will go great on my granola.  They look a lot like raisins, don't they?

Some advantages of drying food this way:  well, of course, it costs nothing and doesn't heat up my house the way canning or electric dehydrators do.  I am grateful for a sunny spot in my yard that stays sunny pretty much all of the day; that is a crucial free (to me) ingredient that I know not everyone has.

When the cherries were done, I just stacked back up the wood,the screen, and the storm window and stuck everything back in the garage for other projects.   (My very clean and de-cluttered garage, better yet!!)  So the second advantage is that I don't need to store a piece of specialized equipment.

And lastly, compared to freezing or canning, dried cherries take up very little space.  Here you see the previously-full colander, together with three-and-a-half cups of dried cherries, stored in air-tight canning jars for long-term safekeeping.  These dried cherries are tiny compared to their former selves, but they really pack a punch!

What I did with the clothes you donated

This past week, we've taken a break from home-bound chores and schoolwork.  J-son has spent the week with his former foster mom; N-son and I have been volunteering with his church youth group at a giant place called GAiN.   GAiN is a relief organization with a giant warehouse about 8 miles from our home.  What goes on at this warehouse? People pack up food, prepare seed packs, sew things, and pack clothes and blankets.

The sewing was sort of fascinating to me.  Here's one group of sewers making reusable menstrual pads.  This kind of activity is so right up my alley.  We got to hear all sorts of warm-hearted testimonials about how giving these to girls allows them to remain in school, how women who got these danced and clapped because they wouldn't have to sit all by themselves on a pail one week each month.  Good stuff.

There were other large groups of people sewing quilts to send to refugees, both for refugees in camps and for those resettled.

Okay, but that's not what *I* was doing.  I was working on sorting donated clothes to send overseas.  This was personally incredibly fascinating to me. I'd heard about how many, many clothes Americans discard, but I hadn't gotten to see redistribution myself.   If you're curious, too, here's what I got to see.

When we say "lots of clothes" . . . well, this is what "lots" looks like in the warehouse. There are rows and rows of these "Gaylord boxes" -- triple thick corrugated cardboard boxes, about four feet tall.  Each one is full of unsorted clothes or blankets.  

To sort the clothes and get them ready for packing, a forklift would bring four or five of these over to the prep area. How do you get the clothes out of these giant boxes?   You throw several small and enthusiastic children into the Gaylords!

The view of kids in Gaylords from my Quality Control table.
Those baskets of clothes are getting ready to come to me for the first sort.

These kids were totally aDORable, and they had a fantastic time. For them, it was sort of like being in a ball pit or a trampoline park, because they took off their shoes and went playing in these boxes. In addition to throwing piles of clothes into laundry baskets for easy carrying, the kids did a lot of treasure hunting. "Look what I found!" They had infectious energy. (And when their energy flagged, we'd pull them out, send them to work somewhere else, and toss a new kid into the Gaylord).

From there, the baskets of clothes went down a series of tables:  quality control, sorting, pre-folding, and packing.  In the photo below, you can see the unsorted clothes in the Gaylords on the right.  The Gaylords on the left are "special cases" of clothing, and the tables where we sorted and prepare clothes are in the middle, hard to see because they're covered with clothes, too.

My job (with about a half-dozen other people) was "quality control".  I'd pull out some clothes for special treatment:  costumes, new clothes with tags still on them, non-clothes that had somehow made it into the clothes piles.  Those went into the Gaylords that you see in the left above, headed for (??  not sure, but probably somewhere appropriate, I hope).   I also pulled out clothes that were unsuitable for sending overseas for other reasons: any image of an American flag, or camouflage, or nasty stuff (skulls, obscenities).  Those clothes (which could make their wearers targets for attack in other countries) went into another Gaylord, I'm guessing for domestic use.

And then I checked the remaining clothing for quality.  Any missing buttons at all, and the entire garment went into the rag bin.  Zipper doesn't work?  Rag.  Any tears or tatters, including "fashionable" tatters, rag again.  (In a refugee camp, tattered clothing isn't a sign of wealth or fashion).  I checked for stains, especially under armpits and on white clothes -- rags again.

I know that when I've given clothes away, I've occasionally had the mindset of "well, someone could fix this", or "well, even though it's not perfect, surely there's someone out there who would appreciate having something to wear."  The people who trained me kept pointing at the rows and rows of giant Gaylords full of clothes:  shipping is expensive, and nobody wants to pay to send damaged clothes overseas when there are so, so, so many boxes full of nice clothes to send.

I asked some of the teenagers working at the Quality table with me what this experience made them think about their own clothes: does this make them want more clothes?  Or fewer clothes?  They all were wide-eyed at the incredible excess, and said it made them want to have fewer clothes.   We were at the anti-Mall.

The rags weren't destined for trash, by the way:  they were still going to a marginally useful future.  They'd be torn up and turned into rags, sold (one person told me) for 10¢/ton.   If you care that your donated clothes will actually be useful, it's probably worth cleaning them and fixing buttons, but if that's impossible, the clothes are still probably worth donating rather than putting in landfills.  Bea of the Zero Waste Home recommends that if you have damaged clothing you want to give away, to clearly mark it as "rags".  I don't know if that actually works, but I think from now on, I'm going to try.

What happened after Quality Control?  My fellow QC'ers and I passed the clothes along to the next table--the sorting table--where the next round of volunteers sorted clothes into adult sized, child sized, winter ("Siberian winter", we were told, not "chilly African evening winter"), and a few other categories.  They passed clothes along to either the appropriate Gaylord or to the "adult" or "children" table.

The next table of volunteers "pre-folded" each piece of clothing once lengthwise, smoothing it out.  The last table was the skilled workers; they finished folding and packing the clothes into wooden boxes about the size of a hay bale.  This folding and packing was done very carefully so as to fill the box as completely as possible.  Because from there these hay-bale-shaped boxes went . . .

. . . to the baler.  Below there's a fuzzy picture of N-son working a manual fork-lift with pallets and boxes.  He, too, loved his job.  The balers would dump the packed clothes out of the wooden boxes into the baler machine, which would tie the clothes into a bale with just two plastic strips holding it all together.  This bale was wrapped in plastic sheeting for protection, labeled with contents, and stacked.  The minimal amount of packaging helps to keep shipping costs down.

What an experience this was!  We were surrounded:  surrounded by things, surrounded by hundreds of volunteers, and constantly being reminded that somewhere outside the walls of this warehouse we were in a world with almost 20 million refugees.    So much, and yet not enough.  

Things to love Thursday: An old leash on life

It doesn't cost much, but oh, what joy it brings.  A leash!  A leash!

Plus, whenever I walk the dog, I think of this wonderful verse from the Muppets Movie:

Rowlf:Ah, but what could be better than a saucy Irish setter
When puppy love comes on strong?
Or a collie that's classy, a laddie needs a lassie,
A lover and wife gives you a new leash on life. 

Kermit: (spoken): Uh, Rowlf, was that a new 'leash' on life?

Rowlf: (spoken): Oh yeah...sorry about that.

Talkin' Trash again

Here's a view from my curbside earlier this week:  two medium-trash cans (one for here, and one so beat up that it's "to go"), plus a side helping of four recycling bins.

It's a pretty typical picture on trash day, for most people.  But (and now here I'm going to do my little braggy thing) this is the trash result of a major (as in HUGE, top-to-bottom) clean-up of our garage.

And (more braggy stuff) we hadn't put out any trash cans at all since May.

And (even more brag-erations) is that what you see here are our fifth and sixth trash cans for the year so far -- to date, we've put out only six trash cans in the year 2015.  Yes, even with five people in the house, we're averaging about one trash can per month this year!  I'm feeling a little bit like we're really starting to get this low-trash lifestyle down right.

***

Where did the rest of the stuff in the garage go, then?  A lot of our cleaned-out material was stuff we're trying to get into the hands of people who can use it.   I've been using the garage as a place to store all of our "to donate" items.  When we finally got around to cleaning this out, we took a car-full of Arts and Crafts items to a non-profit on the other side of town -- it's a thrift store for craft stuff only.  I love this place; its mere existence finally convinced me that I can store my "I-might-be-able-to-use-this-someday" kinds of items "in the cloud" instead of in my own closets.  I gave away fabric paints, glass paints, fake fur, scrap books . . . all knowing full well I can go find similar items again for cheap, should I ever decide I need them.

We've been saving up books to donate to our local library book sale.  Those filled the trunk on a second car trip, while the clothes and other household items bound for Salvation Army hitched a ride by filling up the entire back seat.  

I sorted through all sorts of scrap wood, including some leftover from the Elephant-Mother-Chair.  I kept only the wood I could imagine using in the near future (garden renovation projects are planned for October), and I bagged/boxed the rest up as scraps for K-daughter, who just received a fire-pit from some friends and who wants to burn something it.

Plastic bags. How the heck do we get so many plastic bags, especially in my trash-phobic household?!? I took a fully-loaded bike trailer worth of those to the grocery store to recycle.  Sheesh.  Seriously, how do these bags keep reappearing at my home?

There is a still a pile of use-able but not donate-able items (roof shingles, plastic gardening pots, sleds, and other miscellany) in one corner of the garage.  I'll bring out this entire pile for display at the next neighborhood yard sale, which will be coming up in about a month and which attracts hordes and hordes of people.  I will probably sell most of this for $0.00.   I love free boxes!  

A milk crate and a cardboard box of hazardous household waste (motor oil, a can of oven cleaner, burnt out cfl lightbulbs -- some of it from cleaning out my dad's house and my ex-husband's house) will go to our local hazardous waste place later this week.   Or maybe I'll put some of it in the free pile instead -- might as well put it to use, right?  

There are a few hardware items I'll eventually take to our Habitat Restore, but I don't have enough stuff to make a trip worthwhile yet.  

Sweeping out the garage, I did my best to put the dirt-dirt (as opposed to styrofoam-dirt or plastic-dirt) in the compost instead of in the trash cans

Aannnnd . . . that leaves one recycling bin full of plastic bottles, three recycling bins with paper and cardboard, and two trash cans with a bunch of who-knows-what kinds of damaged goods and discarded packaging materials.

phew.    

  

Early summer days, cleaning house

One week into the boys' summer vacation, and life is surprisingly good.  I say "surprisingly" because  two or three weeks ago, one of the boys (I won't say which) had the kind of melt-down-headed-for-bad-trouble that caused our family to go into a nervous spin; that was what caused me to write my "Viktor Frankl Summer plans" post.  

Almost like a miracle of sorts, that son rebounded.  As in, not merely grudgingly avoiding trouble, but as in carefully finding new friends, checking in with parents more than he has to, generally trying to be the Most Trustworthy Kid Ever.

And so my first week home with the boys, even though it has kept me away from math, has been filled with a variety of sunny events, both literally and figuratively. In so many ways, we're getting rid of bad stuff in favor of new.

We've repotted the aloe that I've been meaning to repot for, I dunno, a year or two, and then started gifting them to friends who need aloes (whether the friends need them or not).

While N-son was off at a squash camp, J-son did lots of yard work, including the usual weeding and mulching, but also offering (because using a saw = fun) to take out this bush that I hate.   More space for edible plants in the garden now!

My own fun projects included dismantling old wooden radiator cover/cabinets that had cluttered up the basement for seventeen years.  

Of course, there was lots, lots more, including some serious garage cleaning.  The school year always acts like a dam to my home projects, piling them up behind that wall of busyness.  The summer releases the spigot and these projects spurt out and get taken care of so so quickly that it's hard to keep track of them.

At night, as the sun goes down, there's time to read those books I have stacked up by the side of my bed.

And of course, even though the dog isn't a long-delayed removal/improvement project, it's good to continue to cuddle up with someone we love.

Ahhhhhh, summer!

Carrying Cute

I've been reading Katherine Schultz's "Being Wrong"; I'm really enjoying it. A point she makes repeatedly is that one of the main mechanisms that causes us to blunder into mistakes, inductive reasoning,  is the same mechanism that helps us to learn things quickly.  Inductive reasoning allows us, for example, to distinguish "dogs" as a breed through seeing diverse examples like Chihuahuas, Golden retrievers, and Scooby Doo.  But inductive reasoning also teaches us to generalize a bit too much -- for example, to think that computer science is a man's career.  She encourages us to appreciate the former while learning from the latter.

This weekend, in that vein of appreciating inductive generalizations, I have been enjoying the power of stereotypes.  I know I have to be careful about how I say this, because falling back on stereotypes can be pernicious in so many ways.

Pernicious indeed.  My family has spent a bunch of time in recent years talking about adapting our behavior in response to stereotype.  As my sons grow from adorable little boys into powerful and tall teenagers, public impression of them has understandably changed.  We've had lots of discussions about what it means to walk around downtown.  When my six-year-old ran and wrestled and yelled, he was cute.  But when my teenage boys do the same thing, it worries on-lookers, especially when the teenage boys are black and the on-lookers are white and elderly. [And yes, I know that sentence contains more than its share of pernicious stereotypes.]   Even after lots of family conversations about Trayvon Martin and Ferguson and Baltimore, I have had to caution J-son that scooping snow off of cars we're walking by (so that he can make snowballs) might look to other people like an act vandalism (as though he were keying cars). I have had well-intentioned passers-by worry for my safety, thinking my boys were attacking me when they raced me to our car and yanked on the door handles to get in. All this is just to say that walking around town, especially after dark, is a different experience now for my family.

When my fair-skinned daughters were teenagers, of course nobody worried that the girls were going to attack them (or me). Sometimes, when the girls carried their infant brother, people would give them nasty glances, assuming they were unwed mothers. Mostly, the girls found this amusing -- especially my youngest, who has blonde hair, blue-eyes, and alabaster skin, and who is only seven years older than her mahogany-colored baby brother.

And this leads us to this weekend.  My granddaughter, Baby A, is with us Friday through Sunday.  The boys have delightedly taken on the role of uncles: tickling her, making faces,  explaining to me that the baby was crying because I was feeding her wrong, so they'd do it right.  They are amazing with the kid.

When the boys walked with a friend named JJ to the convenience store, I asked if they wanted to take a baby along, and they jumped at the chance.

And all of a sudden, walking the streets became a whole new experience again.  Because Baby A is adorable.  She's so obviously not the biological child of these boys, so there's no chance of mistaking the boys as unwed teenage fathers.  And did I mention she's adorable?

With Baby A in their arms, my boys had the unusual experience of strangers approaching them (not retreating, and not even merely ignoring them).   And people approached with a smile.  And they said encouraging things:  "oh, what a lovely baby!  She's so beautiful!".  And they beamed at the boys.

Who would be nervous about walking alongside this trio?

N-son told me that the boys had made jokes along the way to the store:  "If the police stop us, we're going to have to tell them that JJ is the father".  JJ is, in their minds, white.  But he's "white" in a swarthy, Mediterranean way, with beautiful olive skin and a bushy black head of hair.  Baby A is clearly not his kid.

Still, the fictional father story wasn't even remotely necessary.  My boys were surprised by the kindness of strangers.  Heck, we ourselves were delighted by the many ways this grouping breaks from the pictures we carry in our own heads, too:  That it's girls who like playing with babies.  That clumps of teenager boys are trouble-makers.  That race plays itself out the way we read in the newspapers, instead of the way it plays out in our living room.


I loved having my white teenage daughters help me care for my black infant son.  But I think I'm even more intellectually delighted by watching my black teenage sons care for my white infant granddaughter, precisely because of all the stereotypes I know that I carry around in my own head.   It's such a treat to be able to hold both images -- one, the image of my own implicit biases, and the other, the reality of my family -- to hold these in front of me and revel in the dissonance this creates.

Not to mention, they're so darned cute.