I go out walking . . .

Patty Cline, she sang it:  I go out walking, after midnight, out in the moonlight  . . . . I walk for miles, along the highway . . .

Me, I don't walk after midnight much, but I do walk after dark.  Not in the starlight, but in the lamplight.  And also I walk (and run) before the sun comes up.  So I think a lot about walking and running in the dark.

One of the things my friends around here think is how much safer it feels to walk in a city than in the country.  It's kind of backwards from what people usually say about cities and danger.   But for my friends, they feel like if there's a threatening person approaching here in the city, at least they're in a place where there are a lot of other people around to help.  When my buddy TL went running along rural roads near her in-laws' home, in contrast, whenever she saw a lone person heading toward her, she thought to herself, "If that person decides to attack me, I'm all alone and no one around will hear me."

For us, the main danger in the dark is cars.  Drivers, man.  They're kind of scary.

When I was in college, there was a country in the Middle East (I honestly don't remember which one) that decided to solve the problem of women being attacked at night by imposing a curfew on women.  If women don't go out after dark, the government argued, they won't be attacked.  Newspapers reported that the women responded that a much more just solution would be to impose a curfew on men.  (Of course, all of this ignores the fact that a huge part of violence against women happens in the home, . . . I'm just talking here about what I remember the newspapers of the time writing about)>

For me, I feel like there's a weird parallel between that story, with women and men in whatever place that was, and my own situation, with pedestrians and cars in the United States.  If it's dangerous for pedestrians to cross the street after dark because cars can't see them, maybe we should just ban cars after dark.   If a hilly neighborhood refuses to get sidewalks, then pedestrians should own the streets while the sun is down, and cars should be allowed back into the neighborhood only between sunrise and sunset.

(I don't really think that banning cars after dark is a feasible solution, but I like pretending to consider it, because it helps me think about lots of things in the world in a different way).

But since cars keep driving around where I'm trying to walk or run, instead, I try to glow.  I have become enamored of a company called "Lightweights" that sells reflective iron-on tape.   I've bought a yards and yards of the tape, and I cut it up and gift pieces to my friends; I make myself decorations for the heels of my boots, for the cuffs of my coat, for my running mittens, for the toes and sides and backs of my running shoes.

Here's a pro-tip about being visible to automobiles, taught to me by a psychologist who spent his career studying night vision of motorists:

Reflective vests make a person visible, but not identifiable: it's hard for motorists to distinguish between a person and, say, a traffic barrel merely from the glow of a reflective [something] on your chest or back.   Instead, small reflectors on your joints ---elbows, wrists, knees, and ankles--- are much more effective.

You can see a bit what I mean by checking out this video (2 minutes long).  At about 1:16 in the video, a runner comes into view.  You can really see it's a person because of the way the arms and legs move.  The reflective V in the middle of the person's chest doesn't even have to be there.

Movie with reflective tape on kayaks, bikes, and runners

I like reflectors more than lights because, when I'm walking or running, I don't actually need extra light to see.  The street lamps and stars (or reflection from clouds) is really good enough for me to get around, so why carry a light?  The reflective tape lights up for cars (who can't otherwise see pedestrians easily at night) but they don't annoy other pedestrians (who have better night vision, so who can see me regardless, but aren't likely to run me over whether or not they see me).

Even more, if I have reflectors on, I don't need to hold anything in my hands, or remember to charge things.  I don't even have to remember the reflectors themselves, because they're already always there, taped on.  I just put on my clothes, which happen to have reflective tape ironed on them, and go run with my friends.

And as the skies turns gloomy, night winds whisper to me,
I'm lit up as I can be.

I go out walkin, after midnight . . .
a-hoping you may be
somewhere a walkin' after midnight,
searching for me.

Miser Family Update: where in the world is my family?

Life continues to be rich and full in the Miser Family Household.  It's the kind of week where I'm having a bit of trouble keeping track of where people are, but in a good kind of a way.

The week began with an upbeat note -- or with an up-note beat? -- because N-son played drums in church Sunday morning.  I still get all goose-bumpy when I hear him play; I remember the summer I grudgingly bought him a pair of sticks and a practice pad, promising him a snare drum only if he practiced diligently.  We learned simple beats together; I used to practice repeating "paradiddle, paradiddle . . . " at him, just like the drum teacher taught him/us.  The hours of practice on the snare drum led to a hi-hat, which led to a bass drum . . . and eventually N-son was way beyond needing his mom standing over him. Nowadays N-son rocks it with the best of them.  And every time he does, I get all squishy proud inside.

K-daughter and D-son joined us, and after the service was over, 
A-child got to "help" N-son.

 And then my chickens flew the coop.  Monday morning, N-son left town for a multi-week trip to visit his sister in Virginia.   Apparently, N-son is picking up travel advice from his dad, because N-son's journey to Virginia (south of us) has taken him to rural New York State (north of us) and will soon take him to Massachusetts (even norther).   And thence to Virginia, I presume, unless for some reason N-son decides that the best route takes him, I dunno, through Mississippi or Wyoming.

Someday, the lion will lie down with the lamb,
bur right now, the bird will perch on the lion's head. 
This picture is from somewhere in my husband's travels.  

Speaking of N-son's dad, my guy headed out Wednesday morning.  It's hard for me to keep track of that man's itinerary, but I do keep track of money, and I can see that in the past four days he's withdrawn cash from ATMs in Philadelphia, Paris, and Tel Aviv.  In his email to me today he sent me a picture of a monastery in Germany and said he was waiting for the train for Jerusalem. 

I didn't get to see my daughters this week.  I'm assuming they still exist; they sent me Valentines greetings via text messages and I gratefully peeked at the texts in between job candidate visits, office hours, and grading. 

As for me, I'm the opposite of zipping around.  One rainy morning, I decided that instead of running (because: raining) I would do a Fitness Blender workout.  (In case you want in on the fun, the workout I did was this one.)  The workout itself didn't seem so bad at the time, but Dan (the guy in the video) warned viewers that their thighs would burn in the next day or two.  Well, now it's the next day or two  . . . and stairs are a whole new sensory experience for me right now, let me tell you!  And chairs.  And anything where I move my body up or down.   I did my usual 10K with my running buddies this morning, who are all at least a dozen years younger than I am and several of them are decades younger, and I warned them beforehand they might have to carry me up the hill . . . but fortunately for everyone involved, I'm over the hill now.  Phew!

The house across the street from me
has a cat weather vane.  It makes me smile.

And that's the news from our family, which continues to be wealthy in our adventures.  May you and yours be similarly prosperous. 

What I'm not saying about my kids

When my kids were young, it was fun to write about them.  Often, it was also funny to write about them. [Favorite older post about stockpiling emergency pants goes here.]  My goodness, what a cast of characters I've surrounded myself by!

But as my kids have turned into teenagers and young adults, many of the stories about them have gotten simultaneously more interesting and also more private.   I crossed a bad line at one point when I wrote a blog post about something one of my kids did, and my kid REALLY didn't like that post, and I've tried hard not to cross that line again.   (I took the post down, and apologized, but it took a while to build up trust again . . . as it should have; I was wrong). 

The thing is, though, these transition times my kids have faced are REALLY surprisingly fraught.   There's been so much for my kids and me to deal with that I haven't been able to write about in the specific.   And at the same time, I know it's not just me, and I've felt like it's kind of important to acknowledge that parenting in this transition time can be a real . . . what's the word? A real adventure/challenge/delight.  An advenchallight.  

I'm not alone in having family advenchallights.  My friends withi similar-aged offspring have stories that often make mine pale by comparison.  I don't see stories like ours on parenting blogs -- probably because that privacy stuff that keeps me so silent keeps other parents silent for similar reasons, and yet these stories seem to be EVERYWHERE around me in real life.  It seems like, at just the time that it might be most helpful and reassurring to share these stories, the blogosphere has gone silent.  

In fact, my friends and I have accummulated enough of these aventchallights that I think I've figured out a way to share a bit of what my family has been going through without over-sharing.  And that is, instead of telling you just about what's happened with my own family these past half-dozen years or so, I'll tell you what's happened to a LOT of families I know and love.  Here goes.  

My friends and I, here are some of the experiences we've been through:

We've had kids who dropped out of college.

We've had kids who have been kicked out of college.

We've had kids who got in trouble with the law for possessing/selling marijuana.

We've had kids who got addicted to heroin, and who continue to battle that addiction.

We've had kids who got romantically involved with scary people (I'm thinking of an alcoholic with guns, here)

We've had kids who got in trouble with the law for stealing from cars.

We've had kids who have been hospitalized repeatedly for severe, suicidal depression.

We've had kids whose self-care is so poor, they had a limb amputated after diabetes-related complications.

We've had kids who can't/won't get a job, and kids who get fired from jobs. 

We've had kids who moved out and have been homeless.

We've had kids we kicked out of our homes as a measure of "tough love". 

Many of these stories have aspects of redemptive healing.   Take that kid who dropped out of college, for example:  that kid audited classes at another college, and has since transferred to that other college and is thriving and thrilled to be there.  It's the kind of happy plot twist a disinterested bystander might have predicted, but while they were in the middle of helping their kid, the parents had no idea things might turn out this well.   

Or take the kid who was charged with stealing: the parents and the kid learned from the cop who charged the kid about a program our state calls ARD (Accelerated Rehabilitative Disposition).  It's essentially parole without conviction -- a chance to try to redeem yourself and eventually (if you do prove yourself), start over with a clean record instead of carrying around a criminal conviction for life.  It's not the kind of thing I read about in many parenting blogs, but it is an awesome thing to know about when you need it.

Some of these stories are unbelievably hard.  I'm thinking of dealing with kids addicted to heroin, here, because heroin is a TERRIBLY addictive drug that comes with side effects of lying and stealing and ruining relationships.  Rehab is expensive, and usually doesn't take the first or second or even fifth time.   Or I'm thinking of reorganizing an entire house (screwing the windows shut, locking away the knives) to protect kids who waver in and out of being suicidal.  It's not at all what you're thinking about when you have that baby shower, or when you name your child after someone you want to honor, or when you start that book of milestones.  But unbelievably hard can be a part of parenting, too.  

I'm writing all this because I think it's important for people to know that these stories exist:  if you're going through them, you're not alone.  If you're not going through them, it's entirely possible that people around you ARE going through them and just don't feel like they can share.  

I'm also writing this because I feel like not having said this is like putting forward a false face.  When C-son was in our house, and then when he had to leave our house --- that was really hard.  But I felt like it was helpful to me, and maybe to some other people, to write about that.  Part of me wishes I could keep doing that.   The happy bubbly stuff I usually write about is all true, and I'm so glad about those parts of the story.  Seriously.  (Or, *happily", I guess.)   

But the happy bubbly stuff isn't the whole truth, and I even though I can't tell the whole truth without crossing some crucial lines, I wanted to acknowledge that that truth exists, as well.  

Miser Family update: making beds, making travel plans, making pies

Life continues to be rich and full in the Miser Family Household.  It's been a week of making (making beds, making plans, making pies, etc).

Early in the week, we made N-son's bed. As in, we took the mattress off his bed here in my home, took the frame apart, carried everything a block-and-a-half to his new apartment, and put everything back together.

The bed frame, reconstructed

Socket wrenches are a truly awesome invention, I tell you. I feel like I ought to take things apart and put them back together more often, just so I can play with socket wrenches.  (They're easy enough to use that, on the previous move, it was my four-year-old granddaughter A-child who helped me take the bed apart, but even apart from easiness of use, they make a highly satisfying clicking noise and are just generally fun.)

At any rate, after we made N-son's bed, we made his bed (in the usual sense), and declared all was good.  He's moving in well; the gas is on, and he can cook.  In fact, he's made a couple of meals for his girlfriend, who praises his cooking.  I'm a truly proud mom.

N-son's bed with mattress and sheets.

My husband's calendar is a delight to read.  It's full of events like "Activist Lunch", "Wiki Salon", "Tuesdays with ToomeAaaaaay", "ESL", "Minyan", and the like.  (If there's anything "like" those).  He's gotten all sorts of preventative shots in prep for his upcoming travels to* Europe, the Middle East, and Africa.   

[*Okay, except that any itinerary he's ever mapped out 

changes drastically once his trips get under way, 

so who the heck knows where he'll actually head off to 

once his plane takes off on Wednesday?]

My own calendar looks a lot less dramatic:  grading.  candidate interviews.  teaching and more grading.  Office hours.  Did I mention grading?

So the highlight of the week, once the thrill of socket wrenches finally wore off, was our family Valentines' Dinner -- held a week early, because of upcoming travels of two of the men in my life.  I made new napkins, and set the table with these napkins on the plates.  We had heart-shaped bowls of applesauce and beets.

N-son and I cut pepperoni into hearts, and used them to decorate a heart-shaped pizza.

The best aspect of this pizza is that, when you're serving it,
you can channel Janis Joplin and belt out,
"Take it!  Take another little piece of my heart now, baby!"

And if you noticed little red boxes on the table in the picture above, you have good eyes!  I made those boxes, using an origami fold, out of old calculus workbooks.  I filled them with heart-shaped marzipan that I didn't use at Christmas, and so I shaped these and froze them for Valentine's day.  Yummmmmm.

There was also a heart-shaped pie or two: cherry-applesauce-rhubarb, to be specific, alternatively titled a "What's in the basement?" pie.   I love putting stuff together like this, rummaging through my canning jar shelves and convincing different jars to make friends with one another.  If I could have figured out how to use a socket wrench in the recipe, I'd have done it.

The next morning, we followed up with a hearty breakfast of waffles with "Valentines syrup".  The syrup contained hints of rhubarb, apples, and cherry . . .  go figure.

And that's the news from our family, which continues to be wealthy in our adventures.  May you and yours be similarly prosperous. 

Feeling shelf-ish, part two

Yay! We found the book on Organizing Solutions for People with ADHD.  It was in a box, under the bed of a son of mine who has ADHD.  So, good.

The long-lost book.

We found it as we were disassembling the bed and packing up his stuff, getting ready to move the bed and the stuff to his new apartment, where he'll get to be all organized (or not) all by himself, with minimal intervention from a rather Organization-obsessed mom.

I mentioned a while back that I'd learned two really helpful things from this book (although now that I reflect on this, I want to up that to "three" helpful things), one of which is to have a giant paper recycling box that you think of as a box of "chronologically sorted paper".   Another useful approach this book advocates is to pare down possessions, and to correspondingly move your approach from being "the person who has everything I might need" to "the person who can creatively make do with anything that I happen to have".   The idea is that storing a lot of stuff is overwhelming for a person with ADHD, and as much as I'd love to load N-son down with a year's supply of, say toothpaste and shampoo, I have to admit that he functions a lot better if he doesn't have to sort through those many many bottles to find, say, a stick of deodorant.  So pare his possessions indeed.   We've done that.

But here's the shelf-based thing that I've come to learn from this book.  And that is, dressers with drawers are just about the worst possible way we could ask N-son to store his clothes.  I already knew they were kind of problematic because of his handedness issue*, and long ago (back in 2007, or so) I'd redone his toy shelves so that his toys were in bins I'd made from paper boxes with viewing notches cut out.

N-son's old toy bins, made out of trimmed paper boxes.

* N-son had a stroke in utero, and so coordination between the left and right side of his body

 is harder for him than it is for other people; two handed tasks (like opening a drawer to put something in, hanging things on hangers, or buttoning a shirt are all possible, 

but they're enough of an obstacle that he's often likely to avoid them, 

especially when he's distracted).

So, what this Organizing Solutions for People with ADHD book says is that I was on the right track, and in fact that I should have done something similar for his clothes, too.   The book recommends wire mesh shelves and plastic bins, but of course I say to heck with plastic bins.   Instead, I nabbed a bunch more paper boxes and trimmed one side down -- this time, the long side.  While N-son stayed with us these past few months, these boxes fit well on the shelves we'd intended for my husband's books.  

Clothes and books, all on bookshelves.

As much as this looks a little more messy than I'd like in my own bedroom, I have to say it's worked really well for N-son while he's with us.  He rolls his clothes in a Marie-Kondo-inspired way (although she'd die and then roll over in her grave if she realized his efforts came from her approach), or else he just kind of shoves the clothes in.  Either way, they're all in pretty much the right place, and we know what clothes he has that are clean, and which clothes we need to replenish.  

The boxes have all made the transition to his new apartment, where they're lined up beautifully and neatly on the carpet at the edge of his bedroom.  I still think I'll go help him get a set of wire mesh shelves, but we're definitely not getting him a dresser.

Meanwhile, N-son's old dresser is now down in the basement, serving to hold my assorted hardware and tools.  The drawers are awesome for me, because they keep my power tools and supplies clean (out of the way of sawdust and paint).  I don't mind opening drawers, but I'm not going to make N-son do it again on a regular basis, if I don't have to. 

And now that N-son has moved out, we have a bunch of shelves opened up for my husband's books again.  It's kind of magic that things have worked out so well.

Miser Family Update: a sweet new lease on life edition

Life in the Miser Family Household continues to be rich and full. 

The past three weeks have taken me to Denver and back for the big math meetings.  This is the first round of meetings since my book came out, and apparently it's doing pretty well.  Everywhere I went, people came up to me and said, "I have your book!".   (And I got to respond, "How cool! I have it, too!")  And I autographed a few copies, and my editor/publisher bubbled at me about how happy she is, and just generally I felt like a minor celebrity, in a good way.  It was sweet. 

The other neat thing is that I know the authors of a bunch of books that have just come out, and not in the "there's a famous author, and I met her at a dinner once" kind of a way.  No, there are some people I've known forever; I've seen them apply for jobs or come up for tenure or start out on a freelancing gig . . . and now they're starting to come out with books that other people are noticing, and I think, "I knew Bob Bosch/Francis Su/Evelyn Lamb/Dave Richeson back when!".   And so the meeting was fun for me because I got to be happy for a bunch of friends and colleagues I've long enjoyed just hanging out with. 

When I got back home from the meetings, real life started again.  We'd hoped to be done hiring Computer Scientists, but they're an exotic species that is difficult to encounter in the wild, and so we're still on safari, so to speak.  Paperwork, campus tours, lectures, dinners . . . these continue.  My classes have started up, and I have two undergrad research teams working with me, and I'm still the secretary of the faculty, and all of these things combined mean I don't particularly have to fear being bored or aimless this semester.  So that's good!

Okay, but that's enough about me.  Maybe even more exciting is the news that K-daughter and D-son have put in an offer on a house, and it was accepted!   They're likely to be moving in in about a month.  Whoop! 

And those two are not the only ones to have a moving experience in their near futures: yesterday, my husband and N-son and I went to a property manager's place, and N-son and I signed a bunch of papers together.  He now has an apartment! 

It's a block and a half from our home, so he'll have help around the corner if and when he needs it.  In fact, he'll have the help even if he doesn't need it, because my name is on that lease, too, and so his dad and I will check on him a lot to make sure he's settling in okay.  The transition to living on his own is a big deal, and we're all excited!   

N-son spent the evening after the signing calling everybody to tell them, and today we moved most of his stuff into the new place.  We met his new downstairs neighbor, a motherly woman who told him that the walls are thin and he is not supposed to stomp too much, or he'll hear it from her.   I got to give her the welcome news that the person moving into the space above her head is a drummer, but a considerate drummer, who only drums during the day.  After she recovered a bit from this news, she offered him a bunch of advice on living in the neighborhood; I'm glad she'll be his downstairs neighbor, keeping an eye (or an ear) on him.  He won't have any way to cook there for a few days (gas isn't set up yet, and he doesn't yet have a microwave), and his mattress is still on the floor instead of on his bed frame, but he's spending tonight in the apartment all on his own.  So exciting!

And finally, I just want to say yay-hooray for the co-PI on my recent NSF grant proposal.  Not only is he a whiz at writing compelling prose about assessment protocols and data management plans, but he also alerted me, in time for me to take advantage of the news, that the first Saturday in February is Ice Cream for Breakfast Day!   Yes!   We celebrated with gusto.  Or with waffles.  Y'know.

Waffles with ice cream for breakfast.
In observance of the Official Holiday. 

And that's the sweet news from our family, which continues to be wealthy in our adventures.  May you and yours be similarly prosperous.

Feeling shelf-ish

Shelves that are green on top and on the outside,
purple on the undersides.
Up above the shelves is a green bike wheel
I'm making into a chandelier, because I can.

So, I've made a set of green-and-purple shelves out of an old doghouse.

When we moved from our former home to this new (to us) home this past summer, we left behind a set of floor-to-ceiling, built-in bookshelves.   We also managed to re-home quite a few of our books, but not all of them.  Because of that, many of our books and book-like belongings have been been biding their time, tucked away in printer paper boxes on the floor, or stashed in printer paper boxes in my office at work, waiting for the day that they can stand up properly  and flex their spines out in the open. 

The thing is, wood seems to be freaky expensive.  I've toured our Habitat Restore -- there's not really any good shelving lumber there.  New lumber from the hardware store is pricey enough that I've convinced myself it's an environmental imperative to avoid using it if I can.  So I've been scouting around for scrap lumber, but it's not exactly been easy to find. 

Two wrongs don't make a right, but sometimes two problems make a solution.   The people who owned this house had apparently built a dog house at one time, and when they moved out, they tossed the pieces of that dog house amid a big pile of other random unfinished projects in the basement.  After we moved in, we donated a bunch of railings and poles to a scrap metal collector, we cleaned out piles of sand and bricks, and I'm still not sure what to do with all the cinder blocks we were gifted.  (Some of them are part of shelves I "built" -- really, piled up -- in the basement, but we're wealthy beyond our needs when it comes to cinder blocks).  And I laid the pieces of the dog house -- heavy 4'x4' pieces of grooved plywood -- off to one side, awaiting inspiration. 

Eventually, I realized that if Literature Professors can deconstruct a text, I can deconstruct a dog house.  I used the grooves as guides and sawed the pieces into usable widths.  For the cost of about $7 in L-brackets and screws, I had a set of shelves that were fairly sturdy but really badly ugly from weather and outdoor use.  Oh, and also kind of ugly because I used more of a "measure-once-bang-it-together" approach than a more professional carpenter would have. 

When it comes to home projects, I tend to be a "Sin Boldly" type, figuring that gawdy paint makes construction quirks seem "arty" rather than "inept".  So I grabbed some paint from a previous project or two.   I like how the green and purple contrast, with the purple in the shadows.  There's a single board on the back toward one side to provide side-to-side stability, and I have that purple, too.  The shelf just barely fits in that corner of the room-- in fact, in order to make it fit, I had to lift it back out, use the jigsaw to cut a notch out of the bottom for the radiator pipe, and then lift it back in. 

I've started hauling financial stuff back from my math office, and that means the poetry books aren't far behind.  My green-and-purple shelves, here in my Command Center.  I'm so happy.   It's a good kind of shelf-ish feeling, really.