Okay, I am aware that I am seriously challenged when it comes to girl stuff.
I own an eyeliner for glamorous occasions, but not a singe shoe with any heel.
When my hair starts bothering me, I pull the ends around and chop them off.
Other than that, it is clean.
For the most part I am perfectly happy with this.
I have, however, an eighteen year-old daughter.
We've already dealt with the more conventional mother/daughter uncomfortable discussions: periods, the sex talks, and the like.
But now we've reached areas where I have to retire baffled and silenced.
Here's one: Is my leg too hairy; do I have to shave all the time?
And, even worse, how do I get my hair to do that?
You might as well go ask your dad, dear, because I am clueless.
We survived learning how to put up ballet buns (shudders at the memory), produce French twists for special shows, and the like.
We figured out how not to have huge hunks of tangles in long, thick and curly hair.
That's been enough for me.
Up until this spring Sair had never cut her hair, but part of the whole suddenly she's really an adult thing going on here included her taking some scissors and having at it.
(She did ask first if we would mind - I think just for information - and of course no problem.)
Now she's got about three inches of hair around her face,, lengthening out to not-quite shoulder length at the back.
It is quite curly, and really looks cute.
But, sadly, cutting it is only the beginning.
Now she wants it to do things..
If she washes it and brushes it, it makes soft waves.
When she wakes up it stands straight out in spiky bits..
For ballet she can tame it to lie flat with the application on hideous amounts of gel.
But I think she wants to be more in control of how it manifests itself.
And I am completely useless on the subject.
At the drug store there are rows and rows of hair junk all making different claims, and frankly I don't even understand what it is they say they do.
There is an entire technology here whose existence I never even suspected.
And it is not just the bottles, but it seems there are procedures involving brushing, combing or whatever at work here too.
But this is all way, way beyond me.
So, what do you guys do with your hair, why, and HOW?
The next thing I am working on is dealing with stuff.
I'm going to start with photos,
I have boxes and boxes of them, mine, my family's, Tom's family's, Sair's, and what-the-hell-is-this.
The time has come to sort out, scan, label, and otherwise reduce to some kind of coherence the lot.
So, has anyone done this?
Is there any reason to favor one site over the other?
In fact, is one of the photo sharing sites what I need?
My only constraints are that I'd like it to be either free or cheap, easy to use, and secure.
I don't even know what else I should want it to be,
In the news from Wales:
A 72-year-old man who was cleared of killing his long-term partner two months ago has died....
Former lorry driver Mr Henton claimed he found Mrs Sutton dead after discovering the back door window of the property had been smashed. He then called the police.
Mr Henton was charged after officers secretly recorded largely solitary
conversations with cats Twinkie and Pudsey in January 2007.
Twinkie, Pudsey, who could you?:
From the BBC - who clearly have the best news.
(See also: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/7390109.stm)
Well, when it's a paid ad?
Or a puff piece? but that's the kind of thing you expect to see, maybe on the back of a book.
But what about Amazon reader reviews, I hear you ask, aren't they just written by people like me?
(Okay, I have my naive moments.)
If you have ever thought to vet a book before ordering it by scanning the on-line Amazon reviews, here's an interesting controversy to study.
It's all over all the publishing blogs, but there's a good summary here:
http://dearauthor.com/wordpress/2008/04/18/summary-post-of-rebas-amazon-fight/
Another entry of interest:
http://dearauthor.com/wordpress/2008/04/10/author-deborahanne-macgillivray-harasses-amazon-reader/
And, importantly:
http://dearauthor.com/wordpress/2008/04/13/amazons-review-system-needs-to-be-changed/
Or if you want to see more, or different perspectives on all this, you can google Deborah Anne MacGillivray + Amazon, and get all the poop on this anyone could desire.
The quick and nasty is that a reader on Amazon, a fan yet, innocently wrote a three-star review of this person's book.
And all hell broke loose.
Apparently if you are sufficiently organized in your fan-base, negative, or even luke-warm, reviews are a thing of the past.
You put out the word on your web-rings, and your buddies all mark a review "abusive' (it wasn't), and Amazon deletes it.
Poof! No more three-star reviews - nothing but fives for this baby.
And apparently all MacGillivray's less-than stellar reviews had been swallowed up in this way for some time.
But this reviewer, Reba, did not go gently into deleted-land, and the shit has been flying since.
While the particular paranoia of this one author is, of course, endlessly fascinating -- I especially recommend her tracking down and posting to her base the reviewer's name, address, children's names, etc., for those with a taste for crazy -- the whole big business aspect of the customer's reviews on Amazon was an eye-opener for me.
You've got publishers, you've got paid reviewers, you've got sock puppets, and everyone's egos are running wild.
And the current up-shot of it all is that Reba, the reviewer, has been banned from Amazon.
Yeah.
My own response?
Well, some virtual stompage would be good.
I will just point out that she writes badly.
And she appears to be either pretentious or simply a complete loony.
(She claims to have family papers from the 1200s as the basis of her historical bodice-ripper? -- I mean, you'd be talking Henry II, Edward I here, folks.
Any kind of personal memorabilia is incredibly thin on the ground, even for major historical figures.
There just aren't love letters from random folk lying about.
(But, hey, evidently her grandfather was a "British Historian" and she did his work with him, so who am I with my silly pointless years of graduate study in medieval literature to quibble about this?)
Anyway, I found the petition and signed it - http://www.ipetitions.com/petition/amazon_change - and
I will avoid Amazon until, or unless, some serious realignment of their reviewing system happens.
Of course, probably Hell will be getting snow days by then.
All this talk of lice makes me itchy.
I got lice back in sixth grade.
That was 1962.
People didn't get lice in nice suburban schools in 1962.
But I did.
I kept telling my mom I was itchy, but since I was a known mosquito feast, no one listened.
(Once we were camping out while traveling, and as we waited for breakfast at a diner my loving family counted over a hundred bites on my arms and shoulders.)
So of course I was itchy.
It kept getting worse and worse, so finally I found a test tube with a top (of course we had test tubes sitting around the house, doesn't everyone), and I caught about a dozen beasties and presented the sample to my mother.
(Who was busy packing to leave on a European vacation alone with my dad the following week -- Mad timing skillz, I haz them.)
Having been a pre-DDT child, she recognized the contents immediately.
After all, in the twenties her mother used to greet her at the front door after school with a fine-toothed comb before letting her in the house (all those kids from the wrong side of the tracks...)
So my folks called the school.
The school, with a grand disregard for biology, suggested that, filthy child that I was, it was my fault that I had somehow spontaneously generated lice.
I should stay home until my parents cleaned me up sufficiently to consort with other, decent children again.
Part of this was stupidity: they had never had to cope with the problem before, and just wanted it to disappear.
Shut up the complaint,and the problem is gone, right?
Part of this was that my parents did absolutely nothing in the way of school involvement, so the administrators literally did not know who they were dealing with.
There was a massive PTA status system my parents had ignored,and therefore they had no standing in the parental hierarchy, and, at least theoretically, could therefore be treated rudely.
But it was a stupid move.
My dad, the doctor, made a second phone call.
He sent in his colleagues from the county Health Department.
Even though the school itself had a nurse on staff already, they sent in an outside visiting nurse that same day.
She inspected the entire school, and sent home fully three quarters of the students AND teachers.
She reported directly to the county.
And remained on-site to inspect and okay the returning heads (students and staff).
None of this much helped me in getting along with my hideous sixth-grade teacher.
Nor with getting along with my second oldest sister, who ended up having to fine-tooth comb me in the bath tub repeatedly over the new few days after my parents left.
Looking at it now, I have a fair amount of sympathy for her - she was about 18, and it was icky.
But I wish she hadn't made me feel as if the ickiness was me.
So when Sarah picked up lice - I think from the seats on Amtrak - I tried keeping it low-key.
We took a lice vacation from classes and combed each other with the stereo blasting.
It was almost fun.
BTW
You can get rid of lice without any pesticides at all.
You soak your scalp in vegetable oil, wrap it all up tight in a towel for about an hour.
(You are suffocating (you hope), or at least immobilizing, the adult beasties.)
You then shampoo the oil from your hair in a long, hot shower.
As your hair dries, you, or a buddy, flea comb your scalp, paying close attention to getting the entire length of the hair from the scalp out.
Do a small patch of hair each time, sectioning the hair and trying to cover your entire scalp.
If you do with over a piece of paper, you will see if you are getting any lice or nits.
Continue to comb, as often as you can stand it, until you find no nits at all.
(You shouldn't need re-oil the hair, unless you are still finding adults.)
Then you comb about four more times over the next week or so, just in case.
Sarah and I caught the infestation early, and the basic combing only took two days, maybe six or seven comb throughs each.
I did follow up on us both after that, but didn't find anything.
Oh,and launder all the cloth stuff in hot water, and wrap unwashables in plastic and store for a couple of weeks.
I gotta go wash my hair.
As we flipped by they had an English as a second language lesson.
They have actual for-credit courses, and this one was teaching English in English.
All a bit of a crack up, since she was enunciating so terribly clearly, and composing rather peculiar sentences.
All very amusing, until she came to the subject matter of the day.
The lady was informing the students about the difference between can/will, may/would.
As she explains it, in English can and could are informal, while may and would are formal.
So "Could you lend me a pencil?" is informal, and "Would you lend me a pencil?" is the formal way to ask.
Then they practiced it.
I am beyond shock.
Okay, maybe that's a little melodramatic.
Partly in reaction to reading about Bobavid's recent trials, and partly from masochistic curiosity, I thought I'd take a look at that scary place I usually avoid called People who have Lauowolf in their Neighborhood.
Very depressing reading, in an oh-I-didn't-know-so-and-so-didn't-like-me sort of way.
Sob.
And then there are the who is this anyway people, or why is this or that organization looking at my blog'
Ack!.
And even scarier than that are all the Question Mark People who are no longer voxing, but will sit forever on that page.
And it looks as if I have dozens of them.
Or at least lots.
Looks around, uneasily.
Is it something I said?
From today's New York Times:
Howard Dean, chairman of the Democratic National Committee, said that either Hillary Rodham Clinton or Barack
Obama needs to drop out of the presidential race in June in order for Democrats to win the White House in November.
“We really can’t have a divided convention. If we do it’s going to be very hard to heal the party afterwards,” Mr. Dean said during an interview with Barbara Walters Monday on ABC’s “Good Morning America.”
Dean didn’t say which candidate should drop out, only that it should happen after the voters had their say in the primaries, which end June 3.
*************************
Of course, the news people have been blathering on like this too for months, as if the absolute worst thing on earth would be a convention in which something happens for a change.
Frankly, is there anyone -- except true political wonks -- who actually watches either convention?
Can you say -- boring?
Lke the Oscars, only without the celebrities, or the scripted humor.
And don't forget, the brilliant party leaders who are telling us all to get it all settled now, tidily behind doors, and out of public view, are the same brilliant people who decided to punish the Michigan and Florida parties by disenfranchising the voters of those states.
And now they want the big decision, the political sausage-making, to go happen off-stage, with no one watching.
Just how far up their butts do these guys keep their heads anyway?
This is from the April 12, 2008, Science News letters section:
Respect the Past
I feel that Rachel Ehrenberg was entirely too glib in "Digging that Maya blue" (SN: 3/1/08, p. 134). The description of an ancient Mayan religious ritual as "plucking the hearts from humans and tossing the bodies into the sacred cenote" is disrespectful. I am sure that Science News would never describe any contemporary religious rituals in this manner. Here is hoping that the editors and writers adopt a more dispassionate eye.
GERALD J. CERCHIO, San Francisco, Calif
I mean, if he had wanted to complain about being glib in the face of real people having been brutally murdered, yeah maybe I'd start feeling maybe I was just a little insensitive about thinking the article was fine.
Or at least we could discuss it.
But if he wants me to be sensitive to the possible slight to long-dead members of a defunct religion that performed ritual human sacrifice.....it''s a big WTF time for me.
The check is in the mail.
We extended the dithering as long as we could (well, maybe we could have waited until Friday and express mailed it).
But we did give it extra time for considering all the pluses and minuses.
And I think we can say we've looked at this decision to the point of madness.
Pretty much Sair has been decided ever since she first got their letter, but we had to work around to all three of us being on the same page.
And I think we are now.
But it's still painful.
Financially, it will be hard.
We've got offers of loans (yeah), but I think we can pull it off without massive debt.
It's still a scary proposition.
And of course for Berkeley we would be paying in-state tuition.
And she could stay home, or at least, near home.
And UCB is nothing to sneeze at.
Which is part of why it's hard.
But also, I really loved going to Berkeley.
I had dropped out of college back east, and moved out here and was working on the campus, and then I snuck back into school through the back door.
First some "employee development" courses (of course I'll be a better secretary for taking Latin....), then I got admitted formally, and started going to school half-time, and still working until finally I got my M.A. and starting teaching.
But Sair wouldn't be going to my Berkeley.
That was thirty years ago.
The professors I worked with are almost entirely long gone, and only the buildings are the same.
Besides, for me Berkeley was an adventure, while for Sair Berkeley is just home, the campus is in her back yard, and the cultural goodies of the bay area are what she grew up with.
I think she'll always want to be coming back here, but I think she needs more of the world now than this
.
So she's going to be going off to London (!) for her freshman year, and after that New York.
I'm telling myself firmly that once a place isn't near, everywhere faraway is just as far.
New York, London, it is all just not here.
So let's see how calm I am in August.
