I don’t normally talk about my kids much, in part because my oldest is a private sort of person and also because it’s not fair to tell their stories for them. However, this time I can’t resist. I’ve just had my own assumption handed to me by my youngest in the best way possible.

P.S. My oldest isn’t offering a shoddy showing either having just been named a contender for the National Merit Scholarship Award .

Anyway, a little bit of back story is necessary.

Some years ago, my oldest earned a role in a high school performance of Fiddler on the Roof, his first up here in Reno. I’m the type who’s willing, though not particularly able, and so volunteered to help with costuming. (more…)

Several people have been asking me about my pulse pen and what I thought about it. Only thing is that I hadn’t had the chance to take it out on a road trip yet. Well, now I have and here are the results. This is what the pen captured. You can see my lousy handwriting in its full glory…and I was even sort of trying to write well, okay, trying when I remembered :p. Then I ran it through the OCR software. It certainly isn’t perfect, but the reason for the picture is so you can see what it had to work with. My older son wrote a sentence to test it in his cursive and it translated perfectly. Maybe I should improve my handwriting? Oh, and the pen also recorded the audio for the whole presentation in a usable sound file despite sitting in the left-hand, second to last row of a curved lecture hall.

Anyway, on to the show! (more…)

As I mentioned a couple posts back, I volunteer at the Nevada Humane Society. It’s a no-kill shelter that is overloaded with cats and dogs of practically every shape and size. We even have various rodents and bunnies.

My Humane Society is running a free adoption deal this weekend (starting Thursday) and it got me thinking about how much people might not know about shelters. So, here are some of my thoughts on the subject (prompted by replies to my notice about the adoption deal).

First of all, while I only know the specifics of my shelter, it’s easy enough to find no-kill shelters no matter where you are. And these shelters, because they keep their doors and hearts open to animals in need, are desperate for help, whether volunteering, donating, or even adopting one of the residents. (more…)

NaNo started out uniquely this year. Each previous time, I have jumped in feet first and set my target for 5k or 10k for the first couple of days to build up a cushion for when I start to slow down as I always seem to.

This year, I was at World Fantasy in San Jose at midnight on the 1st, and driving back from the Bay Area on the day of the 1st, beyond usual post-con exhaustion. Not only that, but I brought my sister back with me to get some intensive programming time. Then it was my son’s first play of the year, and both sets of grandparents came to see the incredible (unbiased, really, I swear) performance. None of this translated into more than a tiny bit of NaNo productivity.

So, I have finally reached the point where I can focus on my NaNo, and am coming in about 8 days behind. This is clearly not optimum, but I’m not giving up either on the story or on getting my 50k. To accomplish this, though, I need to be focused and driven. I need to use my writing time appropriately, and get those words out on the page.

The universe seems to have other plans . (more…)

pedestrian \puh-DES-tree-uhn\, noun, adjective:

1. a person who gets about on foot; walker
2. going on foot; walking
3. without imagination; dull

I got the above in my email from Dictionary.com’s Word of the Day this morning, and the third entry struck me as odd. What does it say about our culture as reflected in our language that self-locomotion is something to be scorned?

When my boys were younger, we used to walk for exercise, to get out, to experience the world, and to talk without distraction. We had wonderful conversations about life, the universe, and everything; we played imagination games as we stalked the deadly Stopasaurus but failed to find anything but the occasional octagonal red prints; and the boys helped me brainstorm my stories, introducing interesting elements or just getting me to think things through.

Pedestrian? Well yes, except for when one of them was in a stroller.

But pedestrian? I can’t imagine a description less adequate or more inappropriate than “without imagination; dull.” To this day, I remember those times fondly and miss them.

Since moving to Nevada, I have taken up walking again, by myself or with my husband this time as my boys are too busy with their own lives.

As I walk, responsible for nothing but putting one foot in front of the other, I work out story problems, get past programming limitations, muse on my world, and sing along to my MP3 player. And that’s not even considering the natural beauty all around me with ducks of more varieties than I knew existed, the ever-present (though migratory ) Canada Geese, the two herons who are never seen together, the swooping hawks, occasional eagles, and numerous smaller birds, including the laughable hat bob on the heads of quail.

So then I go to Online Etymology Dictionary (http://www.etymonline.com/) and find this:

pedestrian (adj.)
1716, “prosaic, dull” (of writing), from L. pedester (gen. pedestris) “plain, prosaic” (sense contrasted with equester “on horseback”), from pedes “one who goes on foot,” from pes (gen. pedis) “foot” (see foot). Meaning “going on foot” is first attested 1791 in Eng. (it was also a sense of L. pedester). The noun meaning “walker” is 1793, from the adj.

If I’m reading this correctly, the dull meaning, though contrasted with on horseback, predates the walking meaning by some 70+ years. I’d be willing to concede the physical act of walking, the putting one foot in front of the other, has little to recommend it compared to a wild charge across a desert valley on horseback, but I’d question whether a walking pace on a horse would be any more thrilling, any less…umm…pedestrian .

And if all you’re doing when walking is the physical act, might I suggest you’re missing a grand opportunity. Now I would not go so far as to recommend my older sister’s practice of crossing busy streets with her head in a book, but there’s a lot of things you can do when walking that are not recommended for other modes of locomotion. No one is going to pass a “no walking on the cell phone” ban, nor is arguing with a friend (friendly discussion now! ) as likely to result in a potentially serious accident.

With all this talk of the pedestrian act, I think I’ll leave you now to go out into the sunshine I can see through the window. Perhaps today I will actually catch the two herons at once. It hasn’t happened in over two years, but I keep looking while committing a pedestrian act.

Like most parents bringing up kids in this technological age, I tremble under fear of the dual forces of computer and television. I try to remember all the things I did for entertainment, but I get the “aww, Mooooooom,” reaction. It’s so bad that back when the boys were just starting school, I had to enforce a 30 minutes on, 30 minutes off rule with the computer or playstation just to protect their arms. Yeah, really. They came back from school complaining about their hands hurting. Despite their fervent hopes for a “does not need to work in class” pass, when their symptoms turned out to be real, I restricted any hand/arm injury aggravating behavior at home. They get one turn a day on games that we determine will hurt their hands based on repetitive motion.

You might be wondering where I’m going with this, but the background is necessary to understand my moment of pure joy .

Last night after family time where we watch Buffy the Vampire Slayer on DVD… (Let me tell you that is a whole ‘nother story because we watch it several nights a week and have quickly progressed from the earlier episodes into the college life which deals with events and issues requiring…more emotional maturity. “Can’t we skip the kissing,” is a frequent comment, much along the lines of the little boy in Princess Bride.) Anyway, back on topic. We’d started early for some reason and there were exactly 30 minutes before bedtime.

My youngest says to my oldest, “Do you want to take the turn?”

After confirming that I hadn’t misheard and getting over the heart attack of the offer rather than a screaming fight over who gets the last turn, I got the second shock.

The answer was no!

The reason? The oldest had just received his Amazon order with four new books in a Forgotten Realms series he’s been reading. And the youngest? After several false starts, thanks to an Anne McCaffrey short story in English class, he dove head first into the surprising (not ) number of McCaffrey’s I have on my shelf having collected them for years.

While I’d love to see them spend more time outdoors and become more independent about getting themselves around…right now they go to Jamba Juice and back…at least I have proof positive that something is more important than the electronics they use to fill what seems like almost every minute of the day.

Okay, I’ve spoken about all the times I tried to kill myself by accident, well except the fact that I discovered my cuddly purple sweater is all melted at the front after making tea while I was sick last week (guess it isn’t cotton ), so I thought I’d convey one of the triumphs in my house. Gross, amusing, positively icky, but triumphant.

Yesterday, I was going about my innocent life in a house alone with way too many inquisitive, intelligent cats. You know when you hear the bump in the night? Well, let’s just say it doesn’t send me running for a baseball bat. The last time these cats got in trouble, they took out a glass bottle of thyroid medicine for our elderstateskitty (recently passed ).

Anyway, so when I start hearing them leaping off furniture and clatters and bangs, I go running out to rescue whatever next they’re thinking to destroy, or to protect their paws from glass shards if that’s what card I draw.

This time, it was the worst I could ever imagine! My Siamese kitten (1.5 years old), who has been gently brought up and hand reared (okay, since he was 6 weeks), had a mouse in his mouth. No, it wasn’t the toy kind. When he dropped it, it wriggled. Ewww.

So here he is, dropping and grabbing, dropping and grabbing, and growling at Fawkes (a street cat picked up from the pound).

Well, glass had been bad enough, I didn’t want to be cleaning up mouse guts. So I grabbed a paper towel, grabbed Randy, and told him to drop. It only took two tries before he released the squirmy, furry object and I wrapped it up, went to the outside garbage, and tossed it in…not hard enough because it was still wriggling, but at least it was trapped.

So, torn between pride and gross-out, I search the house for an “appropriate” cat treat. Can’t find any so call my hubby. Not only does he direct me to the treats, but he tells me he knew there were mice in the garage and had put out poison for them. Eep!

I lost a cat, my first one actually that I remember for real, to rat poison. Hearing he had tried to poison my cat was no fun, but he didn’t think the mice could get into the house…and none of our pound-collected, formerly outdoor cats had ever had any success with mice. So I start the calls to the vet. She wants to know what poison. How do I know? I didn’t even know we had mice :p. Hubby gets home, tells her the poison, and it turns out they have to ingest a high concentration directly. Thank goodness. He drops the rest of the poison on the mouse still trapped in the garbage can and we go on about our lives. It’s all over.

Or so we thought…

On comes family time. Right now, we’re watching tapes of Space Above and Beyond because the networks have decided that sci-fi buffs like me don’t exist :p. It’s a weird, tense moment and suddenly a burst of violent action. Is it the show? Of course not.

Hubby goes to investigate.

It’s another mouse.

Pause the show, on with the lights, and now we have four humans trying to catch the mouse. Randy backs off, disgusted, Fawkes comes in to investigate, but can’t help at all.

Me, I’m the beater. I’m great at flushing the little furry creature out from behind bookcases and cabinets with an old legal-sized file folder and a piece of cardboard. Just don’t ask me to touch it. Much to my kids’ delight, I go all girly with the tiptoes and squeaking. I don’t want that thing to run over my bare feet, no way! The mouse would have looked all cute and cuddly in a cage in a pet store. In my house, leaving unmentionables about wherever it pleases? I think not.

I flush it out. The others scramble with boxes and cans. It goes into hiding. I flush it out again, scramble, nothing.

It ends up snug with two spare CPUs under hubby’s desk. He gets to crawl under and flush that time. Success. It runs over his lap. Eww! No catch.

In saunters Randy. He tries to get into my prime flushing spot. I tell him to go the other way and I’ll scare the mouse out. Wonder of wonders, after a nudge with cardboard, he does.

The mouse is on the run. Jaws close.

The Randy is on the run. Did he get it? Yeah. And this time he’s not so happy with his mummy. Must have thought I would toss it for him to play last time, not take it away. He finally releases (I’m his bonded human so I have to do this :p) and I’m stuck with a much more lively mouse this time. I hand it off to hubby who goes and kills it. This one wasn’t poisoned for sure.

So now, the house is safe of more ickiness (at least until the babies starve or grow — there’s got to be babies, you know) and Randy has almost forgiven me. Somehow the treat I forced him to take (mint-flavored to take out the smell) just isn’t as fun as proving himself the grand mouse hunter.

And since I didn’t post this yet, an update. Poor Randy is bored with all his toys. He tests each one daily, but not a single on wriggles and tries to escape. And his humans have failed to provide any more of the live ones. We’re mean.

I’m a self-taught type of person. I have a bachelor’s degree that I constructed out of the classes that amused me, I learned coding because my mother taught me “if you do it more than once, code it,” and I’m a whiz at legacy systems. Piecing together answers with little training or documentation is my thing.

So why is it that I still believe the answers should be out there, findable and usable without the mess that is divination from scraps left buried in the sands of time?

I have a home network. In a house with approximately 6-7 computers (though not all working at the same time), it’s a necessity. We just moved and decided that our new house would not have cables stapled along the walls in this modern time period of wireless and wired houses. All we wanted was that all the computers could talk to each other.

That should have been simple, right? We had the right equipment and everything… I even found step-by-step directions (though not for our equipment). Two days later, we had a semi-functioning system cobbled together with the use of the hosts file, a remnant of archaic networking prior to DNS servers and the like.

At this point, you’re wondering what on earth this has to do with learning patterns and the like.

So I’m frustrated, stumped, and tearing my hair out. My oldest son is trying to help but I’d have to explain everything to him. So that’s what I did. Explained, walked through, and then said, “The problem is that the hub can’t see the gateway.”

New search terms. Knowledge is out there, but just like the Oracles at Delphi, you have to ask the right question. This time, I found instructions for our equipment. We put it in that configuration and off we go, everything’s working perfectly.

I grew up with a firm belief in education/training as supreme. But we cannot get trained in everything we’re going to face. At some point, I need to remember to go back to my strengths, go back to the analysis that brought me into databases, programming, and my general approach to life. Sure, the education is out there, the information is available to anyone who is willing to look. But you’ve got to do the legwork and understand just what you need to know. Very few people are out there making this easy, and those that are do so as an extension of their own questions. What do you want to bet they had to do something first to discover the right questions?

I guess the bottom line is whether self-taught, a good researcher, schooled, or whatever, no one can give you the knowledge you need. You have to go out and earn it, sometimes with hard work, sometimes with frustration, but whatever the way, the only true failure is to give up.

And if that’s not a stray thought-random segue I don’t know what is :p.

To continue the learning, how about dropping a note about how you learn the right question to ask. Is it hands-on, talking through something, washing dishes, taking a class, or what?

And for your pure enjoyment, another day in my life:

My kids had an interesting assignment a few years ago called unfortunately/fortunately. They have to write a story in which fortunate and unfortunate events happen that accelerate something simple into something excessive. That’s what my morning felt like. Let’s see if you agree.

I work until midnight or one every night/morning and require a ton more than 4 hours sleep. Fortunately, my boys are old enough and responsible enough to get themselves ready for school. I’m usually awake before they leave, but often just barely. After they leave, I go do my wash up, which I do in the altogether.

This morning, unfortunately, Jacob forgot his school backpack. Even more unfortunately, his backpack has the key to the house that the boys share. He pounds on the door and I finally connect that it’s not the boys playing another silly door game. So, I throw on my knee-length, hot pink, washed-silk robe (looks like a smoking jacket and is really soft) and run for the door as he starts ringing the doorbell.

I open the door with a reasonable expectation that he’s waiting on the other side. But no! Rather than waiting, they’re trying to break into the back yard (how that would have helped I don’t know since the house is still closed up in the morning). Anyway, into that wide open space, our indoor escape artist slipped, prompting me to say VERY loudly *SHIT* and run out in my pseudo-sexy robe and bare feet to chase after him. I glance across the way, and there’s one of my neighbors and her daughter staring back at me. LUCKILY, I unlocked the door first or we would have been in a pretty, pink, pickle.

Yes, I got the cat back in. Yes, I got the boys off to school. And yes, I took my blushing self (now matching my robe) back into the house to finish washing up and facing the day.

At least no one almost died this time…other than of embarrassment that is.

My dear friends tell me I should put this is a novel, but I don’t write chick lit and why would I torture a character like this? Wasn’t it bad enough in real life?

Most people have run into the phrase thinking outside the box a time or two in their adult lives, usually in business situations where business as usual has failed to produce the desired effect. While I am an advocate for a more creative approach to problem solving, sometimes it feels like this has become less of a driven philosophy to seek out new and innovative ideas and more of a ploy to avoid rewarding hard work. Those who keep things running are rarely recognized, while those who come up with new shiny objects are rewarded whether or not those solutions have any grounding in reality.

This is never truer than when a company is in transition to a new system (computer or process). During the transition, who are the most important players? Those designing, implementing and training users on the new system or those working with outdated equipment and little to no support to keep product rolling out the door so the business doesn’t collapse while making its leap into the future? For me, they both have critical roles to play and therefore equal importance, as do the users who provide crucial information and feedback to ensure the new system achieves even a portion of its goals.

However, most reward structures ignore those holding the business afloat and rarely recognize the users’ contribution either. Once again, the business engine focuses on the bright future with little interest in the monotony of the present. Does the phrase been there, done that ring a bell?

So, the lesson learned in this experience is if we want our children to succeed, we must pass to them this elusive ability, opening up a life of rewarded innovation. Sounds easy, right? Teaching innovation and making your children stand out as models for all others to follow. How hard can it be?

Take a look around the world and see what kids are doing? Few bother to create their own worlds for fantasy play. Instead, they reenact scenarios from the latest video games, television shows, or if we’re lucky, books they’ve read. Schools are forced to teach to the test to ensure their doors are kept open, training the students in bubbling and selecting between multiple choices rather than actual problem solving. Add that to subjective essay evaluation as part of the testing process and teachers throw up their hands, finding the last element of creativity crushed out of a grading system that has lost its context of learning. This does not seem like an environment to foster innovative thinking while efforts outside the school system are crushed by peer forces: bullying and exclusion make fools of those who try to step beyond the cookie cutter design.

But wait, before despair takes hold and the outlook becomes grim, let me tell you a story about my youngest son.

Gales of laughter drew me away from my work one afternoon, the sound too enticing for me not to investigate. I found my 10-year-old at the computer, playing yet another strategy game that teaches players, through a series of guided training scenarios, what strategies are effective and how to best employ the various pieces. While on the surface, this type of game may appear to teach critical thinking, it provides such a fixed set in which to enact constructed battles that the opportunities for innovation are limited. Often, if the player fails to make a required move, the scenario becomes unbeatable. Similar to chess, each piece has a role and particular movements. A player wins by thinking faster and farther into the future.

In chess, a player cannot innovate by declaring the queen can now turn corners. Everyone has to stay within the bindings of tradition. This rule system carries over into the design of strategy games. Every piece has a part to play and if you can figure out that part faster than the other player, you win.

So what caused the hilarity? Where had he found humor in this simple game where both players build up their forces then try to eliminate each other with a combination of tactics and numbers? He broke the rules. He made his queen turn a corner. This 10-year-old refused to accept the basic understandings. He thought outside of the box, even when the box penned him in on every side. Instead of building a foundation for military development with his initial peasant characters, he reenacted the American Civil War. His farmers and builders and miners took up their hammers, pickaxes and hoes, but did not start to mine, build and farm. Instead, they crept across the board and destroyed the other player’s infrastructure and peasants, preventing the war from ever starting.

The laughter came as he watched supposedly ineffectual peasants slowly demolish a complete town, cutting off ability after ability until the computer player could do nothing but sit and be destroyed. Would this strategy have worked against a human player? Maybe, maybe not, but the cookie cutter world kids are offered failed to contain one 10-year-old and so maybe it will fail to contain others.

Though we might not be able to teach our children how to innovate, we can show them in our own refusal to “be like everyone else,” and reward it when they show the same, whether with our laughter, hugs, or privileges. At the same time, remember who brought my son his victory. The peasants. Maybe our children will have a better understanding of the values in both those who maintain and those who innovate. For me, it is enough to hope.