Junior nerd

This is my junior nerd at Take Your Kids To Work Day, pretending to use DNA analysis to identify a criminal. Later I sneaked him into my lab and showed him how to use all the pipettors, starting with the manual single channel and working up to the electronic multichannel, which increases speed and throughput by a huge amount. He was very impressed by that, and even told me the next day how cool that was. He skipped the face painting but did make a T shirt, and chowed down on vast quantities of pizza, the sundae bar, and later stuff from the vending machine. He always has a huge appetite when not on his pill. Wait until you hear how low his voice is when we see you in July.

Speaking of his pill, I think that is what has been making him sick to the point where he has to stay home from school. He had been taking a 12-hour multi-dose formulation, but we switched him to a 4 hour generic, and that's right about the same time he started with the nausea and vomiting. The doctor swears it's the same dose, but having spent some time in the drug industry I know that small things can make a big difference. Maybe the other pill was buffered better, or released more evenly, or slightly different in some subtle way. He did sometimes feel nauseous with no vomiting on his old pill. So he's off of it entirely for a few weeks. He seems to be better, but will have a harder time concentrating. He tends to bounce off the walls at times and at other times is too sleepy to function. I hope this takes care of it.

I really liked the warm weather last week, but when it gets really hot I'll miss baking. Yesterday I tried a new gluten-free bread recipe - brown rice flour, sorghum flour, bean flour, tapioca, cornstarch, many eggs, ground flaxseed, three times as much xanthan gum as usual, but highly praised on the websites. And it actually did come out good, springy and stretchy, unlike most of the recipes I try. But I'm so used to not having bread that I couldn't think of much to do with it - I don't keep much around that qualifies as sandwich fillings, and it was so soft and non-crumbly it seemed a shame to toast it or make it into croutons or crumbs. So I'm just eating it with butter and enjoying it. I also baked some chicken leg quarters with barbecue sauce - mmmmm. A lot of the things I like take an hour in the oven so I save them for weekends. Maybe I can use the crockpot instead when it gets hot. I bought a tiny charcoal grill - we have lots of dead wood in our yard (and a rotted away box of it in the shed that someone decided he needed to save years ago) and I like cooking over fire occasionally - brings out the Girl Scout in me. However, since I'm usually only cooking for the boy and I, and he doesn't like meat crusty on the outside, it will take some finesse to get everything cooked but not crisp. He can hold a hot dog on a stick and wave it near the fire while mine gets nice and crunchy right on the grill. I have a perfectly good Foreman grill I stopped using because he cuts away the brown grill marks. I also have to make sure I get gluten-free charcoal - it sounds stupid, but apparently some of them use wheat starch as a binder.

I am thinking about getting the girl a computer for a graduation gift. I am torn about this, because sometimes I just want to strangle her where school is concerned, and it's still possible for her to screw up and not graduate. But the free one I upgraded for her is about at the end of its usefulness (can't add more memory), and it's definitely something she can use. Sometimes I kick myself for having given her too much too easily, and this might be just another of those things. I suppose other people rue past decisions, but often I just act on what I know now and think back later to how I could have handled it better. At the moment she seems to be taking small steps toward responsibility, but they are small steps and she has a long way to go. But the skeevy boyfriend is long out of the picture and she is happy to be unattached for now. She works consistently at the hardware store (although she still doesn't handle money well, and not one kid she hangs out with has any concept of saving money or gas by not giving in to impulse), although they put up with lateness that most businesses wouldn't. She gets mad when I imply that there's any chance she will not graduate and has a habit of denial when things go badly, insisting it's under control. She takes every chance she can to legally skip school (she could go to the vo-tech when her regular school is closed, but doesn't have to so she doesn't - since the kids that rely on the buses can't get there, all kids from a school that is closed can have an excused absence). But I hope this is building into a decent adult. I think so, but she has a long way to go.

It's weird to think that I am now on the downslope of the child-raising years. One is almost 18, one almost 14, and they hardly need me and I can actually do things I couldn't for a long time. I can decide on the spur of the moment to take a detour after work and come home late, and no one will starve or need a diaper change or wander out of the yard. I have weekends free most of the time - girl at work, boy with his father - and I still marvel at the freedom. All those years of weekends alone with the kids because their dad was at work, so I never had a day when I could just jump in the car and go, are past. It seemed like that time would never come when I could live my life just for me again, but it's almost here. Don't get me wrong, I love my kids, but I'm not cut out to be a good mother. I hate not having directions to follow and not knowing if my decisions are going to lead to horrible mistakes. I hated dealing with the irrationality of toddlers and their constant needs. I don't like people and could never be on school committees or PTO, and wasn't much use in Girl Scouts except as a back-up adult. But somehow I got them safely to this point with no amputations or brain damage and they seem to like me, so I must have done something right. I know I could have done things differently, but I'm stuck with what I did do, and I could have done worse. I hope when I'm a grandmother (and I hope that's many years away) that I can be one like Grandmommy and make the kids feel loved and like they are the center of my attention. And I hope my own kids come to see me because they want to, not just for babysitting.

Finally, an update!

I didn't realize it had been so long since my last update. I wrote plenty of updates in my head, but never got them on here.

I have been having attendance problems with both kids, oddly enough. I'm used to the girl getting herself in attendance trouble due to strolling in late or cutting class (and she is already at her limit for this term), but I got a nasty letter about the boy - apparently he has been out 10 times or more, and state law says they can take legal action against me, etc. WTF? Apparently the middle school counts absences for the whole year, unlike the high school which resets the clock with a new semester, and apparently parents' notes don't mean dick in their eyes to excuse an absence. So although all of his were legitimate illnesses (although I might have called him in sick when we went to private school interviews), none of them are excused without a doctor's note. I sent in a note to the school and got a call from some inflexible tight-ass woman. After all, it's written in the school handbook which everyone receives at the beginning of the year (and promptly forgets). No matter that it's a self-limiting fever or bout of nausea which doesn't require a doctor's consultation. No matter that I call it in in the morning and send in a note afterward. Doesn't matter that the kid's an A student and makes up all his homework. Nope, gotta be a doctor's note and has to be in within 10 days of the return to school (is that 10 school days or 10 real days?). I'm a bad parent for letting him be sick without an excuse. Fortunately I had just asked for some notes to cover 4 days since I thought we might have had too many, so I think he's back under the limit if they don't get fussy about the 10 days. Problem is he has been having a day or two of nausea and vomiting every two or three weeks this year, not to mention the two days of what was probably mono. I have no idea why - it seems to be genuine and not a way of getting out of anything or avoiding school, but now if it happens again I have to call the doctor's office for phone triage and a note. And since I had to get all those days excused so daughter didn't fail her last semester, they won't give me a retroactive note anymore. I have to call on the day of the illness so they can record it. I can't blame them, but it's damned annoying. And so is that semi-regular vomiting. I'm waiting for a call back from the doctor on ideas about that.

Almost had the divorce - the court mistakenly set up an appearance date although we had specified we wanted to do it by paperwork without an appearance. I had to call and rattle a few cages since they weren't getting back to my lawyer about correcting it, but they finally did. No appearance, but no divorce yet either. Should have gone for the appearance. It takes longer by paperwork, probably because it doesn't get scheduled and the judge just gets to it when he has nothing better to do.

Speaking of nearly-ex, he spent the last week in upstate New York helping his girlfriend pack up to move in with him. He didn't tell me that, of course, coward that he is, but the boy guilelessly tells me everything. I don't care what he does as long as it doesn't hurt the kids. She's his friend from high school (+ 50 pounds), and is a doctor, so I'm not sure if she's got a job around here. But she has an X-Box, so she's all right by the boy. She is a smart person, although apparently not much of a judge of character. Good luck to her - I'll bet she has no idea how thoroughly self-absorbed he is. And it was very satisfying to hear how crowded his apartment is now with her stuff as well as his. He sent word through the boy that he has a VHS tape player now (hers) so he wants his tapes that he didn't take before. He says I'll know which ones are his. Yeah, I'll put that at the top of my to-do list, sort out his tapes. I already threw out all the crap he left behind and dragged half of it to a flea market (instead of giving her cash toward a car, he told the girl she could sell his stuff and keep the money, thus letting us do all the work. Big of him.), so why wouldn't I want to do more work for him? Sure, I'll get right on that. He still gets plenty of mail here, so I started going online whenever I can find a website and getting him removed from all the catalog mailing lists. Golf magazines are next. He took a little concrete gorilla statue that has been outside the house for years (an alternative to a garden gnome), but didn't tell me so I thought it was stolen (who would steal it? Ask a teenager). Boy was supposed to tell me. Again, too cowardly to tell me himself.

Have you seen the newest Rice Chex boxes? Now they're gluten-free! So exciting! I made a batch of Chex mix and it was glorious.

I hope the weather is as nice where you are as it is here. Went out today and dug and sawed and chopped. I mowed for the first time last weekend, and parts of it just keep growing while other grasses are not up yet, so the lawn is very patchy. I sawed partway through a sapling that was growing in the wrong place, but it was taking too long so I got out my hatchet and finished the job, especially once I found my sharpening stone and put an edge on it. I feel muy macho! I started seedlings in peat pots, which the cat will probably find and destroy. I planted sweet peas outside - it's too cold yet for the rest. I want to plant some climbing flowering things around the fence posts that remain strongly rooted although the fence came down last year (or was it even earlier?), but I have mom's black thumb, so I'm not very hopeful. There is a wild rose bush that suddenly died a few years back (I think someone poisoned it because it scratched him when he mowed, but of course he would never admit it), but then new shoots came from it, so now it climbs way up into the mulberry tree and blooms like crazy. That and the mulberry tree are volunteers, as are the rose of sharon that sprang up where the fence used to be, the honeysuckle, and the trumpet vine that helped destroy the fence. It would be nice if my climbing flowering annuals grow and then don't take over the back yard, but we'll see what happens.

For some reason I thought of Helen and Merton and their Jesus Tourette's recently. Are they still alive? I remember conversations with them: Please pass the turkey - here, praise Jesus. Nice sunset - yes, like the face of Jesus looking down at us. Your tire is flat - Jesus wept. Never heard so many ways to get one word into every sentence.