Tuesday 21.March.06
Some of the guys who work on the house are crew, and some are destined for higher things. I've been wondering what makes the difference.
It doesn't seem to be IQ, although being smart does help. But, as I've frequently noted before, practice seems to be just as good as intelligence in the long run.
It isn't 100% correlated with miskate making, either. Everyone makes mistakes and the guys with more responsibilities tend to make more spectacular and expensive ones.
I'm not even exactly sure what I'm trying to say, except that it is quite clear when I see it. Perhaps it has something to do with paying attention in a certain way. The appearance of alertness is easy to pull off, and one of the more doofusy crew guys also looks the most alert. It's a fairly rare kind of focused intention to learn from each encounter with the material that seems to set certain people apart.
Wednesday 17.March.06
The proctor found the Spanish final yesterday. The instructions say that I have to take it within a month of the proctor receiving it, and the postmark was 32 days ago. With no time to be lost, I took the exam to Pt Hammond and sat there in blowing sand and spray and tried to remember the order of tenses and how you form the past subjunctive and what it was that papito said to the Chilean police before he killed himself. I counted seven harlequin ducks, two harbor seals, one great blue heron in mating plumage, a coot, and a bald eagle. (Oh, the proctor? We are operating on the honors system here; I promise not to peek at the answers and to keep within the time limit, and in return she doesn't have to mess with it. Works for both of us.)
That was yesterday. Today after class we decided to take out the rest of the loft. In three hours, the loft vanished, the east wall got insulated and vapor-barriered, and a couple of necessary but ugly jobs got crossed off the list. I am putting up one drywall piece a day, seems like, but each one makes a conspicuous difference.
Wednesday 15.March.06
My life:
The exhibit opening went well. Lots of people attended and the five artists' work goes well together. I sold a photo, which is nice, but better for me is that I was in an exhibit at all.
School is chugging along nicely. We have a cameraderie which is reserved enough so that we are not entirely entangled, and warm enough so that we enjoy each other immensely. As an example, today we looked at an old Kelsey printing press for business cards and figured out what we need to make it work.
The house addition gives a lot of opportunity for learning basic carpentry. Yesterday I was grateful for all those sit-ups as I insulated under the house. Today I rearranged the furniture yet again and then pulled the sheetrock off the rotting ceiling in the former computer nook.
My Spanish final was misplaced but hopefully the proctor will find it soon and then it will be done.
We've decided to do a klezmer performance at the art exhibit, with the niece on flute, Tony on bass, and me on clarinet.
Sunday 5.March.06
I apologize to my no doubt vast readership for this long hiatus. The good news is that work on the addition to the house has begun again in earnest, and I get to help with a lot of it. The bad news is that I am enough of an introvert so that the complete lack of privacy that has obtained for the last few months means that I couldn't think my way out of a paper bag if you paid me in wooden nickels. I seem to need a daily breather in order to remember my thoughts, let alone have them in the first place.
Tuesday 28.February.06
We
were talking about how most of us have done things that make us squirm in embarrassment. Sometimes, it's a failed attempt at humor. Humor is pretty lame if it falls short. And if it goes too far, you have just hurt someone for no reason other than to be funny. Ouch.
Thursday 23.February.06
Charles
the carpenter deleted the window in our former bedroom, and I sheetrocked the wall. We've moved the bed to cover the hole for the former stovepipe. There are cats and sawdust on it.
Saturday 18.February.06
Yesterday we wandered around enjoying the storm.
Today, David and Mitch addressed the leaks in the newly put in plumbing. By the end of the day,
1. We had hot water.
2. The waterline, which ordinarily during 28 degree weather would be frozen, wasn't.
3. The hole for the former back door was sheetrocked shut.
4. The area behind the washing machine had been turned into a doorway
5. I realized that I don't really understand the % solution problems in my math book and decided to go back for a review.
6. The caribou in my Hero's Journey story was at the brink of death (never fear).
Thursday 16.February.06
Wednesday 15.February.06
One of those grab-bag days.
You name it, it happened. Went to the dock with David at 7, ran back home (still doing the behavior modification thing for psych class). A while back I assigned the kids to write a Hero's Journey story and am on chapter three of mine; over coffee wrote the scene where she meets her animal helper, a crippled caribou (don't ask). Built a fire in the cabin, played some contradance on the piano to wake the girls, and had Spanish class. Then psychology, then math. At lunch, wrote a difficult e-mail and found material on plate tectonics. Did watercolor still lifes in art, discussed bathyspheres and pangaia in marine sciences. Student conference after school, followed by insulating and cutting the visqueen for the kitchen wall. As it got dark we cut the drywall but it was too late to find the nails and finish the job. Instead, we noted that what with the three loads of laundry and moving the stuff away from the wall, there was no clean surface in the living room, which is now the only room. So we did cleanup, and then a bit more cleanup, had chicken tacos, and a long conversation about killing animals for food. Latin class (the master killed one of his mine slaves because he was sick, and the slave's son was killed trying to avenge his father, whereupon the master's guards were executed for dereliction of duty.) Then a game of take two, and now it's now.
Sunday.12.February.06
Mitch the plumber came over and moved the water heater from its corner to an imaginary closet above the stove. In the next week or so, he'll plumb the water jacket in the stove so that heated water can circulate up into the water heater. He'll move the water pipes from the old sink, which will become a doorway, to the new sink on the south side of the house, and add a sink in my studio-to-be.
Okay, so after we muscled the water heater to its new location he showed me how to cut the old copper pipes with a nifty little hand-held thing that snaps around the pipe. To recycle the old fittings, I used a little propane torch to heat the joints, then pulled them off with a old dish towel (now, an old dish towel with multiple burn holes) and wiped the melted solder off with quick swipes of the towel.
In the mean while, the girls moved the back porch stairs around to the former door. The new door, which was temporary, will be permanently retired eventually. While it awaits being sheetrocked over, we'll move the current sink there, pending buying or building better kitchen cupboards.
After admiring their work, and soothing the cats who did not approve of their cat door having a picnic table instead of stairs under it, I went back upstairs and cut through a live pipe. Cold water spurted all over everything. Mitch found the cutoff valve while I used up all of our towels and the cats hid.
My floors are very clean. The walls, too. Also parts of the ceiling.
Friday 10.February.06
I spent much of yesterday cutting mats and cleaning glass to frame the last four of the fifteen photos I'll place in a show in Friday Harbor next month. I'm not accustomed to that kind of fiddly work, and I'm temperamentally unsuited to it. And, I still have to glue the dust protector on the backs. Arghh.
I spent some of today splitting and stacking wood, and a few hours scurrying around behind the carpenters, holding the skylight steady, sweeping, and pulling nails. Large muscle movements with clearly discernible results. Ahhh.
Wednesday 8.February.06
Highlight of the day, for me at least, was a lesson involving toilet paper. The Costco tp that we use has 450 sheets per roll. If you estimate the earth's age at 4.5 billion years, then you can represent each sheet as 10 million years.
We started with about a tenth of the first sheet; that's about how long the human race has been around. The first six sheets represent the Age of Mammals. Then you get maybe 18 sheets of dinosaurs, and an equivalent amount of amphibians. A bunch more sheets represent the Age of Fish, and even more are when trilobites dominated (or so we think from the number of trilobite fossils). Then we had to unroll a lot of sheets to show how long multicellular organisms were around, and more for single cells. By this time there was toilet paper all over the classroom. We draped it over the curtain rods and tacked it to the wall. And there was still a reasonable amount of tp still on the roll.
Saturday 28.January.06
We are reading Neil Gaiman's American Gods and Terry Pratchett's Masquerade for English. The idea is to see the Hero's Journey elaborated in two fantasy novels. There are simpler ways to go, such as the novels of Simon Hawke or Robert Lynn Aspirin, but we wanted something chewier. The trio of action movies we saw recently, Buckaroo Banzai,, Tank Girl,, and Six String Samurai were a fun way to start out.
The gripping thing about the Hero's Journey is that our own lives are patterned on this archetype. We're so much inside it that it's almost impossible to notice that it could have been some other way. For example, when somebody dies discussion often revolves around whether the timing of their death was a good one. This is completely irrelevant except if you think a life should read as a story. And we do think that.
Saturday 28.January.06
Today we rose at 5 to winds gusting around the house, rattling the roofing, billowing the Typar, and sending occasional thumpy things rolling through the piles of yesterday's newly arrived building supplies. David took us to Deer Harbor, and we drove into Eastsound to drop Plumosita off to take the SAT.
Then we went to Friday Harbor for a workshop at the fire station on cleaning birds after an oil spill. The Spink took a duck's rectal temperature (104 degrees), I took a blood sample (40% total protein level) and tRisky threaded a tube down its trachea but not its windpipe.
Thursday January.26.06
Our in-class student body is now only three and a half people. The others entrolled in the Running Start program for high schoolers in the community college. All of a sudden teaching is much easier. I didn't expect that because for the most part, it is easier to teach a larger group because herds are easier to manage than individuals. But this particular group never did coalesce as a community, staying isolated as individuals who just happened to be stuck in a classroom together. I've never seen that condition keep going after, say, mid-October. I've got a lot of ideas about what happened, mostly having to do with the shift that comes when you commit to a group of friends/colleagues/fellow-travellers. It's not so much giving up your own identity, but understanding and trusting that the people you are with can perhaps shed light on your own situation. For various reasons, this shift in perception was blocked or never trusted. I'll be pondering this for some time.
The current group, however, has enthusiastically embraced the idea of community. We added Italian I to our ambitious slate of Spanish and Latin. We've got happy plans for keeping writers' journals and for reading and writing fantasy fiction. Last night, after reading and translating some passages in Latin on the relative merits of Romans and Greeks, listening to an Italian tape, teaching one student how to knit, watching Buckaroo Banzai, and reading Terry Pratchett's Masquerade out loud to each other, I had to forbid people to do some more Spanish homework because it was midnight and there is probably some law about high school lasting longer than 15 hours at a stretch.
In my experience, grand ambitions usually take you to wonderful places. You seldom go where you think you're headed but you end up delighted with where you turn up.
Monday January.23.05
Spink 
wrote a report for psych class on false memories. I helped her with some of the keyboarding and then we saved it and went to dinner. When we came back, it was gone, except for the topic sentence. Apparantly, the startup disk was faulty and we made plans to switch to Pages and to add whatever software updates had been recently made to see if the problem is fixable. But the memory article was forgotten.
The next day we met with Ryan Drum who showed us the wonderful things you can see under a microscope. I told my students about how, when he was a grad student, he trained himself to have a steady hand by writing his name on a grain of rice.
"I never did that," he said. "I wrote my name with diatoms. I'd heard that when you rub your eyes, you wear your eyelashes down and some of them get thin. So, I glued an eyelash hair to a stick and pushed diatoms around. Once I wrote a 1,000 word letter in diatoms."
"I must have remembered wrong," I said.
Thursday January.12.05
Plumosita
and I went for a short jog this afternoon.
We were talking about how some people seem entirely oblivious to who they are. "Well, if they're not interested in themselves, how can they be interested in anything at all?" she asked. Good question. That sort of person certainly seems dangerous to me.
Then there are the majority of us who spend at least a bit of time on introspection and self-improvement. We often notice when we screw up and try to get ourselves to change through will power or shaming ourselves.
I think there's another step beyond that. If compassion is the goal, and I think that at least on some levels it is, then why not have compassion for ourselves? Jesus said to love your neighbor as you love yourself, but I think that a lot of us heartily despise parts of ourselves. What a waste of emotion and good sense!
Obviously, I'm not saying that we should wallow in our flaws. Acceptance doesn't mean turning off your sense of what's right and proper. It means having a sense of humor. Okay, so you screwed up. Figure out what went wrong, not in emotional self-flagellating terms but in practical ones. Pick the easiest thing to fix and fix it right now. Congratulate yourself! Pick one of the harder things to fix and work out a practical plan to fix it in the next few ... days, weeks, years. Then follow through with it.
Tuesday January.10.05
I've
been thinking about layers. Everything we do can be viewed from all kinds of different perspectives.
We just watched The Fog of War, a touching interview with Robert Macnamara. I remember in the '60's, we social-justice types called him a war criminal, and I still think he was one. He mused about that; he was an efficiency expert in the war on Japan and good at his job. And his role in the Vietnam war was ghastly. But, as he explained, he wasn't a supporter of what he did, except in that he was conscientiously serving the president, who was democratically elected by the people.
Mom's uncle (Karl Von Wiese, I think his name was) was a general in Hitler's army. She questioned him about that, and he said that his job was to serve his country, regardless of whether he had a personal opinion about his boss or not.
In cases like these you want to say that one kind of morality trumps another kind. I think that kind of thinking is just a hair too simplistic. I think that you can use such rules of thumb for most situations, but as the consequences of your actions become more far-reaching, you have to question your principles more and more minutely. A nuance may be critical.
Wednesday January.04.05
Now
and then I get a disoriented feeling of being one of a species that's burbling and burgeoning across the planet, gnawing through the resources on its way, and heading for a group destiny that's nothing that any individual desires.
Partly that's because I read The New Yorker, which, like The New York Times, delights in kvetsching. Global warming, apocalyptic nutcases, wealthy and influential morons are delicious to write about but disturbing to absorb into the psyche.
Partly it's because it's cold and dark. Our house is more than usually chaotic, with no light upstairs due to skylights being blocked off and broken light fixtures that it would be needlessly expensive to fix before they are put in permanently. I'm just at the cusp of late middle-age, where I find I need extra light to see well and, apparantly, to avoid mild depression.
Partly, of course, it's projection. Whatever's going on outside of me that matches my internal state is what I'll worry about.
One thing that works to dispel this mood is physical activity. I spent a good part of today splitting wood and filling in an waterline trench. When I really get going, I'm peripherally aware of having strong thoughts as well, but they pass and probably lose a bit of their strength as I keep working.
Another thing that works is the abstract conviction that living ethically is really at the limit of what an individual is responsible for. I can (and perhaps ought to) continually broaden what I take responsibility for, but if I can't influence something, there's no point in feeling bad about it. It's out of my hands.
Both rather tepid solutions. I'm looking forward to the daffodils.
Wednesday January.04.05
During
psychology class, I offered myself up as a test subject. Using behavior modification, I am assigned to work my way up to running two miles three days a week by June. We have been getting quite a bit of amusement out of the horrific things psychologists do to animals and people as well. The first Skinner box, for example, was an ice chest modified to hold an animal, a way to dispense food and water, and a grid on the floor that could deliver painful shocks. On the other hand, now we think we know how to get me to run around.
Monday January.02.05
An
island gentleman spent the last few days making a rock wall around the newly planted daffodils.
Spontaneous gifts are heartwarming to be sure. Spontaneous gifts of time pass from the merely nice to mythic. Unexpectedly I am reminded that the world is indeed a marvelous place to be in. Thanks, Mike.
I found