Interesting tracks in the snow

I found this track in the snow fascinating. Can you guess what made it?

Click below for the answer.

Two underwear mysteries

First, why do they make days-of-the-week underwear for girls but not boys? As far as I can tell, boys are far more likely than girls to need that extra visual reminder that “Dude! It’s Thursday but your underwear still says Tuesday.”

Second, when M goes on winter camping trips with Scouts, the packing list emphasizes that the kids should wear either wool or synthetic clothing, rather than cotton which traps sweat and feels damp. Makes sense. But why on earth do they think the boys own synthetic underwear? (And I don’t mean for the long johns; those we do have in polypropylene.) I know stores sell nylon panties for women, but the main choices for boys run more along the lines of Hanes vs. Fruit of the Loom and 3-pack vs. 6-pack rather than cotton vs. nylon.

Tough weekend for the hamsters

On Friday, Peachy passed away after a couple weeks of suffering a rapidly spreading brain tumor. It was sad to say goodbye, but it was clearly time for her to go.

And then on Monday, Snowy died very unexpectedly. She’d been perfectly healthy, and we think she choked to death.

Two hamster funerals in less than a week just sucks. The cat is currently peering into one of the empty hamster cages, as if wondering where the little buddy he liked to watch has gone.

In the grand scheme of things, especially the disaster in Haiti, two little hamsters are barely a blip… but add up Haiti, and deaths and serious health problems among friends/family/coworkers, and the hamsters seem like the last straw. January better not be an indication of how all of 2010 is going to go.

Election overload

The fine art of writing an essay

M wrote an essay about “Responsibility” for a school assignment. He focused on how the after-school job he has, playing with and modeling social skills for a younger neighborhood boy with autism, has also helped M develop into a better person. It’s a beautifully constructed essay about how an initially-daunting task has eventually helped him alter his own behavior and character and interactions with his other people in his life.

I helped him revise his final draft for grammar. And after he printed it out, I asked him, “So how much of that was really true, and how much was bullsh*tting for a school assignment?”

He got a giant grin on his face and started laughing. “There is a fine line between bullsh*tting and the art of re-imagining the nobler aspects of the truth. Especially in a school essay,” he told me.

Exactly so! And 7th grade is definitely a good age to start learning that art.

The Sound of Music

S here, and last night M and I stayed up to watch all of The Sound of Music on TV. Why? Because he’d never seen the whole movie before. And because watching movies with M when he’s in a totally goofy mood is hysterical.

For example, take the rather slow schmaltzy scene where Maria is in the moonlit garden, moping about the fact that she came all the way back from the nunnery only to learn that the Captain is engaged to the Baroness. M watched about 10 seconds of her standing in the dark garden, then began, “Now, if this were a horror movie, this is where you’d see the chainsaw….”

We also had a lot of fun with the ads. We seldom watch commercial TV, so it’s easy to forget just how ridiculous some of the ads and ad-placement are. For example, what is there about a family-oriented movie featuring a nun who chooses to become a stepmother to 7 adorable children that screams “Let’s advertise birth control pills?” M also pointed out how strange it was that the birth control ads featured only women, usually going around in pairs — because we know how many female couples need the pill — doing inane completely-non-reproductive activities like cutting their own hair and painting their walls orange. Whereas the ad for a woman’s razor did feature a male/female couple and what looked like some pretty serious foreplay. Very strange.

Clean laundry is folded and ready to be put away

“Clean” is a relative term.

The ghost of Christmas present

This is the Christmas ghost who appears when M takes the cover off his comforter so we can wash it before Grandma comes to visit and sleeps in his room.

Getting in the holiday spirit… or not

S here. It’s almost Christmas, so not only are there Santa Clauses and jewelry ads every time you turn around, but we also occasionally see the Virgin Mary with baby Jesus. Certainly we hear their story at church, and see them in Nativity sets, and they have bit parts in at least a few of the TV specials. We picture the young mother holding her quiet baby on her lap, and even though we know about the whole “no room at the inn so they’re in a manger” bit, overall it’s still a joyful, peaceful, hopeful image.

I can’t help but contrast that with what M and I saw during our volunteer shift at the soup kitchen yesterday.

In winter, people start showing up to eat well before dinner is actually served. Partly they want to get out of the cold, and partly the soup kitchen is just so much busier in the winter when food costs compete with heating bills, that maybe they’re hoping for first crack at the extra groceries before things run out. Last night, folks were arriving a good 45 minutes before any food was ready to appear.

And at one table, there was a man and woman with their two little girls. I’ve seen them at the soup kitchen before; the parents are probably in their 20s, and the girls are probably 2 and 4. Last night, the younger girl was being held gently on her mother’s lap, just quietly waiting. And the mother was quietly waiting too, with an expression of such absolutely bleak resignation on her face that it made me want to cry. She looked so totally defeated by what her life has come to: bundling up to go out through the bitter cold and then sit in a loud, crowded church basement just waiting for someone to provide food for her and her children.

So that’s the mother-and-child image stuck in my head this Advent season. Merry Christmas-in-a-Recession, everyone.

Our political analyst was spot-on

Before the election yesterday (primary election for a Senator to finish out Ted Kennedy’s term), each person in our family wrote down a prediction for how the vote would turn out. This wasn’t just predicting the winner; this was predicting what percentage of the vote each Democratic candidate would get. And this morning we compared our predictions to the actual results. Check it out.

……………………	S…….	E…….	M…….	actual
Coakley	43	51	47	47
Capuano	37	23	27	28
Khazei	4	7	11	13
Pagliucca	15	19	15	12

If anyone out there is looking to hire a political analyst, M is available after school most weekdays.