natik1483

In a friends-only post, someone mentioned the Menorah at the National Christmas tree site. Since we went there earlier this month, and I have pictures, I briefly considered hijacking the thread. I decided instead to put a teaser there and a post here. Lotsa pictures behind the cut.*daha*We didn't know we were going to see the National Menorah. We didn't know there was such a thing. For that matter, we didn't know there was such a thing as a National Yule Log or a National Creche. But they were all there. There had been some media coverage of the Lighting of the National Christmas Tree. Limited seating, invitation only for the the official Lighting of the Tree by the President. Mention of the 56 smaller trees, each representing a State or Territory, each decorated by folks from the place that sent it. My truelove wanted to go see it some time, so we picked an evening and we went and saw. We drove to our metro station and parked. We got off at Metro Center and I navigated as we walked. It was the second night of Channukah. The site was the ellipse - the large grassy area behind the White House. My camera has a setting for "illuminated night scenes" that I am slowly learning to disregard. It holds the shutter open way too long and no matter how carefully I brace my hand there is camera shake and blur. It really requires a tripod. That explains the blur in this picture, which is still the best I got of the tree itself. You can see one of the smaller "state" trees in the foreground, and the Washington Monument behind....=================The tree was transplanted, live, twenty-plus years ago, so they're not chopping and hauling a new tree each year.A little girl, close enough for me to hear, thought that six of the lights had burned out on the Menorah. I explained that it was the second night of Channukah, so only two of the lights were lit, plus the helper light. You can see the Menorah at the back of the picture. It looks far away in this shot, but it actually dominated the entrance. Up front are some of the state trees, including Kentucky, and a bit of the sign for the Iowa tree....=================All the small trees had clear globes, and inside each globe was a decoration. The signs identified which kids group made the decorations for each state's tree....=============================A concrete-lined pit held the "Yule Log" which was actually a fire made of several very large trunk segments. While we watched a frontloader added another chunk of wood. I think it was about the size of a clothes dryer. I couldn't get as close as I liked, because of the crowd around the fence around the fire. I had to hold the camera over my head and take whatever the camera caught....=============Somebody was able to get the word "pagan" into the sign explaining the Yule log. (I didn't see signs explaining the big tree, or the creche, or the menorah, but the Yule log had a sign.)..."Ye Olde Yule Log. The burning of the Yule Log is an ancient custom, ante-dating the Christian era by centuries, it was a part of a gay Festival honoring the mythical god Thor. Later, the English made it an integral part of Christmas Eve festivities, even as the beautiful Christmas tree, tho likewise of Pagan origin, is so dear to our hearts as a Christmas symbol."I wonder what negotiations went on over the wording of that sign....============================================="Look Ma!" I exclaimed. "It's the National Baby Jesus". "You're going to get beat up," replied my truelove....========================Homeward bound on the metro. The boy falling asleep with his face pressed against the divider glass. You can see a hint of my reflection in the glass.

According to the folks at ou.org, this is one of the Hannukah prayers translated into "international sign language". source: http://www.ou.org/chagim/chanukah/*daha*

I have so much that I could be journaling about, like getting paid work at last, and the utter weirdness that the paid work is, and my son being in a school now that seems able to cope with him, but really, the thing you need to know is that there are crickets in our shower.This is apparently quite common in the area. I'm on a yahoo mailing list for local people, and they've have been discussing ways to get rid of crickets. Glue strips are popular, but with our wild child we'd be spending all our time detaching him from the glue.They don't bite, they don't even chirp. Mostly they don't even move, unless you come at them. Then they hop. I think they crawl up through the drains, which means they crawled through the sewers and are coated with nasty bacteria. We walk into the bathroom and look in the shower, or the tub, and there they are.I'm the designated cricket remover in the house. I shoo them into a cup, cover it with my hand, and launch them into the outdoors. We've discussed marking them with nail polish to see if the same ones keep coming back in or not.One bright day I looked out the window and saw many robins hunting in our back yard. The ground was covered with dropped leaves, and the robins would stand amongst the leaves and suddenly dart their heads under, then back out. I like to think that they were filling up on crickets.Pictures beneath the cut. They're ugly. These are not cute jiminy crickets, they're fugly camel-back crickets.*daha*...

Here's that taxi hanging over the railing on the elevated roadway at Grand Central Terminal, New York City. Saturday, October 7, 2006.*daha*

Well, here we are: Silver Spring, Maryland, the Washington DC metro area.I've mainly blogged elsewhere about my son's need for a better school than Columbia Missouri could provide. Things went from awful to worse than awful. I kept having faith that the school system - and their specialty behavioral program - was being run by qualified professionals who had my son's education as their top priority. I kept having faithing that I just had to get other professionals (psychiatrists, social workers, therapists) to work with the school and that they could fix the problems.It turns out that if I had put my son in a large cardboard box for two years, instead of sent him to school, he would have benefited exactly as much, with none of the arrests or trauma.I mean that literally and without exaggeration. Over the nearly two years he attended that school his test performance in reading and math and writing and handwriting were unchanged. If I had put him in a box and provided him with fresh air, fresh water, snacks and lunch and toilet facilities, but no attempts at teaching whatsoever, he would have learned just as much. He would not have been taken down and restrained by school staff 3 to 5 times weekly. (And what they meant when they gave that figure at the last IEP meeting was restraints on 3 to 5 days weekly, with multiple restraints on many days.)They failed to help him educationally, they failed to help him behaviorally. One of his new diagnoses is Post Traumatic Stress Disorder - from all the violent takedowns at school.[Meanwhile, as I've been typing, there have been fighter jets overhead, at least three separate sets (or one set that has circled around three times). I went outside for the third set, and saw three planes. Yesterday I know there were fighters scrambled after the Yankee pitcher flew his plane into a NYC apartment building. I wonder if we'll find out what today's adventure is about. We're not in any normal airport flight path. I haven't been here long enough to know if what I just saw was some kind of normal training activity.]We hired a consultant, an "Advocate" for the last IEP cycle. At the end of it he advised us that the school was badly out of compliance and refusing to budge, and the next step was to hire a lawyer and file for a "due process hearing". I researched and discovered that there was nothing helpful the court would be able to provide. I could ask for the school to adjust their methods and comply with all technical requirements, but my son would still be handled by the same staff of incompetent and/or uncaring employees. (Some cared, but weren't skilled enough to handle him. Their supervisors cared more about budget and wrote him off as a loss.) I could ask for placement in a different public school - but this was the only specialty behavioral school within 100 miles. I could ask for placement at public expense in a private school, but there was no private behavioral program within 100 miles. The next level of remedy would be asking for placement at a boarding school or residential program. But since we like our son and like being with him and can handle him at home, we didn't want that.So the answer was to move to a school system sophisticated enough to handle his very special needs, and here we are, in Montgomery County, Maryland, with access to the Maryland MANSEF network of non-public special education schools. http://www.mansef.org .We also worked hard to get an outside psychiatric evaluation. It was worth it. The outside doc picked up on many problems previously undiagnosed by local psychiatrists (two) and therapists (four) and a neuro-psych tester and the school psychologist.Adventures:Beginning of May: start search for outside psychiatric consult. Started by asking my old doctor/friend in New Haven if he wanted to do it himself or could recommend others. Process delayed by tradition of psychiatrists taking vacations over the summer. Eventually ended up with a psychiatrist in Boston area.Beginning of June: Determined that our son should not return to the school system. Concluded that we needed to move. All we had to do was find an appropriate school system, line up jobs, line up a place to live, and move there. Begin networking online and with people and professionals we know personally.In July, three two-hour teleconference sessions with the Boston psychiatrist, doing year-by-year history of our son's growth, behaviors, and problems in the context of our own lives, medical care, medication, therapy, school, etc. Meanwhile, firming up on the Maryland MANSEF schools as destination, with idea being a particular school northeast of Baltimore.We agreed our son could attend the five week "Extended School Year" special education session in June/July. Major incident there involving him locking himself in the classroom and picking up a pair of scissors - police called, one policeman injured, multiple criminal charges against our 9 year old son. August, with school scheduled to re-start on August 23rd, I gave notice at work for my last day to be August 22nd. We could not send him back to school, had no place to send him, had no babysitter (summer babysitter was a student and went back to school herself), no daycare facilities suitable for a 9 year old who flees authority and fights if cornered. My wife had been dithering - thought we couldn't/wouldn't move unless we had jobs lined up wherever we were going, and we didn't know for sure where we were going. I forced the issue by quitting my job. At that point we had much less income than expenses and needed to move in order to enroll him in a school in order for me to be able to work during the day instead of being home with him. Follow all that?Labor day weekend: flew to Providence, had two sessions with the Boston psychiatrist. Traveling with my son is always difficult - high anxiety levels on top of severe ADHD. We had to drive 2.5 hours to Kansas City, park at an off-site parking lot, check in there, take their shuttle to the airport, get our tickets and check baggage, go through security, fly for 2 hours, change planes in Washington, and on to Providence, then rent a car and drive to the hotel, check in to the hotel, etc. Flew back. Ten days later (Sept 12) flew to Washington DC to view apartments with a real estate agent. With no jobs lined up we needed a co-signer. My dad offered but nobody was interested in a co-signer who lived out of state. His sister, my aunt, agreed to co-sign with my dad agreeing to be responsible to her if we missed payments. Found an apartment and signed a lease. Flew back on Sept 16.Set moving date for September 27. Hired friends of friends to load our rental truck. Arranged craigslist people to unload us on Sept 29. (Previous move I had used professional movers to load the rental truck - at the end of a hellish day that had started out with them touring all our stuff and promising they could fit it all, they couldn't fit it all and some large items had to be left behind.) This time I figured I could hire more bodies for more hours per body for less money and get it all done. Moving day - first quarter of loading went well, I told the loaders they didn't need my supervision on the rest and went to work taking down the computer and doing other last-minute things. They bungled it, then gave up, with huge quantities unloaded. They left lots of unused space in the truck, but we would have had to unload everything and then re-load from scratch. We ended up renting a second truck, and a car carrier to tow behind it, and nearly maxing our credit.With help from neighbors and friends we got everything into the second truck, but ran out of daylight and were too exhausted to drive. Our mattresses and blankets and such were inaccessible - couldn't sleep in the house. We spent the night at an expensive local hotel that had enough space to park our trucks.Cleaned up as best we could in the house but did not leave it in acceptable move-out cleanliness - we may lose all our security deposit.Left a day late, but I wanted to make up time. Didn't realize my route was through a mountainous "scenic" highway which slowed the trucks down to 40 mph, and was scary on the 6% downgrades.Rescheduled our unloaders for the next day. But the next day they didn't show and didn't reply to phone calls. Eventually recruited neighors and friends-of-neighbors to unload us. They worked hard and were happy for the money.That was Saturday the 30th. On Friday the 6th we had a two hour school IEP meeting at which the school officials agreed to refer us to the County Central IEP meeting which could actually refer us to a MANSEF school), then boarded AmTrak to New York to help my dad celebrate his 70th birthday. Stayed at the Yale Club - very nice, except that we opened all the windows to let the smoke-smell out of the suite, and then it turned out they did not have their boiler turned on yet so there was no heat available to warm the room back up. Coming out of Grand Central Terminal I spotted people on the sidewalk look up over our shoulders with awed/amazed looks on their faces. It was a taxi which had been driving on the 2nd level roadway above the sidewalk and crashed half-over the edge, two wheels hanging. I had a camera and took pictures, I'll try to post them soon.On Sunday Oct 8th we took Amtrak back. One of the stops was Baltimore's Penn Station. Our son was not sitting at our seats at that stop (and I was stuck in a crowd between the bathroom and our seats) and got confused because we had gone in and out from New York's Penn Station, so he got off the train. Just as the doors closed I heard "Mom, Dad, are you in there?" and got to see him left behind on the platform as we pulled away. AmTrak police rounded him up for us and put him on the high-speed Acella train that pulled in just after we pulled out. It passed us and he got to Washington Union before we did. A stiff cop on a Segway (very Robocop-ish) returned him to us, and we made it home.Tomorrow is a job fair, maybe I'll get hired for something with benefits.Old rent: $450/ month. New rent: $1450/month. COBRA health insurance, including dental, for the three of us: $1150/month.*daha*

Not that I post much at all, but it will be even quieter than usual as I fly off to Boston. Back in a jiffy.*daha*

We'll be moving to Maryland at the end of September. We don't know exactly where in Maryland yet. We're waiting on advice from an educational consultant regarding which particular neighborhoods we need to be in, based on what capabilities the local schools have. It's a bit ass-backwards, because the goal is to make sure we're someplace where the local school definitely can't provide what our son needs, which will force them to put him in a group that qualifies for specialty school "non-public" placement. Did you follow all that?So, we've given notice to the landlord. I've quit my job to home-school until we can get him placed in a school that won't restrain him on the floor most days, or have him arrested, and that actually has the skills to teach him how to read and write. We're working with the consultant in Maryland. We've reserved a moving truck. We're starting to pack. All we need now is a place to live there and jobs.Piece of cake.*daha*

Many thanks to the folks at http://www.boingboing.net for turning me on to David Malki's Wondermark comics http://www.wondermark.com , especially this one:*daha*

Suppertime. Charlene started hamburger helper going, then had to crash before she could eat any herself. She's due in at work at 11:30 tonight, and kept getting woken by phone calls during the day. It was good news, but she couldn't stay awake long enough to eat.Where was I? Suppertime. Hamburger Helper (maybe it was the actual brand). "Hash" variety, which meant instead of noodles it had dehydrated diced potatoes. Not bad if taken with hot sauce (me), or with a slight drizzle of pancake syrup (Perry).Anyway, hamburger helper featuring potatoes, a can of green beans on the side, baby-cut carrots right out of the bag, water to drink. At some point he wanted a bag of chips, and I agreed if he would eat his green beans first, which he did.So he gets up from his chair, farts, carries the bag of chips to me, farts, asks me to open it for him, farts, and says "I'm going in the bathroom now. I'm bringing the chips with me."Possibly he was testing me to see if I'd let him get away with it. Possibly he just thought it was a good idea at the time.*daha*

I was a member of the fatsex mailing list for years. Fat people who enjoy sex ... really, they should have named the group after me. This year they moved to livejournal as fat_sex. It's mainly for discussion. I posted some links to other fat-oriented sex communities, mainly about pictures, and some advice for people new to lj. It was well received, so I'm posting it in here too.*daha*I know a lot of people came to livejournal for the first time because the fat sex list moved here. So here are some lj tips and some communities I enjoy that are for or about fat sexy people.altbbw low traffic, more on the goth sidebbw_photoart takes the arty road, low trafficbbwporn high traffic, very explicit, "wide open beavers" as Kurt Vonnegut would say, open for men and women to post, and sometimes includes couples actionbignsexy low traffic, posting from fat men and women is welcomefatsex they had the lj "fatsex" name first, low traffic, discussionkinkycurves low trafficnekkidbbw high traffic, be respectful with commentssupersizedbbws discussion and some family-friendly picsvoluptuouspinup think 60s Playboy spreads with larger womenvaginapagina not fat oriented, but the best discussion area for women's sex and sexual health issues, high traffic, sometimes too many "what's that discharge?" for comfortsextips not fat oriented, high traffic discussion of sex issues, particpants tend to be teen

Another death. I attended the funeral for my bosses boss. Came back to work after. (The only attendee who did come back.) An hour after I was back at my desk, my son called. He said something quickly I couldn't understand, and he put my wife on the phone. She got a call from the mental health center. Our son's therapist died this weekend. No details provided, I'm sure we'll find out before long. I'm not much good at judging ages, but he was older than teens and younger than fifties, so I'd say he was in his 30s.They're calling all his patients to let them know, and cancel appointments, and offer appointments with someone else. For most of these kids its important for a therapist to help explain why the guy who so wonderful with them won't ever talk to them anymore.*daha*

Funeral tomorrow, my boss'es boss. Lesson in life (and I hope I manage to follow through soon): get your medical instructions in writing, and properly witnessed. I mean the kind like whether to be kept on life support.They put him on a respirator. It's a horrible experience - you'd cough and choke yourself to death with the tube down your throat so they have to sedate you very heavily. Quality of life is nil. They removed him from the respirator thinking he'd be able to go on without it. He told them no, never again, no more respirator.A couple days later he had a lot of trouble breathing again, the doctors told his wife they thought they could help him past all the body-shutdown things going on if they could keep him going long enough, and she okayed the respirator again. Very hard decision, of course, because if she honored his wishes he would probably die, and if she went against his wishes he might survive.Later they took it out again and he was able to repeat his wishes. This time they honored his request, and tomorrow is the funeral.*daha*

Almost nearly worksafe, if you're wearing headphones. Almost nearly pointless if you don't have some way of listening. Song "Do You Take It In The Ass?" by The Wetspots.





hmmmm... doing a copy and paste of a Youtube "embed" string doesn't seem to work. At least I can't see anything when I paste it here myself. Here's the link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rWZo3UBVJZA *daha*

If you're a steak eater, and you haven't tried a flat iron steak, you really should.Who knew that we'd be alive to see, among so many other marvels, the discovery of a new steak? And it truly is a steak. Grill or broil it just like you would a t-bone or strip steak, season lightly with salt and pepper or seasoned salt, and eat it. That's really all you need to know.There are several supermarket chains in town and only one of them carries flat iron steaks, and they don't always have them on hand. They come in vacuum sealed packs instead of the regular meat packaging, so I think they're cut in a central location. They need extra handling in the cutting stages to remove a thick gristle that cleverly disguised this very tasty and tender steak as a mediocre roast.Our Gerbes stores (a division of Dillons and Kroger) carry them marked at $5.99/pound, and they really are a bargain at that price compared to inferior steaks that sell higher. I've never actually paid the $5.99 rate, though, because they are generally marked down to $4.99 ("Save $1.00 when you use your savings card") and on my last trip they were down to $3.99/pound. There's more about the steaks at this link http://www.gourmetsleuth.com/flatironsteak.htm . I wouldn't bother marinating or trying fancy recipes - they are purely good steaks for grilling or broiling and eating straight off the fire.*daha*