Little black spots before my eyes

The headcold came on slowly, just raw throats in the nighttime for a week.  Easy to blame on ragweed pollen.  Mild earache and slight stuffy nose, just job-related germ-sharing in the preschool room.  Dragged myself through a day at the library Saturday, cursing students and hanging on for a round-the-clock snooze.

Sunday the spots started.  Fell asleep while doing the crossword puzzle to wake up with newsprint on my cheek.  Fell asleep on the couch until a text message from my boss woke me:

We found this snake on our walk, 
caught in the erosion control netting. 
We set him free. Can you ID?



Just a bit of groggy field guiding and googling to identify the speckled king snake. It's a mighty handsome snake I don't really want to meet. Or maybe I do, ah-choo! King snakes are constrictors that eat other snakes, lizards, rodents, and birds.

Things deteriorated from there despite a Skype session with my intergalactic stellar grandbaby. My youngest texted asking what movie he had watched as a child with a silver spaceship and time travel. 
That would be "Flight of the Navigator".

I wondered why I was seeing zipping black dots while I stared out the patio window for a couple zombie days. Was this headache a migraine? Brain cancer? Decongestant side effect? Orange juice overdose? The slow-moving green specks that occasionally jumped from fence to plant were anole lizards, not side effects.

First sick leave day with zinc therapy, vitamins, cough Rx, inhaler, saline solution, ibuprofen and decongestants I was only able to nap and play online Legos at Build With Chrome. Second sick day, I'm lots more perky, still snozzy, but able to see that those rushing black dots are tiny scurrying mice on the patio. No OTC meds will get rid of the mice. Maybe I can borrow the speckled king snake!


© 2012 Nancy L. Ruder

Good, clean fun

Today I got paid to make fake dust bunnies. When the candidates orate about job creation, neither mentions this sort of endeavor.  These were American-made fake dust bunnies, not imported from some Asian sweatshop.

There was nothing artificial about the fun had by all the kids at the "Read to Your Dust Bunny" storytime.  After we shrieked with glee over Jan Thomas' Rhyming Dust Bunnies, the kids were authentically astounded to find dust bunnies under the library chairs, along with a missing mitten, a kitten, a frog, a dog, a rock, a lock, some socks, and a guy in a box. Not Houdini, just an orange Lego guy inside a plastic box, but apparently a significant surprise for these kids. They even pitched in to help sort a basket of socks!

Rock around the socks tonight

Parents, grandmas, and kids were all entranced by Nina Crews' photo collage book, Below.* They were obviously worried about little Guy when Jack dropped him into a dark hole under the stairs. In a simpler day I would always panic when Henry B. Swap asked Mike Mulligan how he would get Mary Anne out of the cellar of the new town hall.

What a rush it is to suspend disbelief, to be captivated in the best sense. And isn't a library storytime a wonderful free, charming and influential incantation!?

2.	captivated - filled with wonder and delight beguiled, enthralled, entranced, charmed, delighted enchanted - influenced as by charms or incantations

Lego exhibit, National Building Museum, July 2012

This has been a complicated week in the Dallas area as communities struggle to decide appropriate responses to a large number of West Nile virus cases. One community has also had to act on the very big threat of artificial turf in front yards. Kind of makes me want to plant gigantic American-made fake dust bunnies in yards all around town!

*© Nina Crews 2006 Henry Holt & Company ISBN: 978-0-8050-7728-5, ISBN10: 0-8050-7728-6

© 2012 Nancy L. Ruder

The early bird gets a seat on the plane

N. Mastalir--acrylic--1973

Thank you, Patricia at Gate B-8, for getting me home again. Air travel is a challenge on a good day, and D.C. was having a hellish day. Yup, hotter than Hades. Hot enough to melt the tarmac, and cause a jet's landing gear to sink into the goo. Fortunately, I was not flying La Brea Airways out of Reagan. I was going Southwest from BWI.  Getting to BWI was tricky because a Metro station was closed on the Green Line due to a "heat kink". This is definitely not as sexy as it sounds. Instead, this would be the same heat kink derailment that wreaked havoc on fans going to and from the Nationals/Rockies game Friday evening.

Avert your eyes if you don't do kinky!

Cause of West Hyattsville Metro outage

Yes, I copied this image from the Metro website, but I kinda figure they owe me (and thousands of other riders) for travel difficulties during the July 4th week. On the good side, most of the Metro escalators were working fine during my trip.

Much thanks to the Woolly Mammoth for shepherding me through the Metro mess. He's a good boy, and takes care of his easily-frazzled mama!

Back to my hero, Patricia at the Southwest gate. She saw a missed connection in my future and rebooked my flights. I got home an hour earlier than scheduled, and way earlier than I would have with a missed connection. Plus, it was a non-sweating flight!

This is the repair crew working on the Metro:


(Photo taken at the National Building Museum's Lego Architecture : Towering Ambition exhibit.)  More thanks to the Woolly Mammoth for introducing me to online virtual Lego building. This is the greatest way to waste time and achieve "flow", but you have to use Google Chrome as your browser. If you don't hear from me, I will have achieved Lego nirvana.






© 2012 Nancy L. Ruder

Infinite number of monkeys OR red wigglers with Legos

I gave the red wiggler worms about an hour on the two Lego base plates in my search for activities to keep forty preschoolers engaged at a two-hour "Worms and water conservation" program for Earth Day. The worms did not write "Hamlet" or even any letters. They were surprisingly clingy, preferring to stay in clumps rather than venture out. I expected them to be in a hurry to find the edges of the base plates so they could go underneath where it was dark. These must be Pre-Columbian Flat Earth worms. When they got to the edge of the plate, most turned around and went back to the middle. In the first half hour only one worm went underneath.

Worms don't write Hamlet

In the first act of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead by Tom Stoppard, Guildenstern muses that "If six monkeys were thrown up in the air for long enough they would land on their tails about as often as they would land on their heads"




“There's an infinite number of monkeys outside who want to talk to us about this script for Hamlet they've worked out.” 
― Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy


You can watch a little video of a worm moving on a base plate here.

OR

You can learn about infinite monkey theorem, probability, and randomness here.

I will add that the worm movement was much more purposeful than our preschool students' search for plastic eggs on the playground Thursday morning.

© 2012 Nancy L. Ruder

Cuff Shooting Gallery

My oldest needed dress clothes for work this Christmas, so a concerted effort was made by all gift-givers to get him items he can really use. My Mr. Speech and Debate has never been very interested in attire, partly because it is so difficult to don apparel while holding an open book. His dad and stepmom got him a sport coat and shoes. His brother, Danger Baby, and I took him shopping for khakis, a pair of wool slacks, a dress shirt, and socks at Jos. A. Bank. His Woolly Mammoth brother brought him a handsome neck scarf from Italy for Ohio's winter weather.

On his last day in Texas, Speech and Debate dressed up in his new duds for his flight. He struck poses for the camera, clearly enjoying himself. As I look at my photos*, I see the only thing forgotten was "shooting his cuffs". His shirt cuffs need to project a bit beyond his coat cuffs.

What a strange expression, "shooting his cuffs"! When we see it in print, we understand the meaning. Unlike "shooting oneself in the foot," or "shooting off your mouth," it doesn't involve ammunition. It's closer to "shooting the rapids", sending a whitewater raft full of cuff through the narrow canyon chute of the suitcoat sleeve.

Wisegeek.com explains cuff-shooting is "the male preening gesture that aligns jacket sleeves and shirt sleeves". Not being a guy, I can't pretend to accomplish this action, but it must make the arms and shoulders more comfortable. Nothing feels worse than having a sweater blobbed up at my elbow inside my winter coat.

Answers.com has help for the guy who doesn't have the moves of, say, Robert Redford, Sean Connery, or George Clooney:

One who is unable to throw his wrists gracefully may try another way to shoot cuffs: with the thumb and forefinger of one hand pull sharply on the sleeve of the other arm, to expose the cuff, and then switch hands and repeat.

The idiom also conveys a dandy suddenly showing off an unnecessary amount of cuff or a flashy cufflink.

About 1963 my brother received a "shooting gallery" for Christmas. It was a cardboard replica of the carnival midway game, intended for kiddie pop-guns. During cold winters we played in the basement, galloping around on stick horses, taking target practice, and writing on slates in the schoolmarm's classroom. Upstairs, we built with LEGO bricks. I don't think we ever made a LEGO shooting gallery, though. I'm trying to imagine a LEGO casino with guys shooting their cuffs and setting up the big Sting!

*My kids let me blog as long as I don't post their photos or otherwise blow their covers as 007 operatives.

© 2007 Nancy L. Ruder

Males asking directions?

Two preschoolers were seated at the Lego table building a house for Duplo dinosaurs. The girl announced, "I'm going to bed now," and moved her dinosaur into a red and yellow block room with a color-coordinated bedroom set. The boy responded, "Um, Honey, where's the garage?"

The little girl did not say, "Darling, you've been trying to change tv channels with the garage door opener for the last ten minutes. Follow the sound of the door going up and down!"

Where ya gonna park that thing???

© 2007 Nancy L. Ruder

Attracted by the Duplos

Enjoying my leisurely visit to the Dallas Museum of Art, I wandered into the children's area in the Gateway Gallery. My inner child's peripheral vision had spotted a huge pile of Duplos, those preschooler chunky Lego bricks. I can't resist Legos, and these were the pure, basic, clean Duplos with no little people or trees.

Just the other day I did a little lesson with my students about building stronger, sturdier Duplo walls by overlapping like real brick-layers. The phrase that really got through to them was, "put the Bandaid over the cut." We worked together to make Duplo structures that could be picked up without falling apart, and they were purdy amazed. We also made a domed Duplo igloo, and talked about interior space. This seems obvious to you and I, but preschoolers tend to build by piling things up in a dense mound, instead of surrounding and roofing a space.



So I wandered into the Gateway Gallery to see what kids and parents were doing with all the Duplos, and found that the museum was asking visitors about how they connect to the art. There was a questionaire to mark, label styles to rate, and two pieces of art to write our responses. One section of the research asked the visitor (me) to sit in an armchair and put on headphones while I looked at a landscape painting. The audio asked me to focus my attention on different sections of the painting (top, bottom, sides, middle), then close my eyes and see what I remembered in my imagination. The next section involved seeing the foreground, middle-, and background, and then placing myself in those areas of the painting with my eyes closed. Another section asked me to choose the color I was most drawn to in the painting, then imagine being bathed in that color, and recognizing other personal associations to that color. That's an audio tour I could appreciate.

I signed up to receive emails about the results of the study. Participating enhanced my visit. Things to consider:

• Do you like to view art by yourself or with others?
• Do you like to listen to audio tours, attend lectures, or have a guided tour?
• Do you enjoy having music and performances to enhance your appreciation of the art?
• Do you like discussing art with other people?
• Do you feel comfortable explaining an art work and its meaning to other people?
• Do you read labels and explanations as you view an exhibit, or just react to the pieces themselves?
• Do you like interactive computer programs to enhance your understanding of an exhibit?
• Do you read reviews and critiques of exhibits?
• Do you like to write your responses to the art?

© 2007 Nancy L. Ruder

No need for Mapquest

The almost five year-old boys are discussing birthday party invitations:

My dad doesn't know how to get to your house for the party. Why don't you just have the party somewhere my dad knows how to go--like Legoland?

Why indeed?



© 2007 Nancy L. Ruder

Technology Disparity

"Roving Mars" opened at the IMAX today. I admit to having an anthropomorphic fondness for Spirit and Opportunity. They are each such a charming and amazing cross between a praying mantis and a Lego construction, that they tug fond memories from my childhood.

The movie is great fun, and should be a hit with families. I know my kids would have loved it when they were younger, and will be intrigued even in their twentyish sophistication. The footage of engineers in their white industrial Teletubby suits building the rovers, and later awaiting the landing on Mars are fascinating. The explanations are clear enough for my unscientific mind.

What an accomplishment! The scientists were able to build these incredibly complex robots and safely transport them on a seven-month journey through space, unfold and direct them to motor around the rocky surface collecting data long after their expected ninety days.

This brings me to my question: Why can't I buy a crockpot built to work longer than ninety days?



Philip Glass composed the soundtrack, but I was unaware of it, unlike his soundtrack enhancing the 2003 Robert McNamara documentary "Fog of War".

Run wild, run free

Today I uninstalled a bunch of ridiculous unused programs from my frazzled, overloaded HP. I cleaned the annoying icons off the desktop. Deleted accumulated email. Went to the kitchen and emptied the freezer of all scary unidentifiable casserole leftovers. I've probably thrown some baby out with the bathwater, but I'm feeling slightly less burdened and encumbered.

Where did that "run wild, run free" come from? It popped into my memory from the way-back machine. Hokey smokes, Bullwinkle! That was the title of a 1969 movie I'm sure I never saw. Insidious television ads must have slipped into my subconscious and survived anaerobically in some cyst for thirty-six years, like a tick in a jelly jar.

I want to run wild and run free, but I need to cull my image and lesson plan files, and eliminate much of my stored recyclables collection. Maybe I should whittle my collection of "fat pants" and "skinny pants" to a more realistic range.

What is really important? I've been playing this Robinson Crusoe game with myself for over forty years. The recent hurricane disasters have only aggravated this tendency:

• I have to have my address book. It's hand-written in a little spiral notebook. I live by words, writing, and mail. Once my spouse made a frozen February phone call to his sister from a gas station pay phone in Iowa, and left my address book behind. I made him drive back on I-80 the twenty-seven miles to retrieve it. He was not a happy boy. If I'd been smart I would have offed him then. I'd be out of prison by now.
• My kids' medical records. They are big boys, but they still need to know when they got that vaccination. It's my maternal duty! If the United States were under attack by an enemy other than our current administration, I would laminate the medical records, then strap them to my thighs with clear Scotch brand packing tape.
• My sense of self. It was swept away in a levee break, and marooned in an odiferous sea of toxic waste for a very long time. I make sure it is wearing a Mae West lifejacket at all times now.
• Okay. I admit it. On the desert island I would want the Legos!

Pixielated and updated

Pixies are often easier to believe in than pixels. I can see pixies if I just kind of squint, but pixels require reading camera and software instructions without the aid of a troll translator. The photos were grainy and pixelated because the camera has a digital zoom instead of an optical zoom reports the techno troll. Fortunately, an artsy fairy explained that digital zoom photos look like an elf worked all night to enlarge my photo onto gigantic graph paper, colored the enlargement in the squares with washable felt pens, then left the graph paper on a stone park bench to await the morning dew.

Whoa. I used to love sitting in the tree house and filling in the squares on sheets of graph paper with my first felt pens. That's why I like Lite Brite*, and the Color Game by Ted Naos.

I was fortunate to visit the "Color Pattern Grid" exhibit at the Austin Museum of Art in April, and I almost had to go buy graph paper.

I'm elated to report that I have Pixie Updates. First, the real title of the Highland Park sculptures is, "Frolicking Pixies". The bronze sculptures were created by sculptor Deran Wright, and given to the town by the Crow family. The sculptor specializes in trolls and other little folk, so click the link to his website. Second, I have some photos of the kids' fairyland mural.


GRATEFUL DEAD lyrics - "Morning Dew"
Walk me out in the morning dew my honey,
Walk me out in the morning dew today.
I'll walk you out in the morning dew my honey,
I guess it doesn't really matter anyway,
I guess it doesn't matter anyway,
I guess it doesn't matter anyway,
Guess it doesn't matter anyway.

*My retirement plan includes occasional days off from playing with Legos to play with Lite Brite.

My True Calling

This CollageMama is so old that she learned to build things with Legos using her imagination. In the olden days of the 1960's, Legos were sold without movie tie-ins or restricting instructions. They were for building, just like Tinker Toys, Lincoln Logs, alphabet blocks, and Erector Sets. We used my brother's Legos to build many things, but our favorite activity was constructing camper vans and pick-up campers. These were the glory days of Sunday t.v. with Ed Sullivan, Topo Gigio, Davey and Goliath, My Favorite Martian, Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea, and Lost in Space. We drank Fresca without fear of cyclamates. It was a different world. Dinah Shore sang about seeing the "USA in your Chevrolet", and Alexander Calder designed Braniff airplanes.

Dallas is losing its Delta Airlines hub and many jobs this month. Flight attendants and pilots are being transferred to other hubs like Salt Lake City and Atlanta. I heard part of "Car Talk" on NPR today while driving to Target. One caller asked Click and Clack about living in an old VW Westfalia Synchro camper van (Segment Six) in the long-term parking of the San Francisco airport. She was a pilot being transferred from her home in Alaska. I wonder if she was a Mattel Little Kiddle.

A Dallas friend of mine will have to be based in Salt Lake City to keep her job. This is extremely inconvenient, especially since she will also have to spend many nights in Omaha. She needs to know about the Car Talk camper van plan. I could build her a camper van if I had enough Legos. I have lots of experience!

Many of our Lego constructions were intended to be moon-rovers and the "chariot" from Lost In Space, so basically precursors to SUVs. Our other creations were pick-up campers that fit in the back of my brother's large metal Tonka trucks. These homes on wheels were for my sister's Little Kiddle dolls, mainly because we didn't have enough Legos to build homes for Barbies and Johnny West. Having also played the Beatle's stewardess game, I think I have many qualities needed to house displaced airline employees. Maybe I should get in touch with Jimmy Carter. Legos have been accumulating for fifty years or so now. Like National Geographics, no one wants to throw them away. Maybe Bill and Melinda Gates would fund a Lego Relief Airline Housing initiative.

Since Bush is messing with Social Security and Medicare, I expect to spend my retirement years sitting in a small, drab room eating Spam. That's why I'm holding onto my kids' Legos. I think I'll build some nifty red, yellow, and blue intergalactic space colonies for Barbie, Midge, and Ken.

Non-specific existential interior decorating dissatisfaction

Didn't recognize the Early Warning Signals, and slipped into one of my spells where I want to haul nearly all of my worldly goods out into the condo parking lot and set them on fire. Then I want to rip up all the carpet, roll it up, and add it to the fire.

What holds me back?

• If I rip out the carpet the cracks in the concrete slap will show.
• I'm pretty sure the fumes from the carpet would be carcinogenic, if not mind-altering.
• If I burn the furniture, the biggest spots on the carpet will show.
• If I burn the couch, where will I put the under-the-bed storage boxes full of Magic cards and role-playing game books that are holding it up?
• If I get rid of the mattress and box springs stuffed under the stairway, the terrorists will have won.

I haven't actually looked in the American Psychiatric Association's DSM-IV for this debilitating form of recurrent davenport dysthymia. If it's not there, it should be!

My ex used to say I was having one of my "Buddhist Attacks" when I had an episode of NSEIDD. He was one to talk. His idea of a clean house was a Japanese shogun's retreat built of sliding rice paper walls, with grass mats on the floor, one low table, and one vase holding a plum blossom, and absolutely nothing else. Needless to say, we had serious culture clashes over my desire to hang art work on any wall, and the Legos, toy soldiers, and Hot Wheels of three small sons.

This holiday I will have a large assembly of able-bodied males in residence to lift and move. Now if I could just find a charitable organization with very low aesthetic standards to haul everything away!

Om.....

Force fields and black holes

In the art classroom we have a set of construction straws. The kids build with the straw pieces connected by plastic pieces that look like jacks. To the youngest students each straw is an object. For boys, the straw is a gun or sword. For girls, it is a flower stem. You may think that I am stereotyping and exaggerating, but I don't get involved in this "free building" activity very much. I just observe while I wipe tempera paint off small elbows. Girls bring a handful of straws to me to sniff. Boys sword-fight.

All the kids gradually learn to connect the straws to form crosses and the number four. Girls begin to act out wedding processions, and boys launch rockets. Occasionally a coed team tries to make "a very long snake" or "a road".

When they are ready to move into the third dimension, they do. I don't think this step can be rushed. For a long time they are happy making "stars" and "twirly things". I begin to ask, "Can you build something that stands up by itself?" I sit on the floor and connect the straws to form tripods, four-legged animals, and cubes. I don't push or preach. I just play. They soak it up. Suddenly, they get it! It spreads like pink eye. They can work together to make cubes and towers taller than they are. They can build Mars rovers and dinosaurs. Peer pressure kicks in to force the younger kids to catch up with the older one's skills, and to prevent overwhelming destructive impulses.

Divergent thinkers make my day. Kids who create arches and jungle gyms for flamingos are my inspirations. My all-time favorite was a boy who stuck straws into his sandals to make claws and wore a cube on his head (while shooting a laser gun, of course).

Having gotten a late start on a career and retirement savings, I have realistic plans. Between meals of generic tuna, I will be in my room building with Tinker Toys and Legos, thank you very much. I'm still surprised that my dad didn't build a geodesic dome in the backyard in his retirement.

Kohlrabi

Stayed up late, lordy, it must have been nearly 11:30 CDT, to make Chex Mix the old fashion way for my youngest. Had to stir it every half hour, of course. We call it Kris Kringle Krunch in my family, even though it is ninety+ degrees outside, and it is one of my son's Basic 4 Food Groups. (Yes, I'm so old I don't know the Food Pyramid). His four groups are bagels, strawberry Yoplait custard-style yogurt, burn-it-himself cheese quesadillas, and Chex Mix. All washed down with Dr. Pepper. During the school year this diet is enhanced with apples and Domino's pepperoni pizza. Because he is sixteen now, he is trying new foods, and has actually managed to consume hamburgers when the social situation required. His dad managed to eat perfectly charcoal-broiled Nebraska corn fed T-Bones just long enough to woo and wed me. Then he reverted to his preferred vegetarian diet of M&Ms and beer, with the occasional brussel sprout or kohlrabi for garnish. Kohlrabi, the veggie from outer space!

Sure hope NASA can launch the Mars Rover. Spent a lovely portion of my childhood building Lego vehicles inspired by the Chariot of the "Lost in Space" TV show. After a long day, I wish I'd concentrated on building force fields.

Coming soon to a theater near you: "Danger, Mrs. Robinson, danger." Koo-koo-ka-choo.