Medley

A thousand ducks are nibbling me to death at work (metaphor inspired by Londo) – I’m feeling pretty angsty and stressed out about stuff there. And I’m tired, tired, tired. So, a few links today, mostly pulled from my Twitter stream which these days is basically retweets of things to be exasperated, outraged, or amused about.

• I have only paid vague attention to the Wikipedia wars, but this piece by Jason Scott against the Deletionist faction is good in and of itself and also if you want to get a sense of what some of the issues are.
• Atrios (Duncan Black) explains in USA Today why raising the Medicare eligibility age is a terrible, terrible stupid idea. Bad policy. Bad politics. That Obama is even letting this remain part of the discussion, much less actually considering doing it, epitomizes almost everything I have disliked about his Presidency.
• I will not be seeing Zero Dark Thirty. This is…. gross. I just cannot think of another word to better describe this blatantly creepy propaganda effort. Just nauseating.
• I do not approve of the elf on the shelf business.  You do what you gotta’ do with your family, but no creepy surveillance state indoctrination in this house.
• Josh Marshall thinks the possibility of a massive government shutdown over the debt limit (aka GOP extremist whackadoos–oh, but I repeat myself–playing chicken with the global economy) is greater than most seem to think. I was not in Washington when Newtie threw his fit and shut down the government in the 90s. And I don’t know what this new potential shutdown would mean for my own work (which is at a DotOrg, but partially supported by government grants). But it’s possible that I’d have a bunch of time to practice on my new piano, I suppose.
• And, for something amusing… no… I don’t have anything amusing right at the moment. Maybe tomorrow.

The piano arrived today – delivered at 8am sharp. I worked at home and it was pretty hard to keep from playing with it all day.

Our house is small and has an open floor plan. One test will be whether TLG can manage to get to and stay asleep upstairs if one of us is playing the piano in the living room. I put the odds at 50-50. Of course, we’ll try to keep our evening tunes to mellow stuff. This evening he passed – I noodled on some Christmas-y lullabyes while TheGuy put TLG to bed. Seemed to go fine. But the experiment was confounded because it was a later than usual bedtime and he was tired. To be continued.

I have vague ambitions to try to learn (or relearn) one piece each month – that is to learn it for real, and not just fake my way through it like I’m doing now with my very stiff and rusty fingers. I know just enough to arpeggiate my way around some chords if I lose track of what I’m actually supposed to be doing.

The piano itself puts most of the rest of the living room furniture to shame. We’d been keeping an old recliner couch and a camp couch & chair combo around while TLG was little (in case of food or … other … accidents) but there haven’t really been any.  So maybe it’s time to start thinking about how we might redecorate and upgrade the furniture around the piano.  Hehe. Speaking of which, I need to email my interior decorator friend and ask for an hour of his time. (Once we feel recovered from the piano purchase, there are about a dozen other house things needing attention and for which I am basically at a loss – stuck in analysis paralysis.)

Anyway, here’s the piano – we are all very happy about it. TLG called it “our permanent piano.”  (They’ve been talking about dentists and baby teeth and permanent teeth at school – I thought that was excellent vocabulary usage!)

Kindergarten for TLG approaches. I am moderately anxious about that. We have been thinking very hard about what to do regarding his primary school education and pretty much every option has been considered (some, such as private school, more seriously than others, such as homeschooling). However, after all that, our current plan is to send him to our neighborhood elementary school, to pay close attention, and to be flexible in case other arrangements need to be made.

I’ve also started slowly getting up to speed on some of the ins and outs and controversies of the day regarding the county school district. I do this the way I try to get a feel for any new thing: I subscribe to a bunch of RSS feeds (or similar), and dip into them every so often just to see what people are talking about. I came very close to starting to attend local PTA meetings, but decided that was too over the top even for me. I’ll wait until he’s actually enrolled. (However, I do scan their newsletters.)

And, since I don’t feel like I can understand anything unless I understand (at least at a coarse level) the larger system within which it is situated, I’ve also started flowing some national education policy feeds into my information stream. Like probably anyone who has been educated within a given system, I find I have exceedingly strong opinions about these policy matters. But I also recognize that how various policy options end up being instantiated in a given classroom is somewhat unpredictable.

So really, it’s all a great unknown. And I know this post is vague, but this is one of those things I don’t want to write too much in detail about while there’s still so much uncertainty (in my head – about what the right thing to do is).  I do have great confidence in TLG’s academic capabilities. But this morning I got a call from his pre-K to let me know that he had had a bit of trauma and upsetness because he’d shoved a rock up his nose.*  So there are some other things he still needs to work on, obviously.

* Really, child? A rock up your nose? (I knew to worry about this sort of thing when he was 2 and 3 – and it never happened, but at 4.5 I really thought we’d dodged that particular childhood drama. Sigh.)

Holidailies prompt: What is the thing you most wanted as a child for a holiday gift that you didn’t get?

That’s an easy one for me: for several years I wanted a telescope. Never got it. In fact, now that I think about it, I still kinda’ want a telescope.  There’s a bit of light pollution where we live (especially during high school football season – the field is a block away across the street), but I bet we could still see a few things if we tried. Perhaps TLG will want a telescope some day and I can use that as an excuse to get one.

…..

Long work week ahead, and again next week, and then a few days off for the holidays. Somehow gotta’ plod through the next couple of weeks. On the bright side: piano delivery this week and a holiday party at friends’ house this coming weekend.

• The “take TLG for a late evening event” experiment went pretty well. TLG slept in a little bit today. He was a bit difficult today due to being overtired, but not too bad, considering.
• We made gingerbread cookies this afternoon. It was the first time I’d made buttercream frosting in I don’t know how long. Since long before TLG was born. The sugar bomb gave me a bit of a headache, but it was fun to use the piping bag to decorate them.  Will probably end up throwing most of them out (see: sugar bomb headache.)
• We sold our Schoenhut toy piano today. I had listed it on craigslist a couple of days ago. That was easy.  Three more days until new piano shows up. Cannot wait.
• I gave up on watching Being Human for a bit because it was getting depressing. Switched back over to Psych now that season 6 is on Netflix. James Roday and Dule Hill are hugely entertaining. (I’ve stalled out on my Les Miserables re-read in the middle of the section on Marius–gotta get back to that.)

We ran a family experiment tonight – took the boy out to an 8pm concert at The Barns at Wolf Trap. Schooner Fare — a Maine folk duo (formerly trio) that I’ve known of and enjoyed since I was a teenager — comes to The Barns every year. TheGuy and I have been several times and have been waiting impatiently for the boy to be old enough that we felt we could bring him. Tonight was a bit of a gamble, but it went well. He is familiar with a lot of their music (although they have a large repertoire, so there were songs they played tonight that none of us had heard before) and enjoyed the show. I had packed a few dried cherries and chocolate bits to give him at intermission in hopes a little sugar boost would get him through the second set. It mostly did – he only really started to fade during the last song of the second set and the two encore songs.

Apart from being unsure whether he could make it through the show, tonight is a gamble in another way, too. He has had a really good bedtime-to-sleep routine for a few months (after a few years of not having such a thing).  So we’ve been really reluctant to upset that applecart. So tonight is the latest he’s been up in a looooong time. Thus, the experiment is half over – he did well at the concert. But: Can he get to sleep tonight? How long will he sleep? And what will it do to his day tomorrow? Parenting anxieties… (seriously, the PTSD from infancy and toddlerdom is finally fading, but it’s going to take a lot longer for my anxiety about his sleep drama to go away, I think.)

Unrelated to the boy, tonight was also only the second time that we’ve used the brand new 495 express lanes on our side of the Washington Beltway. Considering they start right near our house, were empty (at least tonight), and there’s no charge if you have 3 people in your vehicle, so far we are huge fans!  Could work out very well for our little family of three and whatever weekend trips north we wind up taking. To friends of ours who come south on the Beltway on the outer loop to visit us: definitely take the express lanes. Easy, easy drive – at least for now.

TheBoy (some days it seems he’s really not such a LittleGuy anymore) has been sleeping well and solidly lately. He’s growing. But it means that he doesn’t have much time to play games with us on weekday evenings or mornings. This morning when I went in to get him up for school he asked me to wake him up at 5:47 tomorrow. I said, “Why?” He said, “So that we have extra time to play games.” Fortunately, he’s also really tickled to be growing so big and strong, so I reminded him that sleep helps him grow. So he agreed that maybe the games could wait until Saturday.

For months now he’s been doing very well at clearing his own dishes from the table after a meal. Today I ran the experiment of having him set the table for the three of us for dinner. Kinda’ worked. Hurrah! Child labor.

He is very pleased that he won trophies at his tae kwon do tournament. I put them on top of his desk.  But he’s very insistent that they be displayed elsewhere in the house. Specifically near the tv (which is in the basement). I don’t know why. But I told him we could consider moving them on the weekend. (He doesn’t spend any time in the basement on weekdays.)

Tonight he asked us how much a Christmas tree costs (we don’t have one up yet). Specifically, if it costs more than $5, which is what he has in his wallet right now. I said, “Oh, the one we get will probably cost around 60 dollars.” He said: “60 with ones on them?” I said “Yeah, or 3 twenties.”  But, while we thanked him for the thought, we reassured him that he doesn’t have to buy the Christmas tree with his money.  (He has similarly offered to pay for milk.)

It’s late and I’m tired and while I have several things I could write epic blog posts about, I don’t have the energy for epic right now.  So I popped on over to the Holidailies site to look for a topic prompt, and one is: “tell us about your favorite holiday book or movie.” So I thought for a second, and came up with an answer. And then realized the book I’d thought of was out of print the last time I went searching for it. So I googled up the author, and realized I could write a short blog post about this author (actually a children’s book illustrator) and how I came across the book about 25 years ago, but … not tonight.

Instead I will recommend three albums, all new to me in the last few months:

• Will Hoge’s Modern American Protest Music. You can listen to all of the tracks on his site. The first one I heard was “I Don’t Believe” and afterward I immediately downloaded the whole album from iTunes. “Times Are Not Changing” is probably my next favorite.
• Seraphic Fire‘s Silent Night. A friend of ours sings soprano on this classical Christmas album.
• Frank Turner’s Last Minutes and Lost Evenings. From the Amazon description, “an incredibly seductive introduction to the man and his music: Last Minutes and Lost Evenings presents 15 songs, standards and rarities, hand-picked by Frank Turner from his catalog to get new fans started off on the right foot.” My faves: “Photosynthesis” and “Nashville Tennessee.”

A couple people have asked whether we’re going to have TLG start piano lessons now that we’ll soon have a real piano in the house.  We don’t actually know.  Our current thinking is that we won’t start any kind of formal music lesson until at least kindergarten (which is next fall).  The next question is: which instrument? We are considering both violin and piano.  (Both TheGuy and I play piano and TheGuy plays violin. I had piano lessons as a kid; he had violin lessons. We also have a guitar somewhere in this house that we can both strum a few chords on.)

I am currently leaning toward violin for TLG because I think he’ll learn more musically from that and it will train his ear much better. He’ll have the piano right here that he can play around with whenever he wants. If later on he shows more of an interest in piano, then we can add on some piano instruction. However, I don’t really feel strongly, so we’re still thinking it over.  Feel free to opine to me at length about this question; I’m collecting anecdata and opinions.

On Sunday we bought a piano! It will be delivered next week.

The original plan had been to simply stop by the showroom and make some inquiries about rentals, but when we left, we had purchased a Yahama acoustic upright (P22). It is slightly used – it spent a few months at Wolf Trap as a studio piano, apparently.

I am super excited. We have had a decent digital piano (with full-size weighted keys) that TheGuy bought in the late 90s.  But I never liked it. I learned to play on gigantic old church uprights. My piano growing up was a 75-year-old gutted piano player (the player mechanism had long since been removed).  And neither the feel nor the sound of the digital piano was ever satisfying to me.  And then there’s having to turn it on, and make sure the speakers are plugged in, and move the pedal to the right position, and also it always felt a bit wobbly on its stand to me

The salesguy we spoke with first tried, lightly, to cajole us into considering a baby grand.  But, while I’ve been thinking about it, I have not yet done the exercise of taping together some newspaper to see what the actual footprint of a baby grand would be in our (small) living room. He also showed us a Yahama digital of comparable price to the piano we eventually purchased. It was… fine. But again with the volume fussing and the turning on and such.

We played with the digital piano a little bit and a few other uprights including a couple of Christoforis (I refused on principle to play any of the grands, because why torture myself), but then I tried the piano (our P22) directly behind us. And the feel was noticeably different – more sensitive and subtle. The sound was also far superior; warmer and with the sound is coming at you from all directions out of the instrument, rather than being piped through speakers. TheGuy (who has a better ear than me) agreed. He doesn’t feel as strongly about acoustic over digital as I do, but agreed that this piano would be a fine thing to have. We wandered around the showroom trying some other uprights, including other Yamahas, so I could convince myself I wasn’t just being swayed by the brand name (and the Wolf Trap story).

I am really looking forward to having it in the house.  Merry Christmas to us. It should arrive next Tuesday. I’ll post pictures then.