MacTechWitch

Some Things (Never?) Change

2008-01-16T18:41:00.000-05:00

A college friend sent me this 40-year-old photograph today. I haven't decided whether to laugh or cry but I was interested to see evidence of two of my most enduring interests. I wonder what was spinning on that "record player."

Movie Memories Jogged by Ms.Dee

2007-12-19T12:40:00.000-05:00

The Syncopated Clock
This was the theme song for the afternoon movie show when I was a kid. Between this program and Million Dollar Movie, (theme song from Gone With The Wind) where it was possible to watch a movie a dozen times in the same week, and I did, films like Mighty Joe Young or The Thing (the original where James Arness is the thing) were indelibly stamped into my cinema DNA.

Where's Waldo?

2007-12-18T13:27:00.000-05:00

"Life is what happens to you while you're busy making other plans."
John Lennon

So that's my excuse.
Now that I've gotten that out of the way, thank you friends who refused to give up on ever seeing another post from me.
I've been puttering along doing nothing that seemed noteworthy since returning from Anguilla last March.

Finished the school year,
had a party for Mondale,
ordered new computers,
patched up the database,
installed projectors and speakers all over the high school,
got a Smartboard for Listmaker,
spent the weekends in Quogue, marked mac-grandson's third B'day,
cheered for new baby Beck and the "parentibos"
started a new school year with two new tech staff persons (so great),
welcomed some great new classroom teachers to Burpie Cow Wow School,
mac-grandson started school (here) too (so so great),
he was a policeman for Halloween and for about three weeks post-Halloween,
went to a great wedding in the mountains of NY,
enjoyed Macgrandaughter's learning to crawl and climb,
had a reprise of last year's Mohonk tech conference,
and a reprise of sister-in law's Thanksgiving
right now planning a reprise of my 2006 Christmas Day Dinner for 30.
throughout it all, took regular peeks at everyone's blogs to make sure the wheels were still turning.

Will I get back on the wagon? It's almost New Year's for God's sake. I guess I should make the resolution.

A Gear Shifts

2007-03-30T17:41:00.000-04:00

This is one of the most beautiful beaches in this hemisphere. There was a storm last night at sunset. Even rainy weather is appealing here but we return to the city tomorrow.
MacHub actually worked most of the week, spending hours on the computer, but neither his Blackberry nor cell phone function here and it is a wonder how much those devices control the person who is supposedly in control of them, for the working does not seem nearly as oppressive when you can choose to take a swim before you carry the laptop to the exact table near the pool that receives the best wireless signal.
I lolled around most of the time but I did rise early each day and walk for an hour followed by a swim. There was good snorkeling and good dinner each night. I read three books and listened to countless podcasts that I had saved up for the trip.
Having another week before school starts sounds good but I don't really have a week as most of it is booked up with installing Smartboards and catching up on dentist appointments (ugh). I really like April, May and June in Brooklyn. They're like wide warm stone steps descending to a sunny summer beach.
We start the final period of play in this school game and it goes fast and furious. We're all sweating and breathless when the buzzer sounds in June. Hey, usually, we all win.

It's Not Easy Being Green

2007-03-28T17:21:00.000-04:00

I took an early dip in the ocean after my walk this morning and then rinsed off in the pool. I was joined by this praying mantis. I've never seen one here before. The more usual wildlife being chickens, lizards and goats, lots of goats.
I was remembering the first time we took the kids here. It was 1986. MacDaughter, a sophomore in high school, was coming off mononucleosis and was in dire need of a little sun and air after spending four pale winter weeks in her room watching General Hospital. MacSon would have been a sixth grader, his first year at IS "FiftyOnes,"
At the "villa" MacHub and I were drinking beer in the daytime, as it was a bit overcast for the beach, while his sister was flat out on a lounge chair with her ears plugged into one of those bright yellow Sony Walkman things they all had. Probably listening to The Stray Cats or Joe Jackson.
Bored of us, he wandered away into the dry scrubby fields on the cliff over the sea and discovered a baby goat entangled in his tether and bleating loudly. No mama goat in sight. Being a Brooklyn boy he was wary of touching the thing. But his soft heart and life-long draw towards the helpless (which would become something of an issue later on) kept him near the goat where he (and he freely admitted this all the while knowing how laughable it sounded) sang The Greatest Love of All, it was the mid-eighties you remember, to the goat until it calmed down enough to extricate itself.

Anguilla Consumption log:
Dinner at the Rasta place. Excellent fish and lemon pasta preceded by some rum punch concoction that was a little too fruity for me so I had to wash it down with some dry white wine.

Basting Away In...

2007-03-27T12:43:00.000-04:00

The east end of Anguilla (our preferred spot) is less developed. There are no real resort hotels and thus very few restaurants, but there is one tiny and delicious french bakery. It is best to place your orders for the week on that first morning of vacation because they sell out of the few precious items they bake. There are no croissants like these to be had in Brooklyn and their butter content is what drives me to fast-walk the beach every day for an hour as penance.
I can whip up a reasonable cafe au lait in the kitchen of our rental villa with coffee I bring with with me. I also brought a small stash of blood oranges – as fresh fruit and vegetables have the status (and often the price) of truffles on little islands with ocean reef soil and no rain. In the old days I used to bring lots of food, things I'd prepare and freeze and pack into cooler bags. Pickings were very slim on this island. These foodstuffs would be just about thawed when our bags tumbled off the small prop plane that was the last leg of the trip. We'd eat them the first few few nights because things didn't keep well, as the electricity was iffy and the refrigerator was often unreliable. The food is much better now.
We tried a new place last night, Picante, a Mexican restaurant, the island's first. This place is on the far west end of the island, a ten-mile, thirty minute drive from our villa on Shoal Bay East. The one road that runs the length of the island has been widened and paved in the last two years and all the speed bumps are gone. End of an era. Anyway, the margaritias were excellent and we had to have a few while waiting forty-five minutes for our table – because the place was packed.
Uma Thurman and her kids were sitting at the table behind us, my second vacation sighting of Uma this year – she was on our beach this past summer in Quogue, too. The fish taco, in a soft corn tortilla was good and smothered in finely chopped very red and flavorful tomatoes and Mac-hub's rib's and black beans were tasty and plentiful – we couldn't even finish them. Probably because we had filled up on a cheese-spinach concoction that we had ordered with the (heated up – a nice touch) chips and salsa at the bar earlier. The bar was ringed by pilgrims (exactly as you would expect them to be) to the Jimmy Buffett concert, which had happened a few nights before, and dotted with young-young golf pros and assistant golf pros from the nearby, outrageously expensive, golf resort run by St Regis. (Remember neither soil nor fresh water are indigenous to this island) the sprinkler system alone, geesh!
So it was - another successful day in my favorite zone-out zone.

R & R

2007-03-26T09:38:00.000-04:00

It was spring break, in 1984, a 15 minute trip on a ferry from St. Martin brought us to this beach. At the time I was surprised that the place really existed, that beach that you see in your dreams – if you were so inclined to dream of beaches.
What was more astounding was that this mile long stretch was empty, save this one small hotel, no more than 10 rooms. It wasn't yet open, waiting on electricity to be run to this (then) remote part of the tiny island, Anguilla.
We managed to return, nearly every year since that day. And though the place has become developed (how could it not) it is still compelling. Every hotel, or villa we've occupied in those 20 some odd years has been great in its own way but this year we are staying, for the first time, in that original little hotel on the picture-perfect beach. It is an oldie now (like us) but no worse for the wear. It has modernized – wireless internet is available. I like to remember the way it was then.

Anguilla consumption log:
Night One-
Arrived very late -no bars or restaurants open on this beach but I had planned ahead and asked for our fridge to be stocked with beer and water. So, several beers went down along with olives from Blue Apron and prosciutto from A & S Pork Store which made the trip from Brooklyn with us.
Next Day - Breakfast and lunch were not memorable but maybe that's because of the rum punch at Gwen's Reggae Grill which seemed to induce a definite memory lapse. Dinner at Hibernia, our favorite restaurant on the island. Smoked fish and lobster appetizers, crusted mahi-mahi and swordfish entres accompanied by a nice Alsatian Gewurztraminer, house-made sorbets for dessert.
So first 24 hours - beer, rum punch, white wine.

I Can't Give You Anything But...

2007-02-28T20:09:00.000-05:00

We spent the long weekend attending 60th birthday celebrations. The picture is mac-husband flanked by two of his college roommates at one such fiesta. The car (if
you can refer to a Porsche by such a common three letter word) was the surprise birthday present of the roommate on the right, given to him by his wife, who actually did the whole "I Love Lucy" hide-it-in-the-garage while he's-in-the-shower getting ready to go out to dinner thing.
Can you imagine? These things still happen in the alternative universe (New Jersey).

Our gift was a copy of the new book of yet another turning-sixty college friend and a photo from a ski trip in the sixties - all sideburns and Buddy Holly glasses.

Now I did get it together, last month, and pull myself out of the post-Christmas doldrums long enough to throw a small dinner party in honor of mac-husband reaching his hexacontal year but I didn't buy a present.
I would love to be the person who can find the perfect gift - the ohh-ahh-wow gift. I am so bad at gifts.

To be good at choosing a gift, one - you have to really know your recipient and two - you need to have confidence.
We've been together since before The Beatles broke up, you'd think "one" would be a slam dunk. It's not. And confidence? What's happened to me? I've lost it in so many ways.
Gifts are just things. Maybe some have meaning but mostly they don't. At this stage of the game the real gift is time - spent together, if possible.

Clare

2007-02-28T19:29:00.000-05:00

My first granddaughter - this little peanut turned two weeks old today.
Born on Valentine's Day, she weighed 8 pounds 1 ounce and measured 21" -taller than her brother was. Everything is going smoothly as she quite enjoys sleeping at night, waking to eat once or twice but conking back out very nicely.
The past eight weeks have produced four new babes connected to our school crowd, starting with Mondale's, Henry, then Clare, then swim-sweetie's, Matteo, then grandchild of Helen's (of Ebbet's Field), Vanessa.
And there are more to come when Natalie Portmanesque & Unwellness deliver as spring turns to summer. What a fun preschool class this could be.

Gallery of Drinks Returns

2007-02-06T19:57:00.001-05:00

I admit it. Sometimes I drink on school nights. I have been enamored of the
Cosmo, of late, but really, they are practically pure alcohol and they
are so good you can't drink just one, so I invented this "lighter fare"
– along the same lines – because I really can't be passing out on a
nightly basis. You know that as whacked the day has been, there's tomorrow to deal with and I've come to enjoy facing the music of each day, however discordant.
This is

The Cosmotonic.

2 parts vodka
1 part cointreau
1 part pomegranate juice
4 (or 5) parts tonic
a squeeze of lime

The New Year -Check It Out, Check It Off

2007-01-28T18:37:00.000-05:00

Nothing much to say, of late. I haven't been hibernating, though.

Hired new staff member in IT... this could be a major improvement in my life.
Installed some Smartboards and scheduled the upcoming trainings...this could be fun.
Network upgrades - I can see the light at the end of the tunnel...this could be a great relief.
Grandbaby (girl) expected any day now...this could be lovely chaos.
Her parents are in contract on another house in Park Slope (though they have not yet completely unpacked into the house they moved into in December)...this could be exhausting.
I've gotten really good at mixing Cosmos...this could be oblivion.

Check these off the list for this month:

60th birthday party thrown for MacTech husband.
Grandest commission check deposited by MacTech husband.
Annual upper respiratory illness (short and thus already) recovered from.
Plane tickets purchased and villa and car reserved for March vacation in Anguilla.

Saw:
Dreamgirls, B-
Volver,B+
Notes On a Scandal,B-
The Good Shepherd B+

Don't Go There

2007-01-05T19:44:00.000-05:00

This might have been my last ever trip to that snake-head of a peninsular chad-hanging state of Florida. Just flew back to NY about an hour ago. Though there were a number of mildly annoying things about this particular trip, none of them were so terrible, and the weather was hot, the ocean looked good (I say looked good because I could not bring myself to go into it. I could not take the chance that I might find it...fun.
So why could I not enjoy myself just one little bit?
The place is a model showroom of everything that's wrong with this country and how we attempt to live our lives in it. (I'm sure LA could be a contender but not the ENTIRE state of California, they do produce wine there, after all)
Conspicuous consumption, to the hilt – driving back and forth up and down Federal Highway from one hideous mall to another (the restaurants mostly reside in malls too) to buy useless crap to haul back to your place.
The state is populated by a most disconcerting collection of misfits and "ne'er do not well-enoughs" who swarm and grovel in minimum wage jobs below the styrofoam-trimmed and gated mansions of the rich. Those are the ones who work. The place is the Mecca of those trying to make it on Disability checks and or Social Security. Every foray into public space left me wincing in a sea of palsied slow-moving limbs, and worse, navigating motorized wheel-chair traffic (younger than me, people!)
I think the place just scares me – to death.

R.I.P.

2006-12-27T20:22:00.000-05:00

Lest we forget. It wasn't always rising property values and high-fashion-high-life.
Click for article from 1975

Christmas Dinner 2006

2006-12-27T19:20:00.000-05:00

It was my turn to do Christmas dinner this year.
Seven of Mac-Tim's eleven sibs were in attendance and one of mine. With the various spouses and cousins and friends and my mom, we were almost 30 people. Chicago Mac-son's girlfriend-who-could-not-get-home-to-Denver was a big hit with everybody and she was a good sport about the dumb questions.
"Do you think this spot could be cancer?"
"So skin is an organ, huh?"
"Did you bring any Botox or Retin A?"
(She's a dermatologist)
Mac-Tim cooked the three fillets of beef on the gas grill in the pouring rain. There were no leftovers.
I wasn't hungry for dinner but I think it was because I filled up on smoked salmon appetizers and the fabulous pitcher of cosmopolitans whipped up by Mac-son and mac-sweetie.

Bizarro Christmas

2006-12-23T14:29:00.000-05:00

At this point I'm wondering if I should set the Christmas dinner table on the deck. It's mid afternoon on the Saturday before and I'm opening the windows and doors and sweating. It's hot in the house. At least I won't have to scramble for extra firewood. I'll be damned if I'll build any fires this weekend.
My mother should be arriving in a cab any time now so I need to get myself ready for the talkathon. Mactech-son & girlfriend (she, being an unexpected guest who was shut out from going home to Denver as there is some cataclysmic weather happening there) are out and about in Manhattan. Mac-Tim is shop-working, combining a property visit in SoHo with his usual last-minute creative gift picks. I just got back to the house with an armload of roses - $12 for 2 dozen so I bought 4 dozen and holiday greenery from KeyFood.
I'm making my cooking lists and schedules which are essential when you are cooking for 30. I think the three whole fillets will be enough but Mac-Tim picked up a whole spiral-cut ham this morning at the excellent Polish market on 5th Ave -just in case.
In a pinch, Fairway is open 'til 9:00 on Christmas Eve so I'm not worried.
I got out the creché and dumped it on the mantlepiece and decided to leave it just as it fell - a visual metaphor for my holiday season and my holiday season affect.
It will be chaos but it will be good.

Be Hopeful For Better Things

2006-12-20T19:22:00.000-05:00

Hopeful is what we have to be, when we're really "quietly scared," to quote an esteemed colleague. All in our circle seem to be quietly scared about one thing or another these days. And we're all dead tired as well. Another year has bolted past us like third graders on their way to the yard and it was a year marked as much by things that didn't happen as things that did.
And still we keep on.
Thanks to all of you for being there, for every kindness for all the music and especially for all the laughs. I need that the most.
"So here's hoping all the verses rhyme, and the very best of choruses, too."

The Year at a Glance-A Meme

2006-12-15T15:24:00.001-05:00

The opening sentences from my first blog post each month in 2006.
I "caught" this from Unwellness.
It makes the year seem so short. And it's a fair snapshot of what I blathered about in 2006. Work, The Weather, Travel, The Past.

JAN First day back at school after the holidays...D+
FEB If you're going to feel plowed under anyway, you may as well have a snowstorm.
MAR I was really into The Lives of the Saints in my early adolescence.
APR The picture above is of many thousand year old cliff dwellings at Bandelier National Monument, NM.
MAY I would rather delete by hand the stupid generic advertising and anonymous comment posts, that land on occasion on my blog, than put people through the maddening task of typing nonsense security words.
JUN Leftover Stories to Tell is a tribute to the late, depressed, anxious, dyslexic and brilliant Spalding Gray.
JUL I'm liking the new head of BCS.
AUG There's been a lot of complaining about the heat this week prompting questions of "What do you hate more, NY summers or NY winters?
SEP It is cooler this morning but the sky is exactly the same as it was that day.(9/11)
OCT I could tell you about the dinner party I hosted to raise money for the school, you know, What was my menu? Who were my guests?
NOV Steve Earle played his first Brooklyn gig ever on Wednesday night, at SouthPaw.
DEC I've often felt the school year starts as a slow torturous climb up a sheer precipice, its summit reached sometime Thanksgiving week. The rest of the year is a hurtling bumpy slide down the other side. (ok, 2 sentences in this case)

Walkathon Plus

2006-12-07T11:21:00.000-05:00

There was a piece in the Times (Arts section) yesterday about Will Self, a Brit author. He's here to promote his new work, "The Book of Dave," which sounds intriguing and wacky, but you'll need to read about that yourself.
What was even more intriguing and wacky was the fact that he walked to Manhattan from Kennedy Airport (6 hours) and this is a normal course of events for him.
Here's a bit from the article:

Smoking is Mr. Self’s only remaining vice. He used to be a prodigious drinker and drug-taker, famous for late-night altercations, not always coherent public appearances and marathon hours at trendy spots like the Groucho Club. During Britain’s general election of 1997, he set a new standard for journalistic infamy by getting himself bounced off John Major's campaign plane for snorting heroin in the bathroom.

But Mr. Self has been clean for eight years or so, and some of the energy he used to expend on carousing now goes into epic hikes, sometimes as long as 100 miles — from London, say, into the Lea Valley and through the Epping Forest to north Essex.

Sounds like our kind of guy, right?

That Time of Year Again

2006-12-02T18:04:00.000-05:00

I've often felt the school year starts as a slow torturous climb up a sheer precipice, its summit reached sometime Thanksgiving week. The rest of the year is a hurtling bumpy slide down the other side. (I watched The Mission last night and that over-the-waterfall scene is definitely pertinent here) and I don't have to check my calendar to know that the ass over teakettle descent has begun.
There is no hope of controlling the fall at this point. You just have to protect your most vulnerable parts and hope you can stand up when you reach the bottom, sometime before the fourth of July.
My view was once again upheld during the hilarious post TG faculty meeting. To those of you who were there, if you weren't suppressing the urge to either hyperventilate or shove your head through a window and scream for air you must have already drown because it was a classic example of how out of any one's control things get right about now.
After the waves of auction project planning and winter concert logistics crashed repeatedly on our heads we'd hardly caught our breath before we were pulled out to deep water by progress report deadlines and style sheets, and conference write-ups that were due last week.
We were treading water (though weakly) when we hit a patch of rocks and rough water. We would, it was announced, from now on, be known as a nut sensitive school. (Well OK, that seems prudent) Peanuts and sesame seeds were singled out as the chief pariahs, "tree nuts" were getting a pass, at least for a while. So we'll be getting our deputy nut police badges any day now and you know that also means no more ordering in cold noodles with sesame sauce? (What! Do you mean we can't eat what we want? Oh the humanity!)
The final item on the meeting agenda was "snacks." A benign subject, right? Apparently not. The triscuits, graham crackers, pretzels and veggie booty that have fortified our charges through the mid-morning blahs would now be supplemented by fresh food prepared by parents and brought into school, say, once a week. The brouhaha that ensued? Well, you'd thing the Hemlock Society had been contracted to take over the food service at Burpie Cow Wow.
And another thing, animal crackers would be no more as they contain the dreaded substance -trans fat.
"Whoa! that's all my kids eat!" came a plaintive cry from a far corner of the room. (So she'll need to hoard the last of the supply.) but wait, where can she store the stash? Such agonizing problems!
The extreme hardship of having to deal with strange food items being introduced into the classrooms and what of the self esteem of those children whose clueless parents bring in unpopular offerings? It's hard enough dealing with the weeping and gnashing of teeth when broken graham crackers are all that's left. And that veggie booty? Kids don't like it the way they like animal crackers. The teachers are eating it all up. You can see the telltale green flecks between their teeth.
There we all were, hurtling towards the falls, hardly able to keep our heads above water. It was as if we had been unexpectedly attacked by a school of ravenous fish (looking for a special snack, no doubt). The only reason most of us made it back to shore that night is that the fish were momentarily confused because a number of us were not sweet, some of us were cracked or broken and others had green flecks on their booties.

I Have Seen The Future

2006-11-12T22:01:00.000-05:00

I haven't really seen the future but I did spend the better part of last week with my head in the clouds. New Paltz, NY is in the mountains and The Mohonk Mountain House is probably the highest point in that town. And if the altitude wasn't enough to make this sea-level New Yorker light-headed, the subject matter of the conference was.
On our first night we were put into small groups and given this task:
"You have two years until the bird flu hits. The schools will be closed down. Plan how your school will continue to function with most of your students and staff quarantined in their homes or escaped to safer environments."
Doesn't it sound like the opportunity of a lifetime? – to jettison everything extraneous and bull-sh*tty and distill what we do down to it's essence, which is, I think, teaching kids to figure out what they want to know and then learn how to learn it themselves.
I am convinced that the best we can do for kids is to get them thinking, talking, reading, and writing Oh and I also still believe in times tables. Kids should understand basic math concepts and do simple math in their heads (yes, I think you are better off knowing how to add, subtract, multiply and divide without having to rely on machines or even paper and pencil)
I have nothing against machines. The machines we have today will change education as much as printed books changed learning in the late fifteenth century.
The computer has changed my life.
The first generation Internet, when it went mainstream, and referred to now as Web 1.0, was a huge collection of documents and web sites. You needed some programming skills to post to it and you needed some Boolean logic skills to extract meaning from it. You remember what it was like – the directory-model search engines, Alta Vista, Yahoo, Lycos, were not exactly user friendly but intriguing and cool, nevertheless.
Then Google came along, with it's relevancy-based search engine. Since the late nineties Google searches have been fine-tuned by the sheer volume of users. Its PageRank algorithm causes the most connected-to pages to rise to the top aided by the unseen metatags.
The current phase of Internet development is referred to as Web 2.0. and it was made possible by Google's search advances along with the widespread availabilty of high-speed connectivity and inexpensive fast-processor computers.
Web 2.0 is characterized by its interactiveness. The classic example is the "mash-up," the mixing of data from various sources – like Google Earth, where you can plot restaurants or hotels into a satellite map.
It is also free. Web 2.0 is all about participation and democracy. It is blogs and wikis and flikr and opinions on Amazon and shared bookmarks on de.licio.us and ratings in travel websites and playlists in iTunes and Skype and Wikipedia and on and on.
The Times ran a front page story today on the dawn of Web 3.0 – the next iteration of the Web. It will harness the power of the "social computing" sites like the ones I mentioned above – full of facts and opinions and music and pictures and video and collaborative thought. Web 3.0 will not simply connect the dots from one site to another it will do things out of that scary Spielberg movie with the robot children. It will use the content that we all have created to make it possible for us to be "understood" by our computers. You will be able to type in, "I need to find a critically-aclaimed book, fiction, where the main character develops super powers after a natural disaster." Or, "I want a hip hotel in Budapest for $100 a night - next week." Or, "I need to find the cure for bird flu." It will know what you want and find it for you - fast.
So will this be the standard in two years when I have to keep my students learning when they are stuck home in the pandemic?
Jeez, they might never need to come back to school.

The Technology Boondoggle

2006-11-10T01:04:00.000-05:00

I have been at a technology conference this week.
There are so many blogs, chats, photo streams, del.icio.us links and general content created around this conference that it is pointless for me to write anything except that it really was worthwhile as I am dead tired and should be asleep.
But I can give you the links and chat you up next time you see me.
(Ask me about Pageflakes or see if I can adequately explain Web 2.0)

Think Blue!

2006-11-08T16:23:00.000-05:00

YES!

Think Pink

2006-11-03T15:19:00.000-05:00

Steve Earle played his first Brooklyn gig ever on Wednesday night, at SouthPaw. The opening acts were Tim Easton and Allison Moorer (his wife) and Laura Cantrell (who lives in Brookyln and performed her first “proper gig” since giving birth five months ago.)

It was a very late night for me (a school night) I didn’t get to bed until 2:00 AM. It was totally worth it. They were all good and Steve Earle was in great form.
His theme was the upcoming election, the sorry state of politics in the USA and his general anti-war themes. Earle is a real connoisseur of historical blue grass and a self-proclaimed student of all things Civil War. This drove the performance and gave it weight. I was instantly transported backwards in time to the nineteen sixties and I loved it.
Some audience members walked out in a huff, though, when Earle started down this road,
“I hate it when Bush says we were attacked on September 11 because they hate our freedom. That’s not why we were attacked on September 11. We were attacked because we are friends of the House of Saud and friends of Israel.”
(Since this is Park Slope I’m thinking that offense was not taken to the Saud piece of that statement)
Tonight Danny Kalb is playing at Barbés. He’s really quite an old man now but I remember him playing with The Blues Project (which he founded) in the sixties. Live at The Café Au Go Go was one of the first LPs we bought once we owned a real stereo.
I’m on a sixties roll and I’m fine with that.

Halloween

2006-10-26T19:46:00.000-04:00

It’s been remarkably calm at Burpie Cow Wow. That makes me nervous.
This was my day.
I had time to chat with the kids and teachers who came in to use the lab.
I helped Mondale with a web page question (and wasn’t I cheerful and unrushed?)
The exceedingly kind and pleasant new head of school stopped by my classroom to see me (like about the fourth time this year and I’ve been here for twenty-five years under four different heads and I can only remember one classroom stop-by from any of the others) Anyway, he was letting me know that there would be a candidate coming next week for the new position (a position created at my request!)
I had a coffee and pastry (both good) left over from the prospective parent tour, and btw the tours have been enormously popular this fall and we are way ahead on applications for next year.
There were no techno-emergencies at all, none. Well, one person, The AD, sent me an email about his acting-out computer, which turned into a whine-fest about how hard his job was and how little time he had to do it and how he needed a reliable computer, oh, and his printer needed ink cartridges, too. But he was very careful to mention, “This is not an angry email, just one of frustration.” So I cheerfully spent my lunchtime setting up a brand new computer for him (which I had ordered for a teacher who was fired during the summer) And he practically cried, he was so happy. I left him some ink cartridges too.
In the afternoon, I played about 4 rounds of widget Sudoku while updating system software on several laptops.
I read and responded to my email. Someone sent me a thank you note for computer tip I bestowed the day before. (Really! A thank you note)
I went home BEFORE 4:00 PM.
This was very unusual. It hasn’t been all that nice this year so far.
We changed Internet service providers at the beginning of September and everything went wrong. And that’s my fault, my responsibility. I signed the contract for these (non) providers. They wouldn’t respond to our complaints about the poor service. They generally made my and my network colleague’s life miserable. People at Burpie were freaking out (with good reason) The email was erratic. Internet service – when you could get on the Internet – was at a speed reminiscent of 1994.
If that wasn’t enough, we needed to orient a record number of new teachers and what new teachers want to know is how to get their email and how to get help with all their hardware and software questions.
We also launched a new interactive website with which everyone at Burpie needed to interact. That was a ton of training and complaining.
There were too many new computers to configure and set up.
I bought a ton of projectors because everyone wanted a digital projector, oh, but they really want them permanently installed in the classrooms, not schleppable.
Nothing seemed good enough, and I couldn’t make a dent in the task list, and there were so many angry incomprehensible meetings and I wanted to run away…
Then it all stopped.
Ten days ago we borrowed a router from a nice Internet company and swapped it for the one provided by the bad Internet company and the network has been humming along smoothly since then. The maintenance staff has agreed to permanently install at least a few of the projectors. All the new computers are in place. Most people are using the web site – using it well enough. The technologies are working. Heaven help us.
I just can’t really relax though. In the movies, when you think you’ve slain the beast it always rises and sneaks up behind you.

For The Record

2006-10-22T08:10:00.000-04:00

I needed the distance of a few days before I could even write about this.

In 1963 country singer, Skeeter Davis, had a big crossover-to-pop charts hit with her record The End of The World. If you can't remember what the tune is - click
That year the Mets were finishing only their second season of play, in The Polo Grounds, by the way, before moving to Shea. They won 51 games that season (and lost 111) It went like this for quite a while. They wouldn't outwin their losses until that magical 1969 season. That kind of season will come again, I hope.

My friend, Frank, a loyal Metsie, has reprised Skeeter's hit for us in his elegy to game 7.

The End of The World
Why does the sun go on shining?
Why does the sea rush to shore?
Don't they know it's the end of the world,
`cause the Mets ain't playin anymore?

Why does my heart go on beating?
Why do these eyes of mine cry?
Don't they know it's the end of the world?
It ended when the Cards broke the tie.

I wake up in the morning and I wonder why ev'rything's the same as it was.
I can't understand, no I can't understand, why Wright can't hit nuthin no
more!

Why do the Redbirds go on singing?
Why do the stars glow above?
Don't they know it's the end of the world?
It ended when that last pitch hit Molina's's glove.

Leaves Fall

2006-10-14T10:37:00.000-04:00

Halloween is around the corner.
This snapshot was taken on the front stoop on Halloween, 1991. The class was lining up for their parade around the neighborhood. The featured goblin designed and made this mask himself. He was a wildly creative boy. After graduating from Burpie...he went on to the premier art/engineering school in NYC, Cooper Union.
His life ended last weekend in a tragic accident, jumping roofs at a late night party.
Going through my "school" picture boxes, I found several of him and his classmates. It was one of my best teaching years, my first back in the classroom after a two-year stint as acting director. It seemed so entirely managable - a little band of eight-year-olds. The year was a supremely calm and enjoyable time. I do remember that this little guy travelled to the beat of his own drum and did not particularly take to management, but he was very funny and a great deal of fun.
This week I found myself pondering the children we teach today and wondering which of them will leave this life before the adults - who spend theirs trying to shape them. Are there any early signs?

Subversion of the Best Sort

2006-10-09T09:13:00.000-04:00

Two year-olds love music and can quickly learn rhyming verses when they are sung by the beloved voices of moms, nanas and pre-school teachers. His dad, the Yankee fan, was away for the weekend. And so it seemed the perfect time for a little good-natured indoctrination. How about thoses Metsies!

I Have Nothing To Report

2006-10-03T18:53:00.000-04:00

I could tell you about the dinner party I hosted to raise money for the school, you know, What was my menu? Who were my guests? How was the dance party afterwards at the 5th Ave music venue? Or I could post cute pictures of the grandson and the funny things he says.
But no. I don't feel like being cheerful or positive.
Lots of problems at work. One thing seems to get fixed and two more things break. I'm in way over my head. In the circle I'm currently traveling in people are actually screaming and spitting at each other.
I will stick it out. I always do. But I'm not happy about it. This misery has to end, one way or another.

Makes Great The Life

2006-09-24T18:32:00.000-04:00

Mactech-husband's family (maternal side) held a reunion this weekend. We gathered in an Elk's club on the shores of the Navesink River in Red Bank, NJ, the scene of the last family reunion (paternal side)
It was a warm and humid night by that pretty river where the rows of shrink-wrapped boats seemed prematurely hoisted out of the water. I brought my camera but both batteries were dead (a testament to the generally chaotic nature of my life during September) I'll have to wait for the shared family photos on this one.
The picture that appears here is of the invitation. "Strive, strive I urge..." which balloons from that serious gentleman's face paraphrases a Robert Browning quote that was a favorite mantra of Tim's grandfather.

"But try," you urge, "the trying shall suffice;
The aim, if reached or not, makes great the life."

"Grandpa" was born on the south side of Chicago near the stockyards before the turn of the century. he died in the late seventies. He was a self-made man who yearned to be a priest early in his life but was told by his parish pastor, a wise and practical sort, that his family needed him to help support them financially. He took it to heart.
He started by selling newspapers on the street (while his mother sold sanitary belts, a new invention, door to door). He eventually became the Secretary of Agriculture for the State of Illinois. He might have gone to Washington, but a Republican, Warren G. Harding, won the 1920 presidential election.
He moved his family east, to NJ, sometime around the stock market crash and while the story that's told has him going flat broke three times - he landed on his feet each time and the family prospered. He was a larger than life presence in the lives of his grandchildren and they told the stories, funny and poignant to prove it. One of my favorites is my sister-in-law's story about her first job after college in the early seventies. He was passionate about education, travel and career choices. She was afraid to tell him that she had landed a job as a sex-educator. When she finally sheepishly told him, he bellowed throwing his arms in the air, "Why I think that's wonderful! Your nana and I didn't know anything when we got married."

Three of Peter Emmet's six children are living. There are thirty-three grandchildren, forty-five great-grandchildren and six great-greats (one of which makes an appearance on this blog quite often.

It Was

2006-09-11T08:16:00.000-04:00

It is cooler this morning but the sky is exactly the same as it was that day.
I had handed Tim a stack of late invitations to our daughter's wedding to be mailed from work(anyone who lives in my neighborhood knows it has the worst post office in the city) The Trade Center had its own zip code and a fairly high percentage of employees who read and spoke English. They processed a huge volume of mail daily and they did so fairly well. I had to rush off to school that morning because I needed to straighten out some problems with a big order of toner cartridges. A lack of toner can provoke life and death reactions early in September.
I distinctly remember registering the beauty of that morning and enjoying it because I knew it was not going to be an easy season. Tim had just been diagnosed with prostate cancer. In between after school appointments to taste potential wedding cakes and have wedding clothes altered, I would be meeting him at various doctor's offices throughout Manhattan to listen to the merits of radiation versus surgery, surgery versus radiation. This was the start of my 20th year at my school we had a new head for the first time. How would that go? (another story)
In my computer lab I was simultaneously on the phone with my toner vendor and checking e-mails when the school custodian came in to ask me if I had an antenna for the TV in the library. I remember feeling very annoyed with him. Couldn't he see I was busy? What the hell did he need to watch on TV anyway? It wasn't yet 9:00 AM. He didn't want to tell me but he did. He knew where my husband worked. A plane had hit the Trade Center.
The rest of the morning is a blur in my memory. A kind of static-y numb steeliness took over. I went directly home watching the huge plume of black smoke take over the sky. The housekeeper was there and I sent her home. I didn't want anyone around me except the one person who wasn't there. The phone eventually stopped working but until it did, it rang and rang, our daughter at work at 200 Park, crying uncontrollably. Our son, from the midwest where he was beginning law school, The brothers, sisters, relatives, friends. I had no information for them except what the television was showing us all – that the first plane had hit awfully close to the 88th floor where Tim's corner office had a most breathtaking view north and west.
I'm not sure what time it was. I heard his voice out on the sidewalk and ran to the door. Neighbors were out on the street crying and hugging. The invitations were still in his bag.

Crazed and Confused

2006-08-31T00:28:00.000-04:00

A simpler time for me.

OK This is the worst work week of the year. I just have to remain civil and keep my head from exploding. Smile, smile, smile! Don't drool too much and for Pete's sake, don't wet your pants.
I started today at 3:45 AM on one cup of coffee - worked straight through until 4:00 grabbed some ready-made sushi, then worked til 7:00, ate a small steak and a tomato. Went back to work until...5 minutes ago. A twenty hour work day with very little to show for it but the prospect of another one just like it tomorrow.
Everyone at Burpie... is under pressure to ready the school for the new year. It hasn't helped me that the maintenance staff, while performing their much applauded renovations disconnected nearly every computer and network connection in three buildings or that my network manager has difficulty staying on task.
But when the kids actually arrive, next Thursday, it will be fine. It always is.

Favorite moment of the day:
When our fearless leader compared the new PO forms to a glassine bag of crack.

On The Beach

2006-08-22T18:19:00.000-04:00

I took the "lunch at the beach club" option today. Reward was another celeb sighting – Uma and kids.

August Reading '06

2006-08-22T11:59:00.000-04:00

My summer vacation routine is very predictable. I rise between 7:00 and 8:00, make some coffee and drink it, bike to the beach to check the water temperature and surf conditions and if both are to my specifications (neither too cold nor too rough) I take a dip and hang out there for a while reading. I come home for lunch then go back to the beach later in the afternoon where I read and plan dinner. Sometimes, instead, I walk a half-mile down the beach to mactech-in-law's beach club and eat lunch there and then stay for the afternoon. Not much reading gets done at the beach club as participation in local gossip or conversation about the articles in this month's Oprah magazine is expected.

Even so, I have been able to get through some books this month as well as study and recreate several recipes from the most recent Gourmets. Check me off, Unwellness, Here's my summer reading report.

Assassin's Gate George Packer has carefully fleshed out his New Yorker pieces into a detailed explanation of how America has gone about trying to change history in the Middle East. As complex and messy this situation is the book actually reads like a novel.

The Fall of Rome Martha Southgate's (my neighbor in Park Slope) morality tale of affirmative re-action is set in a fictionalized version of her own prep school.

Veronica Mary Gaitskill has written a novel-length poem on beauty, family, sickness and death. It's a quick and stunning read.

Everything Bad Is Good For You Steven Johnson, another Park Sloper (with three kids so we may see him at our doors in the future) does a fabulous job of arguing for the worthwhile-ness of pop culture – especially TV and video games. I love it.

Omnivore's Dilemma Michael Pollan's exposé on the secret life of corn. Our American love-hate relationship with food is examined in fascinating detail in this book. It contains this quote from a cranky organic farmer in Virginia who only sells to locals, "Why do we have to have a New York City, what good is it?" (this is a must read for Youthlarge)

Sail Away

2006-08-15T11:24:00.000-04:00

It's been a spectacular week in the East End (of LI). The ocean has been the perfect temperature and color. Striped bass are running in schools so huge they appear as roiling dark shapes heading west in blue jello. The nights have been cool enough for quilts and the mornings hold enough of a chill that you need to seek a sunny spot to perch for your first cup of coffee.
Sister-in-Law-Mactech lives out here full time. She's a learning specialist in a public elementary school about a third the size of The Burpie Cow-Wow School. Her summers are non-stop fun and we get to tag along. Last week she suffered a slight set-back as the thwarted terrorist plot made necessary the cancellation of her plans to fly to London this week to see the musical, Billy Elliot with the other sisters-in law.
She didn't waste any time filling her dance card and so last night we got to participate in a dinner party on a 52 ft. boat in Peconic Bay. The boat belonged to a fellow-teacher and her husband. He grew up in a marina and understood how to deal with all that crap behind the door they called "below."
I loved the boat with its miniature bedrooms and heads. And I was astounded at how easy they made cooking and serving a dinner for 12 seem. Well, served to 10 of the 12 because two of our party spent the evening in the stern (is that right? The back?) silently staring straight ahead or leaning over the side doing some unanticipated chumming. Seasickness is pretty much identical to the nausea of pregnancy for those of you currently moving through that state. Everyone else was sympathetic as there wasn't one of us who hadn't been there - either seasick or pregnant. I remember a particularly bad ferry ride to Block Island. I wouldn't get back on the boat at the end of our stay. Mac-husband had to take me back by air in a puddle jumper and then we had to find a way back to our car at the ferry terminal in Point Judith.
The water on Peconic Bay was unusually choppy last night. The wind kicked up as a low-pressure front moved in. Today it is here in earnest and the skies have opened and poured out for the first time in about 10 days. So it's not a beach day. It's definitely a blog, listen to music, read and eat day.
I'm in my last two weeks of summer vacation. But I'm not going to feel bad about it ending. I'm having a good time now.

Summer of '73

2006-08-09T09:16:00.000-04:00

The quality of this photo is poor but if you look closely you will pick up a certain heaviness. The chin needs support. The lips are pressed closed and the nose is crinkled – a miasmic protest against the normally bracing scent of the sea. I was probably about six weeks pregnant in this picture. It was my second pregnancy feeling lousy but not out of control awful. I was due in March and delivered a boy, the younger brother of Megan MacTech whose gestation brought me to my knees – in front of a porcelain bowl more tha once a day, and with nothing of substance in my stomach ( I actually grew afraid of eating food) only a bitter viscous egg-yolky blob would jet out.
This image of my face came to memory recently as I saw its exact replica on my daughter. She is due in February and she's just coming through the worst of this.
They say this aversion to so many foods and their smells is a protection – a preventitive against ingesting toxins that might be harmful to a developing fetus. That's pretty amazing when you think about it. As I told Unwellness, the pains of childbirth can be forgotten but this queasy sick fog that envelopes you for weeks (even months sometimes) is hard to forget. Long after the bundle of joy has been delivered you'll remember, like whenever a stomach flu grabs hold or the morning after a particularly celebratory night or even when you think about something you said or did that you wish had never happened. I wish I had morning sickness to steer me clear of those toxic moments.

Reality Check

2006-08-08T11:54:00.000-04:00

I adore the above child, Grandbaby MacTech. So I volunteered to keep him out at the beach while mom, dad and "pop-pop" returned to work. I am not a stranger to the labors of childcare having raised a couple from scratch and spent the better part of my lifetime shepherding the lambs of others in a school setting – still the relentlessness of being alone with a two-year old for hours on end can be shocking even for one whose eyes are as open as mine.
He does not like me out of his sight and if I sneak into the kitchen to make a gin and tonic (after 5 of course) The "where nana go?" litany begins. He likes to vacuum, swiff and wet mop. (yes it could be worse, he doesn't set fires) The thing is he likes me to participate. "nana do it, too?"
He also enjoys zooming little cars and trains around the floor as he delivers bits and pieces of junk he missed in his vacuuming. This endeavor doesn't always go as smoothly as he'd like and when tracks come apart or carefully loaded cars tip over he'll start to throw things and groan loudly.
He cooks with a pretend microwave which goes crashing to the floor every time he slams the door hard, yet he will not consent to leaving it on the floor. It must be on the kiddie table (and nana must place it there, over and over again)
Every 30 minutes or so he stops, looks into the distance and exclaims, "tramp killed da rat." or "Ya 'member da naughty cats?" an allusion to scenes in Lady in the Tramp which I let him watch before bedtime every night, and no, he isn't having nightmares, he sleeps quite soundly until 5:45 or so when our day begins again.
His midday nap allows for the writing of this post otherwise I dare not open the computer as he takes over, slamming on the keyboard and demanding the Thomas the Tank Engine website. ( I can sing you the Thomas and Friends song by heart or "We are Siamese..." if you please.
Soon he will wake and I'll hustle him down to the beach where the surf has kicked up the past few days - the break water too difficult for a short person to broach with a baby in tow and so we'll have to stay in the white water, splashing and squealing, nana at a 90 degree angle to herself with a 35 pound "sinker in a floatie" tugging at her arms. We'll dig tunnels and make endless cakes for immediate smashing and find pretty shells for mommy. We'll eat pretzels and ice cream. I'll do my best to tire him out so he'll snooze in the car on the ride back to Brooklyn tonight. He'll wake tomorrow to city sounds and mommy hugs.

Summer – Why I Still Like It

2006-08-03T07:44:00.000-04:00

There's been a lot of complaining about the heat this week prompting questions of "What do you hate more, NY summers or NY winters? So, it's been hotter than hell day after day (even at the eastern end of LI). Summer is better than winter. I will never get over my childhood crush on this time of year.
You can lie in bed in the morning for what seems like hours and when you get up it's still before 8:00 o'clock.
The local produce and fish are outstanding.
I actually drink less alcohol but enjoy it more.
I rarely, if ever, get sick in the summer.
Swimming in the ocean is theraputic.
Outdoor showers - the best.
It's often daylight when Mactech-husband returns from work.
Going out in the city on summer nights is always fun.
Air-conditioning makes sleeping possible.
The break in everyone's routine allows an amnesia to cover the fact of how bad that routine can become and make you believe things could change for the better.

Birthday Number 80

2006-07-17T11:27:00.000-04:00

My mom turns 80 tomorrow. I threw a small party last Saturday night to commemorate the event. It was the first time my brothers and I were all together since our father's death in 1998. Two or three of us – frequently, but rarely all four of us.
With all of my air-conditioners cranked up to the limit the house was comfortably cool and it was pleasant enough to eat out on the deck once the sun went down. Mom-Mactech is notoriously heat-sensitive but she didn't complain once.
The menu:
Filet mignon and sirloin steak, green salad, tomatoes & mozzarella with basil, a surprisingly good watermelon and mint concoction, my own special potato salad, and a fabulous coconut angel food cake from The Two Little Red Hens Bakery.
We had purchased the meat (huge quantities) at the new Fairway in Red Hook, a couple of nights before. My first time in the store and I was pretty impressed. We filled the cart in no time. Luckily we have an extra fridge in our basement where these bulky items could be stored until needed.
About twenty-four hours after the Fairway shop I took a FreshDirect delivery of more food stuff (you can never have too much food stuff at a party) and began hauling it down to the basement where I discovered that the refrigerator door had not been properly closed the night before. The motor was panting and the inside of the thing was sweating bullets. It did not feel the least bit cold in there either. Yikes! All that meat! I closed it tight and immediately called Tech-husband at work, not being willing to shoulder this distressing news by myself (and after all he was the one who put all that meat in there and then didn't shut the door)
"Let's just throw it all out and start over tonight with another trip to Fairway." I announced with resignation.
"Shit." he exclaimed.
MachTech husband was not going to take this lying down. He immediately called the owner of a rather celebrated restaurant in the Slope, a finicky guy who knows and loves food, and explained the turn of events. He brought the chef out of the kitchen to consult.
The verdict was this: The refrigerator would not have "lost its cool" for several hours and in fact was still running and reducing the temperature of itself and the area around it. The meat, due to its size would not warm that quickly to the core. We would be cooking it to 127 degrees, killing off - whatever - I don't want to think about that. And anyway that kind of bacteria only affects small children and old people. (did we mention it was an 80th birthday party with a 2 year old in attendance?)
End of story. We cooked and ate the meat. It was delicious. Everyone was fine.

The Terror Target List

2006-07-12T07:14:00.000-04:00

Soon after September 11th, when we were constantly being warned that we were on Orange Alert in NYC, mactech-husband mentioned that we should air-drop (on potential terrorist countries in the mideast) maps of possible targets in the midsection of the US. "They only seem to know about places on the coasts. It's a big country."
Apparently he was on to something. Today's Times has a front page article on the National Asset Database. (This is the "data" by the way, by which Homeland Security divvies up their zillion dollars worth of antiterrorism grants).
According to the list of resources that could be potential sites of "terror," Indiana, with 8,591 posible targets, has more than any other state. New York has 5,687, California, 3,212.
I'm sure glad the Times is getting this news out. Leave us and the left coast out of the terror-planning, you terrorists. We're small potatoes.
Amish Country Popcorn (on the list), in Berne, Indiana - watch your back.

Away

2006-07-02T18:29:00.000-04:00

I'm liking the new head of BCS. The first e-mail I ever send to him? mind you, he doesn't know me from a hole in the BCS wall - is a request to take Wednesday, Thursday and Friday off this week, you know, to make it a whole week away from school. Technically, I'm on duty all of July and off in August, but since I probably will need to work a good part of August too, it didn't seem a far-fetched request. Coming off of a couple of years where we all seemed to be challenged to compete for the title of who can work the most - I was a bit skittish about asking.
His response -"if you say it works, it works for me, enjoy the time with your family."
We drove out to Quogue, Saturday morning. The house has had some improvements over the winter and we're loving the new outdoor shower. Baby Mactech was up at six today so an early trip (open at 8:00) to Target was in order. His B-day is this week so whatever he hauled off the shelves went into the basket.
"Buy it. Buy it."
What a red-blooded American boy.
The picture below represents the first celebrity sighting of the season. Adrian Grenier (Entourage) was at the beach.

Wedding Season

2006-06-18T22:59:00.000-04:00

Molly's Wedding click for some more pictures.

We had a family wedding this weekend. The Weasel Wedding Chronicles were so enjoyable that I wanted to post one myself. Think of it as a sequel to Weasel-Wedding.

The bride and the weather were gorgeous all weekend. Festivities began on Friday night with a rehearsal dinner for a huge number of people. The church wedding, on Saturday afternoon was beautiful. The highlight was when the family's long-time housekeeper got up on the altar and sang an a cappella gospel number. She got the whole church swinging and clapping with her and went into one of those fainting collapses at its conclusion. The reception party at her parents home, was smashing. The food, toasts, music and dancing -it was just so much fun. Mactech had many memorable (yes I remember them) cocktails at this great celebration.
We left the after-party to the younger generation and headed to our hotel when the kegs were being rolled down to the boat house and people were jumping naked into the pool. Mactech-son reported that the good time lasted well into the early morning. We returned to the scene of the crime for brunch on Sunday and to hear the happy recap.

One mishap - The bride and groom arrived at their wedding night hotel to find that their bridal suite reservation had somehow been "lost." After much yelling and sobbing the hotel went to work finding them a room somewhere. They arrived at the second hotel and were given a room but when they opened the door, there was a naked couple in the bed doing what you might expect a naked couple to be doing.
The exhausted bride and groom returned to her parents' home and slept on a cot. The house, big though it is was, packed with overnight guests.
Well, it'll be a good story to tell the grand-kids someday.
Now it's off to Africa for three weeks of safari-ing. Then back to the news beat at NY 1.

Tasty Leftovers

2006-06-03T18:46:00.000-04:00

Leftover Stories to Tell is a tribute to the late, depressed, anxious, dyslexic and brilliant Spalding Gray. Daily writing was his most effective therapy, and it was through his writing that he came to know himself most fully.
When he died, by jumping off the Staten Island Ferry into New York Harbor, in 2004, he had been suffering for three years from the effects of a car accident in Ireland in 2001.
He left a young family behind. His wife, Kathie Russo, worked with Lucy Sexton, a performance artist based at PS 122, to craft this series of readings from known and unpublished pieces, including a recording he left for her before his death. They were read by the above cast, joined by guest readers each night of the performance. I was lucky enough to catch Aidan Quinn and Steve Buscemi reading for Friday night's show.
The familiar parts were wonderful reminders of how he could make us laugh. The pieces from his journals and diaries were riveting. Small nuggets of raw truth about a life full of both psychic pain and pure joy.
He would have turned 65 on June 5.

Where Have You Gone Joe DiMaggio..?

2006-05-30T21:20:00.000-04:00

I spent the weekend with old friends from college. One couple provided the beach house. Others bought and prepared the food and alcohol. A few have those pinpoint memories and quick wits and so provide the running commentary - old stories connected to new stories. I listen. I laugh. I provide the soundtrack. I plugged my iPod into a stereo system that piped music into each room, at my direction, and at the volume I chose. My goal was to set a mood reminiscent of our youth, but not totally of our youth, by carefully mixing old music with new music gleaned from the mixes of my young friends and children.

Which brings me to the picture above. It was 1967. I was a freshman in college. I was going to the movies to see The Graduate. Someone snapped this picture as I was getting into a car to go on an actual date. It is fitting that the "driver" is cut out of the picture because I can't remember who it was. I do remember going to Dorrian's Red Hand afterwards – a place where it was exceedingly easy for the under-aged to be served liquor. Though I was 18, and the drinking age was 18 at the time, this picture makes it painfully obvious – it was a while before I looked my age. And while the date was not memorable, the movie certainly was.

I know that movies had soundtracks before 1967. There were Elvis movies, which were more like full-out musicals, and The Beatles movies – essentially music videos, but I don't remember movies having anything like the soundtrack in this movie. This was different. The songs that wafted through this movie were already familiar to the general public of a certain age. They had not actually been written for the movie, the movie was cleverly screen-played around these songs by Buck Henry at the direction of Mike Nichols. The movie was an expression of the "emoto-moods" already evoked by those songs.

Maybe you had to be there, but The Graduate, which is at the top of my top movies, perfectly captured the perfectly off-base feeling of being in college or just out of college in the late sixties. There just wasn't a lot of direction, self or otherwise. Kids with money didn't have to think about the war. They only had to think about themselves. And they did, without relief, and it made them slightly sick.

After this, movies with soundtracks would change radically. Pop music would become an essential element of pop movies. And now, the almighty iTunes has made it simple to score the movie of our lives that is constantly playing in our heads. And so we do, backwards and forwards.

Honey...Don't Water The Cactus

2006-05-14T20:40:00.000-04:00

Actually he can do whatever he wants. This child is just too adorable.

Remembrance of Things Past

2006-05-08T11:34:00.000-04:00

Today he would have been 59.
Joe Marasco, a high school friend, was the only close aquaintance of mine to be killed in Vietnam. He took a leave from Springfield College, sometime before graduating to join the army. I never quite understood why.
He was a wrestler in high school, not a big guy but very strong and very principled.
In Vietnam, he was a dog-handler – the person who takes a dog out into the jungle to sniff out the enemy. I looked on the Internet and found this account of his death.

After a long night we had a Mad Minute just before daybreak. It seems to me that I was sitting on the berm of a foxhole looking in and 2LT Hendrixson was facing out. It was then he said that he thought he saw a gook climbing down a tree. Sure enough, mortars came soon after.

A Tracker Team was called in. I remember working forward with the tracker (he did not have a dog with him.) A break was called, and just as I sat down the tracker was hit by AK fire. He was only 10 feet in front of me. I believe I was with 3rd Platoon when this went down. I remember helping to give first aid. The tracker had 17 days left in country. However, he was Line One upon arrival to Tay Ninh. ( Line One meant killed in action.) (Source: Charlie Dickey) PFC Joseph A. Marasco died while attached to C 2/5 Cav, and we consider him one of our own.

Joe died on July 22, 1969.

I Really Do Hate These

2006-05-03T09:30:00.000-04:00

I would rather delete by hand the stupid generic advertising and anonymous comment posts, that land on occasion on my blog, than put people through the maddening task of typing nonsense security words. I hate these nonsense words and I have great difficulty typing them because at heart I am a no-nonsense person.
Fact: I have composed more than a few comments that never got posted because when I mistype the security word once, I will NOT try again.

Weeds

2006-04-27T09:50:00.000-04:00

Every year I tear the violet clumps out of my garden. They really do take the place over.
Every year they grow back. I'm never sorry.
They are some of the prettiest weeds.

Let's Go Met-sies

2006-04-19T20:16:00.000-04:00

Every now and then you come across something that ...well...makes you feel happy. MacTech-Son, a loyal Mets fan - like his mom sent this to me. I know at least one blog-friend who will want to see this animation.
I love the Internet.
1986
If you want to know about the person who made this little animation read this.
Creator

Renewal

2006-04-16T22:17:00.000-04:00

When our kids were young, the family tradition on Easter weekend included an egg hunt. From the mid-seventies through the mid-nineties there were plenty of young cousins happy to scramble about some relation's yard in pursuit of plastic eggs filled with candy or money. Then it stopped. There were no young ones around. Easter time morphed into spring break for the college crowd.
The oldest cousins now have kids of their own.
2006 saw the hunt revived with five descended from three of the original crew.
The day couldn't have been more beautiful. Everyone was a winner. When all the eggs had been retrieved, each got a present to boot. It was like Easter, Christmas and Halloween all melded into one intense potentially legendary memory.
The bittersweet undercurrent to the day was this – it was the first anniversary of my nephew's death.
As the sun set, we all gathered around the tree where his ashes had been buried earlier that day. His mother and father spoke of their certainty that he was present – still communicating. Their pain is raw and wildly palpable.
Joan Didion who also lost her daughter last year, sent a note that was read aloud under the tree.
Celebrate and cherish the living for it is in that celebration that our love for those lost becomes clear.

Click here for a slide show Easter Saturday

A Little Trip

2006-04-02T22:46:00.000-04:00

The picture above is of many thousand year old cliff dwellings at Bandelier National Monument, NM. A while back Unwellness posted a link to a color-in map of the states - a record of those you have or have not visited. My map was appalling. I could only color in the edges. So last week we took a little trip to New Mexico. It could have been the moon. I can't say that I've ever seen anything quite like this geography. But what really struck me was the emptiness of the place. Hundreds of miles of sand and hills as far as one could see. It was very quiet. Listo? Is there any baseball there? Of course, as empty as the place was, wouldn't you know, I ran into a Burpie Cow Wow family in a restaurant in Sante Fe.

On the way back we stopped in Chicago to visit the boy for a few days. Good weather and good food and funny stories. That's all I need to keep me going for a few weeks at least.

Relax, Please

2006-03-24T11:37:00.000-05:00

Enough of the eye. I'm all better.
The much anticipated two week hiatus from the school children is upon us. Some of us are traveling to far away places. Some of us are looking down the road towards new and different possibilities. Some of us are just catching up and that is good too. I wish you all whatever you wish for yourselves.

Sick Day (after day, after day)

2006-03-13T10:36:00.000-05:00

I could use a a pair of those doggie alien contact lenses of Weasel's about now.

I've been pretty sick for the past two weeks but I've been coming to school because each day I kept thinking I was getting better. you feel a little better today, right?
Friday night I stayed at work to get my piles of papers in some order and update my school webpages and think about lesson plans for this week. Later, I met my husband and his friends for dinner on 5th Ave. I was feeling a bit off but chalked it up to a tiring week. By Saturday I felt a bit worse but figured it was the result of a sleepless Friday night after having gone to bed with a pounding headache. By Saturday evening it was written all over my face she's sick and sicker. While I managed to make an early appearance at a family cocktail party on PPW, the school auction was out of the question. Sunday dawned, I had a raging fever and pretty much every unpleasant symptom imaginable. I spent the day staying alive. By midnight, I could no longer see as my eyes were glued over with the same substance being produced by my respiratory tract. I really don't think I've ever felt this sick in my adult life.
I am home today waiting to (finally) see a doctor, not my own, mind you - he only sees people on Tuesdays and Thursdays.
Contracts are due today, I never did sign mine. I'm not sure I could even find it at this point. According to Listmaker's blog, they will officially start looking to replace me tomorrow.
Maybe we'll all get better.

John, Paul, George or Ringo?

2006-03-03T07:09:00.000-05:00

You are Saint Francis of Assisi! You don't care what you look like (or smell like) as long as you can live simply and help the poor. You should be receiving your stigmata any day now.

Hey I already have it.

I was really into The Lives of the Saints in my early adolescence. My friends and I loved the story of Maria Goretti - most fascinating. She was "martyred" at the age of twelve refusing the sexual advances of her twenty year old neighbor. Why sainthood? I guess you had to be there.
My martyr obsessions soon morphed after the fab four landed at the newly renamed JFK Airport into something more like "to which Beatle would I want to lose my virginity?"

St Francis is perfect for where my head is right now. I could definitely see myself living in a simple cave in the hills outside of Assisi...as long as there was wireless Internet service.

Which Saint Are You?
brought to you by Quizilla

Poor Baby

2006-02-25T14:28:00.000-05:00

Daughter and Son-in-law McT. went away (Thursday to Sunday) for a much needed and deserved long weekend. I did the Mrs. Doubtfire duty, with help from the regular weekday sitter. Mr. McT and I had a fun-filled weekend planned for the tot but when he rose Saturday AM he seemed decidedly subdued and I thought he was beginning to miss his mommy and daddy. He had the hiccups. (odd for first thing in the morning) Normally a good eater, he refused to open his lips for either pancakes or scrambled eggs though he did drink a few ounces of watered-down juice.
Just as I was about to get him dressed fro the walk over to the pool for swimming class, he whimpered and threw-up the juice and what looked like the last meal I had fed him the night before. Uh-oh, diarrhea too. There won't be any swimming this weekend.
I cleaned the boy up from top to bottom and gave him a few small sips of water. A few minutes later that came up and the diaper needed changing again. Enough evidence for me to diagnose a case of whatever's been going around.
We bundled him up and brought him to our house for the day. After crushing a quantity of ice, Mr. McT was dispatched to the market to buy Coke, Gatorade, Pedialyte – fluids that have not seen the inside of our refrigerator in years.
Unfortunately, the day went downhill. He slept a lot and when he was awake he was inconsolable. He just didn't know what was happening to him. He couldn't keep down even small amounts of fluid. He was refusing to open his mouth for anything. He just cried and cried. I began to worry about dehydration.
We bundled him back up and drove back to his house. The ride in the car calmed him down and he fell asleep. (Whew) A call to the doctor was definitely in order and he couldn't have been nicer. He assured us that a kid of his size and general health could go a whole day with nothing and that we should just offer whatever we thought he might possibly like and eventually he'd feel better and take something. (I should know that, right?) He said that usually when he calls back the next day to check on a child with a stomach flu the child has bounced back but the adults are all sick.
Great. This was starting to resemble the flu episode in The Secret Lives of Dentists.
Saturday night was bad. Baby and I spent it on the couch watching Barney and Thomas the Train DVD's in between bouts of stomach cramps. He had a fever that was just high enough to cause misery. Would it suddenly spike? Was an emergency room trip a possibility?
Morning finally came. He took a few ounces of milk mixed with camomile tea. It seemed to make him feel bad again resulting in his refusal to open his mouth for anything for the rest of the day. He looked and acted really sick. All day he couldn't really even lift his little head off the couch. When we spoke to the doctor again that afternoon, he was surprised that things had not improved. We were to monitor the temp and be ready for the tepid bath plunge if he got too hot. In four hours we'd call him and if there was no change we'd be meeting at the hospital.
I was tired myself and realized that I hadn't eaten in the past two days either so we ordered in some Chinese food. When the door buzzer rang, the baby opened his eyes and said something (What he said, I have no idea)
When I spooned some wonton soup into a bowl, he said, "Soup? Soup?"
I answered him, "Yes. Chinese soup."
"Chinese? Chinese?" he countered with genuine interest.
This was the most life we'd seen in two days. He wanted the soup. He took it a teaspoon at a time with a bit of noodle and rice asking for more as soon as he swallowed and while this relatively enormous quantity of food precipitated some drastic intestinal reactions he seemed suddenly unbothered by it all and eager to eat more soup. The pains must be gone. He's getting better!
Daughter and Son-in-law McT. arrived home at 10:00 PM Sunday night. Baby MacTech was peacefully asleep.

A Little Entertaining

2006-02-20T18:06:00.000-05:00

A very long weekend. I love it. It was another hellish week at Burpie Cow Wow. I'm actually quite inured to it all which I think is good. My mate is in worse shape than I. He even made an appointment last week with a hypnotherapist. He missed the appointment which is par for his recent out-of-control course. We met a friend for a quiet Friday night dinner at one of our favorite 5th Avenue restaurants and avoided all talk of the real world.
Saturday AM I was up early to make my shopping lists. My cousin and his new wife and his two grown children were coming to dinner Sunday night. The cousin is in from the west coast. His kids live here in Brooklyn. I haven't seen either in at least 20 years.
My cousin now works for Apple at their headquarters in Cupertino. He lives in that unreal area of the coast just north of Carmel.
I would throw an official dinner party. I invited a few more New York relatives to round out the group to an even ten.
I did a quick clean up of the house. That consists of throwing all the crap that piles up on horizontal surfaces into shopping bags and stuffing them in closets.
Mac-husband and I both made several trips to various food purveyors across the neighborhood on the coldest day of the winter thus far but the sun was warm and the prospect of using the fireplace was enticing.

The menu:
plenty of wine, of course
Cheeses and olives and vegetables with dip
Green salad with pear and grilled tuna
Fillet of beef with scalloped potatoes and roast asparagus
Tarte Tatin with vanilla ice cream

All went well. I especially enjoyed my cousin's children.
His daughter is a physics teacher at a prestigious New York City independent school "...after college I just hung out in St. Luis Obispo working in a coffee shop and smoking a lot of pot."
His son is a drop-out from an English Lit PhD program at Columbia who now works for a hedge fund. "...I really hate it and all the people I work with. I'm not going to blow up the building or anything though."
My younger brother also came out from Manhattan. He's always funny and edgy.

We sent the guests home at a reasonable hour neither too early nor too late – Legends car service ( better cars and distinctly middle-eastern with American flags stuck in their rear-view mirrors to throw you off any terrorist inklings) for the cousin and wife who were headed to a Manhattan hotel, Arecibo car service for the kids who would be perfectly comfortable heading back to Williamsburg in those jalopy cars, with the cardboard air fresherners and salsa background music, my brother by subway as he eschews cabs of any kind.

Monday I was up early to do the clean up which I actually enjoy. I worked for half a day as I had network consultants going over our servers at school. My colleague who is the official "Network Manager" had his nose out of joint about that so I had to spin it a bit to get him to swallow this (to him) intrusive pill. He doesn't realize yet that it will be a lot worse before it gets better. Oh, don't get me started down that road.

Tuesday I'm up and off to the dentist to repair some broken teeth. He'll tell me for the fourteenth time, "I think you grind your teeth at night." I probably should just get all my teeth sheathed in steel like Jaws, that villian in The Spy Who Loved Me.

Last Year...

2006-02-14T20:47:00.000-05:00

Last February ('05) and the first half of March I'd get up every week day morning at 5:00 AM. I needed to be on the subway before 6:00 AM in order to get to the Upper East Side for the first radiation appointment of the day.
There were a few snowy and stormy days and a major East Side subway shut down during that six week period of time.
This is all to say that I took it as a challenge. I would get through radiation therapy every day for six weeks and still be at school before my first class of the day. No one would be any the wiser.

Radiation is nothing. It's painless. It does not make you feel sick or tired. (Everyone I know is sick AND tired but radiation has nothing to do with it.)

The down side of radiation:
•It's a pain in the neck to make the commitment of going every day with the other things you have to do in your normal day.
•At the end of the six weeks you do have a very itchy rash. They give you medication for it and the rash eventually goes away.

I bet most of the people I work with didn't even realize something was different with me last year. That was my plan.
I forgot all about it myself, until today.
I got a questionairre from Sloan Kettering:
"When was the date of your first breast cancer?"Oct 15, 2004
"Which side?" right
" What was your treatment?" surgery and radiation
"Have you had a second breast cancer?" no
"Have you had a third cancer of any kind?" whoa...give me a break, it's only a year!
My annual radiation follow-up falls on March 7 this year, a Tuesday. If Mondale really pays attention he might notice that I'm not there at the beginning of his computer class that day. He may not notice at all, which would please me. I like to accomplish these things under the radar.
Life goes on.
I really did enjoy the snow this weekend. almost as much as the snow last February.

Snow is a Nice Diversion

2006-02-12T19:56:00.000-05:00

If you're going to feel plowed under anyway, you may as well have a snowstorm. I'm still not able to dig out of the heavy weather that's hit me at work. The weekend's snowstorm is sweet icing on my bitter cake.

It's Sunday night and I'm sitting next to a pile of paperwork that I've shuffled about for the last 48 hours. I spent Thursday and Friday with our school database developer. We were trying to find and repair glitches and bugs and generally get the thing to function better. When he left I was left with one of those eye-squinting headaches. And while we did move forward, I slept the disturbed sleep of FileMaker Pro layouts and scripts.

I'm into my second week of Federal jury duty. Luckily...not picked but I have to call in every day 'til Friday. I admit, I just forgot to call last Thursday night. I'm sure to forget at least one night this week too.

These things worry me:
•I have to make a decision on a three year Internet access contract for school on Monday. I have not done my proper homework.
•I have to arrange for many thousands of dollars of network security projects in the next several weeks.
•The historical academic data has to be converted from the old database to the new so that transcripts can be accurately produced.
•The three-year tech plan I must produce in order for our school to qualify for discounted network services requires a survey of staff tech skills (where they are now) and a plan of where their skills will be in three years and how I propose to get them there.
•I have a meeting with red pants on Tuesday.

And there lies the theraputic nature of blogginng for just writing this down makes it seem not so bad. In fact almost laughable.

I will be working on the holidays next week and I won't be able to take the March break either. I am beyond self-pity on this as now I'm just worried that these pieces of time won't be enough to catch up on all this crap, and besides, my friends at school are going through really life-altering issues and what have I done for them?

I hope they can be strong. I hope they can be happy.

...She's Under That Rock Over There

2006-01-26T11:06:00.000-05:00

•I've been "away."
•It' was exam week in Middle and Upper School, grades need to be entered by many teachers...always problems with the software (or more accurately the software users)
•Have been prepping for a major presentation -also at the "big" school. That's done but now lots of follow-up and planning for the next presentation.
•Report card support in Lower School, not too bad this year, but still not as smooth as I would like.
•There are several things (of an uncomfortable nature) brewing at work having to do with employment and next year and I don't want to go into it.
•I have a major (three-year) plan that needs to be drafted in five weeks.
•I have a meeting with red pants in three weeks.
•I'm still teaching my third and fourth grade classes every day.
•I have yet to set up the new purchase order database for the business office that was requested in October.
•It's contract time for the students, don't have that part of the database working properly.
•I'm totally sick of the database...I mean really sick.
•I took advantage of no meeting yesterday to run downtown and purchase supplies for my auction project but while I was out...
•Someone rifled through my computer lab last evening and stole something of value.

Load Those Staplers Folks!

2006-01-08T10:45:00.000-05:00

I'm afraid our "new guy" has gone a bit off the deep end. It's not so much this message he sent
Looking forward to seeing new bulletin boards now we're back.
as the fact that he sent it at 11:01 PM on a Saturday night.
At about the same time Saturday night ...Mondale was toasting his newly-attained Google status. I was arriving home after dinner at Stone Park and returning to the Season Three, Six Feet Under marathon that I had started at dusk.
I wonder what my other blog-pals were up to at 11:00 PM this Saturday night?

Mid Year Report Card

2006-01-05T04:31:00.000-05:00

Back in August I wrote about the opportunity for change that a new school year brings. We reach the halfway point in January. Time for a report card. You'll see that I'm not living up to my potential (who the hell is?) but there is time to get my grades up.

I haven't followed through on making this the year I figure out a great new system in the classroom. I never teach the same things in the same way and that's fine but it does make me feel like I never get things to go really smoothly. Still, the teaching kids part of what I do is the best and most satisfying part of my day's work. Kids are happy in my class and we do a lot of fun stuff. Every year is different and that's good.
Dealing with everyone's technological breakdowns and questions is – to put it mildly – daunting. I will never get used to this deluge. I have been a teacher of young children for a long time and so I have a high tolerance for interruption but this is over the top. Literally, the ONLY time I can work on something for longer than 15 minutes is when everyone has left the building at the end of the day. The other hard part for me is this: I can't fix or answer everything and some days I feel like I haven't fixed or answered anything! This leaves me feeling inadequate. This is a "course" that I wish I just didn't have to take. But I can't get out of it and so I have to make this better somehow.
I'm working on a couple of presentations right now, one on introductory web page creation and one for parents on Internet safety. These tasks are actually interesting to prepare and with the Internet safety one I've been working with some folks from the upper school and that has been good for me. I'm pretty impressed with the the number of tasks these particular staff members juggle and their high degree of professionalism. They work hard and there's no whining (at least not that I've witnessed) They are my new models.
Other administrative stuff that I've had to do has been very mixed. I'm a bit overmatched by this new database and helping all those who have to use it. That's only going to get worse. The business office also had a major computer crash this fall and I had to sweat that out, still am, actually. I have a major report in the way of a three-year technology plan to write before the end of the school year. Some of this I like and I'm good at, I just don't have enough time to do my best so it gnaws away at me.
One area where I need to work harder is having fun. Maybe it's not going to be in school, as I always hope. So I just have to face that and use my time away from school in more fun ways. Some excellent examples have been set for me recently by fellow bloggers. I have to develop some good habits here! More movies, going out, seeing people, taking trips, spending money!!
OK it looks like teaching the kids gets an A, being "your company's computer guy" gets a D, Working with others on special projects? I think a B+, Administrative duties a C+ at best, Having fun? I'm failing there. I'll get a tutor and turn that around soon.

Flappy New Year

2006-01-02T18:18:00.000-05:00

First day back at school after the holidays...D+
The plus is just because the lobby of our building was fixed up over vacation and it looks, well, plus.
Everything else about the day...D

iPod Update Please

2005-12-28T17:52:00.000-05:00

These are the CDs I got for Christmas. I am listening over and over to get my bearings and figure out what I like best. I also got Heaven Must Have Sent You From Above, The Holland Dozier Holland Story which is essentially the story of my adolescence.

Addendum to Christmas

2005-12-27T09:24:00.000-05:00

Click here for an action shot of Mr. Vacuum's favorite gift.
(this is an excuse for me to try out a link to a short quicktime movie.)

Merry Christmas

2005-12-26T10:43:00.000-05:00

It was so warm that we needed to open the windows to have this fire.

Funniest kid gift. Mr. Clean was crazy about the vacuum cleaner.

Most fun adult gift. People read out loud from this all night.

It was a calm and quiet cocktail hour.

Stephen reads Neruda in Spanish in remembrance of our nephew, Andrew, whom we lost this year.

No, No, No, No, No

2005-12-24T13:25:00.000-05:00

Day 5 and 6 of anti-vacation sort of epitomize my issues with the holiday season. Enforced cheer is oppressing me.
Yesterday was VERY bad.
Daughter Mactechwitch was trying to buy a house on my block. I would have loved this, really, to have baby Mactech around and so close all the time. We all spent the ENTIRE day yesterday on the phone with despicable real estate agents and kookie owner and owner children-in law.
Outcome: They decided they (the sellers) were "more comfortable" with the other bidder, a doctor, even though daughter Mactech's bid was higher and she probably has double the income of this "doctor." I don't get it?
This will be very hard for me when these "people" move on my block. God help them if they have children who attend The Burpie Cow Wow School.
I didn't get dinner on the table until very late and it wasn't very good. My heart wasn't in it. At the table, my mother talked for two hours about her white-water rafting trip in September. It's a good story but it's about the fourteenth time I've heard it. Didn't get to bed until midnight. Baby slept over but he was up at 4:00 AM. For two bleary hours we scuttled around the kitchen making a big mess and watching Sesame Street videos as he intoned "No no no no no..." to all of my suggestions in every voice over which he has command. I got him back to sleep at around 6:15 in my bed with a bottle and we both slept until 9:00 but I'm feeling unrested and restless.
Everyone is out shopping now and this is how I'm wasting my time...writing this.
Tonight the family rounds begin and probably the fifteenth and sixteenth telling of the rafting trip story. We decided on catering from La Villa – so no cooking tonight. Tomorrow I get up early to start the prep for the big feast.
I think I'll try to bake some cookies right now. Maybe that will be the antidote.

The Anti Vacation: Day Four

2005-12-22T08:30:00.000-05:00

And Transit Strike: Day Three.

8:00 AM, Fifth Avenue, Park Slope.
A Volvo SUV carries seven passengers rather comfortably. Some of us have had the good fortune of hitching a ride in this neighbor's vehicle for the past three days. It's a different combination of travelers each day, which is interesting – a different pressing need to get into town. The flip side is that everyone has been able to forego work for all or part of at least one of the last three days. So how important is the work we all do? Obviously not so important that we HAVE to be there everyday.

Things to do today:
• Buy some food today as the family begins arriving tonight.
• Make sleeping arrangements for the guests. (I can't find my Aerobed. Did I leave it in the summer house?)
• Wrap the presents I have.
• Hang a sign for FedEx and UPS with delivery instructions for all the packages I'm expecting in the next 24 hours. The chances are about 1 in 10 that I'll actually be in the house when they arrive and both my doorbells are broken anyway. I've already made one painful trip this week to the UPS depot on Foster Avenue where I waited on a long line in a cold facility (needing to pee the entire time) for a package whose delivery I missed.
• Go to the bank and withdraw an obscene amount of cash to get through the next four days.

The Anti Vacation: Day Three

2005-12-21T16:03:00.000-05:00

Mr. MacTech... left at 8:00 AM again this morning with six other commuters in a friend's SUV. The traffic was worse than yesterday but they still made it to midtown in a reasonable amount of time. I spent about two hours shopping on the internet after they left. I was pretty pleased with the fact that most of the things I needed to buy offered FREE last minute overnight shipping. I'm expecting a pile of stuff tomorrow! After "shopping" I took myself up the street to Barnes & Nobles (instead of Amazon.com) to buy some books. I had them wrapped in the store because, hey, no lines. I ate lunch by myself on Seventh Avenue. Passing a toy store near 11th Street, I spied a toy Miele canister vacuum cleaner – perfect for Mr. Clean so I bought that too.
Daughter MacTech... has her office party later at Top of the Rock. Mr. MacTech... plans to just work late tonight and then call it a week. I can sit for grand-baby MacTech...while his father crosses the water to do the Manhattan pick-up around 10:00 PM.
I like this anti-vacation so far. The only real wrinkle is this: My mother planned to take a bus from Toms River, NJ tomorrow for her annual "Christmas visit extravaganza." If the strike is still in effect it looks like I'll be wasting a day driving down there, picking her up and going to the Chinese buffet at the shopping center (she'll insist) and then driving back to Brooklyn.
I'm not complaining.

The Anti Vacation: Day Two

2005-12-20T08:22:00.000-05:00

6:55 AM When the ringing phone is what wakes you in the morning it's probably not going to be a great day. OK transit strike.
I could keep my plan to shop in SOHO. I don't really mind the walk IN but I don't want to schlep packages back over the bridge. I will have to cancel my check-up appointment at Sloan Kettering this afternoon. Again I'm sure I could get in but I don't know about getting home. East 68th Street is a long way from Park Slope.
Mr. MacTech... is still in bed in denial but the phone call gets him up. The call is our daughter. She has a ride into Manhattan with room for one more.
8:25 AM The car with 5 passengers had no trouble slipping through the Brooklyn Battery Tunnel. The traffic on the West Side Highway is not bad at all. The Brooklyn Bridges, on the other hand, are jammed. Maybe they can hitch a ride downtown at the end of the day and I'll just drive through the tunnel and pick them up.

The Anti-Vacation: Day One

2005-12-19T15:10:00.000-05:00

I have a whole week (sort of) off. I have a few meetings at school and two January workshops to plan but other than that I'm free. Free to stress out about the things I need done by Saturday.
The week before Christmas is a real pain. No matter how much I try to get things done ahead of time I'm always down to the wire. Another thing that bugs me is that I have never been capable of choosing the "one perfect gift" so I always resort to purchasing several "not quite perfect" ones.
I thought that Unwellness's tip about the Things I Want website (which I immediately commanded my nearest and dearest to employ) was going to save my ass this year but only my son has the tech skills to do a decent job of putting together the list. My daughter 's list had no pictures (she couldn't figure that part out and she was composing it at work so she didn't want to spend the entire afternoon on it) She did manage to list an Apple Store link but when I clicked it– it had timed-out. The only hint as to what she meant to ask for was the price $299. Must be an iPod, right? Well, I hate to break the news to her but she'll really need a personal computer to go with that iPod. You know the old saying, "The shoemaker's children never have shoes."
My son's girlfriend's links (and her list is huge) didn't always go to the right items but before I realized that fact I had bought her the bottle of perfume I thought she wanted. Correct brand – Trish McEvoy– but wrong fragrance – Blackberry Vanilla instead of Snowdrop & Crystal Flowers. She's getting the Blackberry Vanilla because it's already here. I guess I could run out and purchase a case of Sugar Free Red Bull – that was on her list too (can you believe it?) She also had about seventeen pairs of boots. What do you suppose that's all about?
My mother let me know that she wanted a large jewelry box. I bought one, but our taste is so different I'll be shocked if she actually likes it.
My husband? He'd never do the list. But that's OK because I actually got him the perfect gift – a swiss coffee maker that works incredibly well. It makes a single cup of coffee, expresso, cappuchino at the press of a button and it uses (and grinds) regular beans so you don't have to use those detestable coffee pods. The only problem – I already gave it to him so there's nothing to put under the tree.
The baby's getting a table and chairs and a cashmere sweater.
His father, my son-in-law, I have NOTHING for him so the rest of the week I'll obsess about this. He did not do "the list" – I have no window into his aquisitive soul. I may resort to slippers and underwear. Pathetic.

Why Teach?

2005-12-14T19:32:00.000-05:00

Sometimes I just have to step back and remind myself how I got into this game.
As a kid, I liked school, I was good at it and so I figured I'd enjoy it just as much on the other side of the desk.

I like kids (in a good way, not a sick way) and kids like me.

I have a fairly high tolerance for noise, messiness, compromise and change.

I have leadership qualities but not necessarily STRONG leadership qualities (because then I'd either be an administrator or managing adults in a totally different job)

The vacations are good.

My school is a few short blocks from my home.

With really very few exceptions, I work with an overwhelmingly professional, talented and supportive group of people.

I have quite a bit of autonomy in my own classroom and I like that.

I don't need to worry too much about someone trying to steal my job.

I have a sense of humor. Kids are funny (usually a lot funnier than adults) and that can be very enjoyable.

I like the feeling when I see kids enjoying learning and doing things for themselves and knowing I had a hand in that process.

Things I have had to accept about this line work
The money will NEVER (in my lifetime) be good. If this is a problem one needs to develop (or marry) other sources of income or try for a job in a higher paying school or move to a less expensive place than NYC.
Very few school buildings in NYC are spacious, comfortable or well appointed. If this was very important to me I would find those schools and try to get a job there.
While the importance of teaching "you shape the future hog-wash" is always paid lip-service, I have never felt exactly respected, as a teacher, by society in general.
There will always be children in my classes whom I cannot reach, save, cure or make everything all right for. I have gotten over it. I know I'm just not that special. I can still work to create a positive productive environment for those "special cases" for at least part of every day or week.
Difficult parents are a real pain, more than difficult children. But I know rationally that very few parents create problems for me. Humor, avoiding defensiveness, avoiding resistance and just plain "avoiding" work well enough.
Every year there is at least one seemingly intolerable situation – but the great thing about school is that however bad it may seem, it ends in June.

I admit, I advised my own children NOT to become teachers.
One got an MBA and is a financial analyst the other is a corporate lawyer and while they make a significantly large amount of $ and perhaps (just perhaps) they are more highly valued by society they suffer all the other difficulties that I have "accepted" and they suffer them in spades. They have little of the autonomy, fun, (messiness and noise) that I have. They have far fewer days off. They can't walk to work and they deal with many truly insane and/or despicable people.

Sometimes you just have to step back and remind yourself.

Gallery of Drinks 5

2005-12-07T09:26:00.000-05:00

On Thanksgiving (at my sister and brother-in-law's house in NJ) I took several pictures. We then drove back to Brooklyn without my camera. I had left it on the dining room table. Things being as they are this time of year, it took more than a week to get the camera back. I had to wait for my niece to bring it into the city as she was coming for her third interview at the New Yorker. (I'll let you know if she gets the job)
Without my camera, my posts definitely lack punch.
It seemed pointless to do the turkey photo essay (I loved Listmaker's) at this point in December So I simply offer this one picture (and please click it to get a big close-up for the full effect) from my Thanksgiving, as a promise of what's to come as the alco-holidays descend upon us.
Peace on Earth and Cheers!

A Neighborhood Story With a Good Ending

2005-11-28T11:24:00.000-05:00

Went to the movies Saturday night. Saw Good Night and Good Luck. It is very good.
We walked back (from BAM) to have dinner in the neighborhood and wound up at Stone Park. We had to wait for a table and so had a drink at the bar (fine with me!) where we picked up some interesting background info on some characters in The Squid and The Whale.
We had dinner, wine, after dinner drink This is all in the way of an excuse as to why I probably left my purse there. Which is what I did. I didn't realize it was missing until late Sunday morning while searching for my iPod nano. It was in the purse, along with all my IDs charge cards and plenty of cash.
I called the restaurant and explained that I thought I probably left my purse the night before. The hostess cheerfully reported that it was locked in the manager's office and I could come down and pick it up at my convenience.
Everything was in it. Completely undisturbed.

Traditions

2005-11-24T13:45:00.000-05:00

Thanksgiving Morning 2005: I am in preparation mode.
I have two mandolines set up on the kitchen island ready to slice, dice and julienne the ingredients of my winter vegetable salad. It’s mainly fennel, celery root and parsley in good vinaigrette and spiked with Castlemango (an aged Piedmont mountain cheese) difficult to find, even in NYC. But thanks to the miracle of the Internet – I have obtained it – at a price. I only have the salad to make. But I have to make enough for forty. Thanksgiving is a group effort in this family. It has to be.
Younger child arrived in a cab from LaGuardia early this morning. He could only get tickets on the crack of dawn flight out of Chicago. He is already in his childhood bedroom under the covers, the result of having worked until 2:00 or 3:00 AM last night. I don’t understand this. I see it in his sister too, and their father. Where does this drive and necessity to work late into the night come from? Is it that my job is so different than theirs? – The emergencies of childhood so able to wait until tomorrow? Most of them solved by a good night’s sleep anyway.
We will take off about 3:00 PM or so. The drive to Rumson, NJ normally takes only an hour but getting there from Brooklyn involves driving through Staten Island and that can be a problem even when it’s not Thanksgiving. If we get there by 5:00 PM it will give us a good two hours of drinking and hors d’oeuvres before the main meal. This will insure that we won’t be able to eat more than a teaspoonful of each of the many courses served. It will also guarantee that the lability-index will be sufficiently ratcheted up by the time the “toast-grace” is given by my sister and or brother-in-law. As they lost a son in April – an amazing and wonderful person – I can’t imagine what they will come up with to be thankful for.

Gallery of Drinks 4

2005-11-15T18:30:00.000-05:00

This is a beauty.
Its color is derived from the particular types of liquor I use.
A Margarita on the rocks with salt ( but easy on the salt)
The first Margarita I ever had was a giant frozen one, in a dive in the West Village (still there!) called Tortilla Flats. It was the mid 80's. I was teaching first grade at the time and my teaching cohort was a west coast transpant. "What! You've never had a Margarita?"
I'm still a sucker for frozen "M"s but in a real restaurant or at home – I do rocks.
This one is particularly...not sweet.

2 oz. of Cuervo Gold ( I've always liked Steely Dan)
2 oz. of fresh lime juice
1 1/2 oz. of Mathilde orange liqueur
1/2 tsp of powdered sugar

Shake it all together and serve it in a tall glass (whose rim has been gently dipped in kosher salt) over mucho crushed ice.

(You're not getting any dietary pats-on-the-back from this drink, so forget the calorie count. On the other hand, you'll never get scurvy! "You Limey!")

Mr. Clean

2005-11-11T19:53:00.000-05:00

Every Saturday morning, the grandson gets dropped off for a few hours so the parents can get some errands done. I look forward to it. For one thing, my floors get done. This child is obsessed with cleaning. Give him a rag, a Swiffer, even a vacuum cleaner and he's a happy camper. He'll sweep or rake in yard too.
It must be the Irish in his genetic history.

Gallery of Drinks 3

2005-11-10T18:31:00.000-05:00

I am enjoying this drink right now with a lovely pork chop, braised with celery and sauerkraut.

The Bloody Mary is an underrated drink, mainly because it is nearly impossible to get a well-made one. They are labor intensive and need several ingredients and, let's face it, everyone has a different idea of how it should come out.
Here's mine.

Use a shaker. Pour in (at least) 2 oz. of vodka, the juice of a whole fresh lemon, 5 or 6 ounces of V8 ( I prefer this to plain tomato juice) a short teaspoon of horseradish, and a couple of shakes each of Tabasco and Worcestershire sauce and salt and pepper to taste. Add a few ice cubes and shake.
Pour the drink over fresh ice cubes into a tall flared glass. Add a stick of celery and fresh piece of lime to garnish. Drink.

Nutritional Information:
Calories: approx. 180
Fat: 0
Protein; 0
Carbohydrates: 17 grams

Really, it's a diet in a glass. You feel so healthy after drinking this

Gallery of Drinks 2

2005-10-31T19:11:00.000-05:00

This is a Montepulciano D'Abruzzo. Modest in price, under $15, and available at Shawn Liquors on 7th Avenue where Andrew, The sommelier in residence (with the coke-bottle eye glasses and the Jerry Lewis voice) has rarely steered me wrong. It went beautifully with the rib steak at its side. I ate the whole steak myself with two glasses of the wine. The perfect antidote to Halloween's sickly-sweetness.

Gallery of Drinks

2005-10-26T21:17:00.000-04:00

This is the first in a series.
By the way, I just finished this one.

This is a well-made vodka tonic. Fill a tall narrow glass with nicely-shaped ice cubes. Pour in (at least) 2 oz. of vodka, squeeze a small wedge of lime over the vodka then fill the glass with tonic, preferably pre-chilled Schweppes from a small glass bottle. Add a fresh piece of lime to garnish. Drink.

Nutritional Information:
Calories: approx. 225
Fat: 0
Protein; 0
Carbohydrates: 29 grams

Of course, a gin and tonic is always superior, but alas, I have drunk all the gin in the house, including the miniature bottle of Sapphire Bombay that recently came in a "tony benefit" gift bag.

What Goes here?

2005-10-07T16:37:00.000-04:00

What? you say you think Mr. C is being drawn to a powerful magnet being wielded by Mr. B? (you can click the picture to make it bigger)
WRONG FOLKS.

At assembly this AM we were treated to a charming exhibition of "boys will be boys" Brit-style. And we loved every minute of it! The item on the string is a chestnut. The "boys" are attempting to crush each others nuts.
The game is called conkers? or konkers? or conquers! Yes that's it.
Mr. B was crowned champion nut-crusher.

"...Here is my handle. Here is..."

2005-09-17T14:19:00.000-04:00

Forget it Freddie. I've been a registered Democrat since I was born, yet I couldn't muster any enthusiasm for last week's primary. And I'm not going to vote for you. Also, the kind of NYC folks who might have been persuaded to vote for you in November, will not be impressed by the pictured endorsement. She, unfortunately, is poison to the groups you're trying to corral in your corner.
I'm voting for "Richie" Bloomberg. Yes, a Republican. I'd vote for him on the merits of 311 alone – the single best government technological advancement I can think of in my lifetime (and much more effective than 911).
In addition, the fact that he would even attempt to reorganize the NYC school system is to his credit. The shortcomings of said reorganization are many, of course, but the dismantling of 110 Livingston St. (The Board of Ed) was brilliant.

(I mainly wrote this post because I wanted to use the picture. I bet my very clever fellow-bloggers can think of far-funnier captions than mine).

Rock and Roll

2005-09-09T16:01:00.000-04:00

I ordered new chairs for the computer lab this year. They go up and down and spin and roll.
First lesson of the year:
Assign the seats then let everyone roll and spin for the rest of the period.

Only one kid had to go to the nurse.

Do you think they worked it out of their systems?

And They're Off!

2005-09-08T19:25:00.000-04:00

A new year begins.

The first day of school is almost always perfect. The kids are excited and happy. The teachers are full of good intentions and good humor. The school looks its best all shiny and clean. The brand new divisional director is off to a happy start and enjoying the honeymoon our parents afford a new person at the helm. (How long will it last? I hope really long. I can't take another tear down.)
Now we wait for the other shoe to drop. When will that happen and what will cause the drop? Hard to tell right now. Everything seems just right. Will a new onerous or controversial policy be announced? (That broadsided us last year.) Will the parents band together to change curriculum, methods, schedules, events? (It's not like that hasn't happened before.) Will someone get "laid-off" leaving the rest of us awash in a sea of unease?
Though I worked most of the summer, today it seemed worth it, because most things technological went smoothly. But I should have known some people would not be happy. You see, everyone at Burpie Cow-Wow School was not the recipient of a new computer. And you can believe I've heard from each and every one of them with their emergency sob stories.
My colleague, at the other building, starts every task I ask of him with a "can do" attitude, but then has a hard time following through to the finish so I find I am tying up an inordinate number of loose ends.
My e-mail box is full of the most maddening helpdesk questions ( didn't I show her this last week, last month, last year and the year before!!!) I still patiently answer these questions with detailed answers and pictures because these people really need the pictures.)
I, of course, never complain about helping the newbies or my good friends and I suppose that is really unkind and unfair of me to pick on the handful of entrenched Luddites.
And there's always this: I still can't seem to get out of this building until they're mopping the floor around my feet. After all these years you'd think I would have developed a system - a sense of balance. Ah...well.
A new year (already) begins (to fray around the edges.)

Blood on the Tracks

2005-08-19T12:48:00.000-04:00

Your blood, my tracks.
I request and require your input. If I were to burn a cd for a potential party, for background-foreground-drinking-dancing-whatever else, what track would you contribute? You can give me more than 1 selection but not more than 3.
Don't obsess simply choose.
All contributors will get a copy.

What's in The Beach Bag?

2005-08-18T23:23:00.000-04:00

IMG_9065
Originally uploaded by mactechwitch.

I liked reading about the discipline (in the Unwellness home) of removing a certain number of books from the shelves to make room for new. In my house, we are undisciplined book buyers who seem to have time to read only on vacations. Our books are piled here and there as the shelves are at their limits.

The summer reading lists of my blog-pals are quite interesting to me. It's fun to see the patterns developing in the choices. I seem to have been on an extended Nazi trip the past several weeks.

After finishing The Lost Legends of New Jersey, Frederick Reiken, a sweet treat of a book and a gift from a favorite friend, which was not about Nazis but was about the Rubins and the Berkowitzes and the Jersey Shore so you know Nazis were not too far back in the collective consciences of the characters, I read Hour of The Cat, Peter Quinn, Everything is Illuminated, Jonathan Safran Foer, then Last Dance at the Hotel Kempinski, Robin Hirsch and now I've picked up The Plot Against America, Philip Roth.
I also use the summer to catch up on New Yorker fiction and articles. There is one that I want to share with my lunchtime crossword pals. It's a classic David Sedaris called Turbulence

Tabula Rasa

2005-08-18T08:35:00.000-04:00

This week I received my "summer mail envelope." For those of you unfamiliar with this rite, it is a large, thick, pile of letters, schedules, calendars, fliers and directives – everything you need to know before coming back to school. It is filled with equal parts excitement and dread. My envelope was completely empty and stamped by the USPS as having been received that way.

It was perhaps the best summer mail envelope I have received in 20 something years.

A new school year presents new opportunities. It always has. When you're a kid it's the excitement of seeing your friends again after a long separation dressed in spiffy new duds a size bigger than before, the new notebooks with their promise of soon being filled with something important in a new adaptation of one's old handwriting, the new teacher "...I'm going to show her (him) my real stuff." When you're a teacher it's the resolve that this year you will figure out a system that really works for everyone in the class, and it will be a system that doesn't require late nights and weekends. This will be the year that you will have fun with your students. This will be the year you will iron out the kinks and overcome your weaknesses as a teacher.

Take this empty envelope as a sign. We can create something new this year.

Who is with me on this? What will it take to make it happen? If those questions can be answered we are well on our way. It will come out of the best that is already in place.

Ahh

2005-07-30T17:24:00.000-04:00

Peace
Originally uploaded by mactechwitch.

...to this.

Quogue is beautiful and serene. No Hampton's Hype, no nightlife, no clutter. And practically no people. Not that I have anything against my species. I just become prickly and intolerant in mid-summer.
Unwellness sails the Mediterranean, Listo's off to Maine, ...Mondale to Mother England, Maestra had her Caribbean interlude. Less than two hours from 5th St. (if you know the right route) I have this beach.
(And broadband internet service back at the house.)

The Big Birthday

2005-07-07T22:58:00.000-04:00

The Big Birthday
Originally uploaded by mactechwitch.

Baby Michael turned 1 on July 6. I spent the day alone at the vacation house with the adorable grandson. Mommy, daddy and grandpa all headed back to NYC for a rousing day of WORK.
Our day consisted of endless rounds of mashed foods punctuated by toddling near disasters. (why would you stand up in a rocking chair?) His nap was a grand total of one hour which I foolishly spent answering "helpdesk" emails from school and reading blogs. I should have been sleeping or luxury of luxury, showering.
The beach was empty due to the overcast weather but it was pleasant enough. We ticked off a good two hours there, sifting sand and throwing mac and cheese to the seagulls. In the house we played with giant legos and pushed screaming fire engines around in front of the TV's continuous coverage of the London explosions.
We we're both exhausted by 6:30 PM. He was sawing logs before 7:00. His daddy pulled into the driveway soon after with a rotisserie chicken and mommy and grandpa got off the jitney around 9:00.
It was a totally absorbing and very satisfying day but I'm looking forward to NOT doing the same thing tomorrow.

I've Been Playing Unwellness Games.

2005-06-23T23:40:00.000-04:00

How did I get so lucky? Who wouldn't want to be horse?

You're a Horse!

Versatile, powerful, and true, you have quite a reputation for hard work and a certain unbridled spirit. Many look up to you as an example of what people can really become, though somewhere deep down, you admit to feeling a little bit broken. You hate racing, but are still exceptionally good at it. Beware broken legs, dog food, and glue. If your name is Ed, you do a surprising amount of talking.

Take the Animal Quiz
at the Blue Pyramid.

Hello, My Name is...

2005-06-20T00:38:00.000-04:00

family reunion
Originally uploaded by mactechwitch.

Just returned from a first annual family reunion in Red Bank, NJ.

My husband, Tim's family is, well, huge. He's one of 12 children and his father was one of 14. There are 242 (214 living and 2 more expected any day) descendants of his paternal grandparents. This reunion was the result of a plan that was hatched at the funeral of Tim's aunt Ann, about six months ago. Distressed by the fact that funerals have become their main reason for gathering, some of the more organized optimists in attendance actually followed through and pulled this off.

About 8 weeks ago I received an e-mail with a three-page attachment detailing the various events of the weekend, their cost and a request for a check to be mailed to the chief organized optimist by a certain date.

OK here’s the thing, I seem to have trouble with e-mail attachments that are important, contain instructions and are impossibly LONG! Take the weekly regs. Its militaristic moniker bugs me to begin with. It’s our school’s list of events, instructions, directions, changes in the schedule and otherwise essential information that arrives every Friday afternoon, as you are about to walk out the door. I know the smart people just don’t even look at it, or at least they don’t look at it until Monday. But I can’t stop myself. I can’t have a red flag on my mailbox. I check my e-mail a pathological number of times a day (and night.) Those regs are opened and the attachment is downloaded within five minutes of its sending. But even so, do I read them? Eh – not really. They’re too damned boring and detailed.

I reacted to this family reunion attachment as if it were a particularly onerous weekly reg like the ones that come around the spring festival or the fourth grade play. I did send in the check (only a little late) for the Saturday night barbeque. All the other details on those reunion instructions made my eyes blur. Reunion t-shirts? Sizes? Five-mile race entries? Beach reservations? Picnic? Communion breakfast? Late night fist fight anyone? The whole thing was a la carte to avoid forcing anyone in this notoriously frugal clan to pay for any service they did not want. I wound up having to beg my husband to get his uncle to sell him a family directory at the door (which I neglected to order and prepay as the unread instructions specified.)

Well it turned out to be really fun, even though we didn’t get t-shirts (sorry you had to order and pay ahead.)