OmegaMom

Over at ScienceBlogs, they’re doing a blog challenge with DonorsChoose.  The Questionable Authority has an especially impassioned plea.

DonorsChoose is an organization where teachers across the country can submit a project with a wishlist for funding.  Donors can shop the projects, select one that resonates, and then provide funds–any portion of the requested amount.

DonorsChoose is doing a blog challenge for the month of October, and yours truly, OmegaMom, has decided to toss her hat into the ring to see if I can get my readers to pony up some funding for some very simple requests.

I’ve selected three projects.  One is a teacher who would like to have a heavy-duty electric pencil sharpener for her classroom.  Another is a teacher who needs staplers.  A third is a teacher who needs dry-erasers for her whiteboards.

Now.  Just sit there and think about this for a little while.  Pencil sharpeners.  Staplers.  Dry erasers.

We’re not talking particle accelerators here.  Nothing fancy.  Nothing that requires large amounts of money.  Pretty basic supplies.

In fact, the amounts needed for these projects are so small that it makes me sad.  My stapler teacher needs $134 for a bunch of heavy-duty staplers to use in the classroom.  The teacher who wants the pencil sharpener has used manual sharpeners and has previously snagged one from a closing school (!!), and they keep breaking.  The dry-eraser person made his/her own white boards for the students a few years ago, but needs a constant supply of markers and erasers.

Help OmegaMom buy staplers, pencil sharpeners, and dry erasers at DonorsChoose.  I’m going to stick my donation thermometer over in the sidebar.  OmegaMom gets an average of about 100 readers per day; if each of my readers dropped $5.20 into the donation bin, these three teachers would get their projects funded.

Don’t get me started, though, on the sad commentary this makes on the amount of money spent on, say, NCLB versus plain teaching supplies…grrr.

(Ahem.  Just realized that this could be construed as an attempt to guilt my readers into dropping $$.  Naw, please don’t feel pressured, it’s an experiment.  Whatever we collect will be more than $0 [I'm dropping a few dollars myself], so that’s all too the good.)

(Also, I’d like to clarify #34 in my last post–it reads as if I were saying that bloggers who are similar in thought/tone as yourself [me] aren’t interesting.  Ahem.  Not at all what I meant–I meant to include the second group as “interesting bloggers who are not similar in tone or style or thought as yourself”.  Now I’ll go somewhere and write 100 times on a blackboard, “I will try to write more clearly.”)

Hey, sounds like a fun topic on a grey, rainy, chilly morning, eh?

Okay, okay, it’s better than, say, “global thermonuclear warfare” (about which I have nightmares on a twice-a-year-basis, just like tornadoes) (the Wizard of Oz turned tornadoes into nightmare material for more kids than me, I am sure).

Way back when, in the mists of time, I took a Geology 101 class in college.  It was great.  I loved it.  There is an alternate universe where OmegaMom decided to pursue geology as a career instead of sort of floating about for years before deciding on computers.

One of the really neat things about this Geo101 class was that the professor discussed, in great depth and detail, the controversy about the Great Extinction Event of the dinosaurs.  It was interesting because the professor had been there while the controversy started, played out, and the paradigm shifted to the new, improved version of what happened.  Previously, it had been thought that a period of extremely active volcanism was what did the dinos in (remember that scene of the animated dinosaurs taking the big trek in Fantasia to Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring?).  But right around the time OmegaMom was born, a geologist named Luis Alvarez and his son Walter proposed a new theory:  that a meteor or comet impact was what had caused the extinction.  They cited, as evidence, the KT boundary layer, a layer of soil found worldwide, which was chock-full of interesting elements such as iridium and (I believe) osmium and particular particle shapes that are only produced under huge heat and impact stresses (tektites).

OmegaMom was taking this intro class at the end of the paradigm shift period (it took quite a while for the geology types to actually accept such a radically different view of looking at things).  It was fascinating, especially realizing that scientists could just toss every bit of “accepted” knowledge away, when presented with enough evidence, and move in a totally different direction.

The geology folk have been looking for evidence of other such things all over the place since then, and have found quite a few that seemed tied into other extinction events.  This has also led to a certain amount of interest in space agencies tracking near-earth objects (and to a few grand disaster movies), Just In Case.  After all, if it’s happened once, it can happen again.  And what will We do (we being the human race) if it does?

Then, this week, Small Mountain University issued a press release in conjunction with a bunch of other universities.

For years, the “accepted” knowledge about the extinction of the mammoths and other large mammals that roamed the Americas and northern Europe and Asia has been that they were hunted to extinction by human beings.

But lo & behold–according to this group of geologists, there is evidence that a large something–a comet or low density meteor–whapped the Earth about 12,900 years ago, causing firestorms, devastation, and a 1,000-year mini ice age.

First off, it’s a radically different approach to the idea of the mammoth etc. die-off–so that’s interesting.  Then there’s the question of how it will play out in the scientific community.

Then there’s li’l ole OmegaMom sitting here and reading that press release and accompanying news articles and realizing–with a weird gut-level oomph–that, hey, yeah, these things can happen, and it isn’t necessarily millions of years in the past or millions of years in the future.  Dudes, this event, if the evidence pans out, was a mere 13,000 years ago.  That’s a blink in the geologic record.  It’s like yesterday!

So every once in a while, OmegaMom catches herself casting the hairy eyeball up to the sky, wondering…when?  What if…?

(Like, “what if the Tunguska object had been bigger??”)

Hey, as disaster theories go, it’s got more sweep and grandeur than, say, Y2K or Peak Oil or even gl0bal warm1ng.

Living in a shoebox has some side effects.  One of those is, since we are sans washer and dryer, we must visit the laundromat.

OmegaDad did the honors the first time.

Now…I hate crowds.  I hate noisy situations.  Too many people making too much noise around me makes my back start twisting up, my adrenaline level rise, and my teeth grind.  Figlet recently asked “What’s Your Krazy”–this is one of my very biggest crazies.

OmegaDad has it much, much worse than I do.

So he returned from his excursion to the world of coin-operated washers and dryers frazzled to a fare-thee-well, his teeth set, and his psychic aura emitting “KEEP AWAY FROM ME, MOTHERFUCKERS!!” on a continuous loop.  He gritted his teeth at me and hissed, “YOU are doing the laundry from now on!” and then went on a tirade about the quality of people at the laundromat, the level of noise, the problems he had simply moving about, on and on, for half an hour.

I nodded my head, rolled my eyes, and said, “Yessir!”

I’ve been visiting the laundromat once per week ever since.  OmegaDad gave me the hairy eyeball last week and asked me, “How come when you go to the laundromat, it’s empty and nice and quiet, but when I go to the laundromat, it’s a seething mob scene?”

I dunno.  I’d guess it’s my laundromat karma.

You see, I love doing laundry.  It’s soothing.  It’s calming.  I go into a Happy Place mentally.  I zone out.  I plunge my hands into heaps of warm, fresh-out-of-the-dryer clothes and could just get wiggly like a small puppy.

And the laundromat doesn’t seem noisy to me, because all the things making “noise” are making white noise.  There are washers washing (schloop schloop schloop) and dryers drying (rumble rumble rumble thunka rumble rumble rumble thunka) and video games going bleep bloop and various people chattering to each other, which, with the white noise as a background, blends right in.

Okay, so I’ve been lucky:  No great huge fights have broken out, no whacked out druggies have suddenly started seeing spiders crawling down the walls, no fundamentalist nutcase has started preaching The Word at the top of his (or her) lungs.

Given the current close quarters at the Shoebox, going to the laundromat has an added plus:  I am gloriously alone.  OmegaDad drops me off with the clothes and accoutrements, and then hauls the dotter off to do shopping.  I get myself a frappucino, read a book or the Sunday paper, and just relax.

Part of this being-in-the-moment and zoning out to the white noise is related to having grown up and living as an adult in the big city.  Chicago (and any other big city) is filled with noise.  There’s the sound of traffic.  There’s the sound of people’s boomboxes and TVs.  There’s the sound of the couple two floors down having yet another fight.  There’s the El rumbling by a block away.  There’s the distant rumble from the expressway.  There’s the kssshhhh-SCREECH of buses stopping.  There’s the sound of jets taking off and landing and circling around waiting for a chance to land.

The city is an ocean of noise.  And to survive, people who live in cities learn to let the noise mash into a generic background wash, like the sound of ocean surf.  Because if you paid attention to all those different noises while living in a city, you would go utterly insane.

The only time I wasn’t able to put city noise into the general white noise mishmosh was when visiting my buddy Suz when she lived in Wicker Park in a walk-up that was directly behind the El tracks.  That noise was impossible to mesh with the rest of the ocean surf.  (However, as I recall, Suz herself said that after a few weeks, it started to blend in with the rest.)

Today was our last wash day at the laundromat.  I get to do laundry in the peace and privacy of our own home Real Soon Now.  I’ll be able to do the weekly laundry without spending $20.  I’ll be able to nosh in the kitchen, piddle in the office, wear my jammies, and sort my damned clothes into as many different color piles as I want starting tomorrow.  Yeehaw!

But I’m going to–in a weird way–miss the laundromat zen.  A bit.

 One of the things about living in Small Mountain University Town was that we were surrounded mostly by evergreens (Ponderosa pines) and there were fewer deciduous trees (oaks and aspens).  The aspens would put on a golden show in the autumn, but you had to drive to where there were lots of aspens to see the best show.  The oaks–eh.  The leaves would turn kind of muddy brown and drop off, and that was it.

So autumn wasn’t a visual stunner, like those of us who grew up in the midwest or east are accustomed to.  The stunning you would get was the vibrant blue sky and the vivid white sun, which was, admittedly, a jazzy combination.

Now here we are in the Final Frontier, and encountering an entire new ecosystem.  The majority of the trees, shrubs, bushes, and weeds here are decidedly deciduous.  And they’re showy.  Oh, oh, oh-so showy.  Reds.  Golds.  Oranges.  Greens with red spots.  Burgundies.  Yum.  And we still have some yellows, but they are put to shame by all the rest.

We aren’t having a grand blast of everything turning at once–yet.  But so far, we have lots of individual plants and trees turning color and dropping their leaves.

Many years ago, a cousin of mine took her 3-year-old daughter out one autumn to collect leaves.  They took clear plastic contact paper, laid the leaves out on it, and then put another layer of clear plastic contact paper on top.  GrannyJ still has the resultant banner hanging on the back of her office door.

Taking a tip from cuz J., I decided the dotter and I should collect some leaves and maybe make some placemats out of them.

So here are some autumn leaves:

Pixelating out, again, bah.  But, nonetheless, maybe giving you an idea of just how varied and colorful things are getting.  When we make the placemats, I will present a pic of one of them, too…

Thanks for joining me in a world-wide WOOT on word of our closing!  As GrannyJ suggested, we are visiting the furniture and boxes now & then and petting things and crooning happily.

A few years after I moved away from the Bay Area to join Not-Yet-Mr.-OmegaMom, we traveled back there to visit some relatives.  I took him in to the city to do the usual touron things.  As we were walking through downtown San Francisco, we encountered a quartet singing opera, a violinist, and some people playing folk music.

It reminded me of one of the things I absolutely loved about living in/near a city:  the nonchalant expectation that one would run across buskers almost every day during one’s normal, everyday routine.  Climbing out of the BART station, I was greeted by the sounds of the saxophone; walking down the streets, I would hear a trio of guitarists who I could see if I peered down the sidestreet; there would be multiple groups of musicians jamming in the various parks.  It wasn’t a bonus of being in San Francisco–the same delightful musical free-for-all existed in Chicago, as well.

I miss it.  Oh, we have music here in Small Mountain University Town, but it’s not the same.  The type of musical encounter one has in the city is serendipitous–there’s no schedule to it, no need to put it into one’s calendar and remember it.

My mom remembers an instance, during a visit to Vienna, when she climbed out of a subway station into the midst of a large group of people singing the Carmina Burana.

The Washington Post, prompted by–curiosity?–ennui?–sheer deviltry?–enlisted the famed violinist Joshua Bell in a busking experiment, seeking to determine if “beauty can transcend”.  Bell was assigned a DC Metro station to settle in and play his violin during the morning rush hour.  Hidden cameras took video; reporters cornered commuters outside the station to take names and contact info for a “commuter study”.  Bell made $32 in the 45 minutes he was playing; tickets to Bell’s performances on stage regularly command $100 and up.

The Post claims that most of the commuters didn’t even look, yet when I watch the videos, it seems to me that a majority of people actually glanced over at Bell.

In Chicago and San Francisco, when I encountered these serendipitous musical moments, I was often in transit–on my way to work (and usually about to be late), on my way to a date with friends, or on my way home and just dog-tired.  I preferred my buskers lurking on station platforms during the evening rush hour, rather than the upper levels or the connecting passageways or by the exit doors; though the music was constantly interrupted by trains arriving and departing, I could enjoy it in a more relaxed manner without a constant underlying nagging feeling that I Should Be Somewhere Else!

A few of the commuters knew that they were listening to an excellent violinist; one of them knew who he was.  But the majority hustled on by, some flinging some money into his violin case in passing.

Perhaps if the Post had positioned him elsewhere…perhaps if it had been the evening crowd, rather than the morning crowd…there would have been a different response.  I’d like to think that I’d recognize the quality of the instrument and the playing if I had been there–but, even so, the pressure of modern life, of needing to “be there on time”, would have intruded and had an impact on my response.

But, no matter what the response was in reality, the tale makes me wistful for those days of serendipitous music providing a sound track for my city life.

(FYI:  “Brainwashing my child” is featured at the Carnival of Family Life at Lil’ Duck Duck, along with many other fun and touching blog posts.  Wander on over and check them out!)

Technorati: Joshua Bell, busking, music, city life

Miss Cellania asked about “weird people” I have known.  Alas, my mind immediately went blank.  All I could think about, rather than people, were the various odd living spaces I’ve either considered or lived in.

Shortly before I moved out of Chicago, I was wisting for the country life.  I was also wisting for a cheaper rental (though, looking back, I could slap myself upside the haid, because I had a lovely one-bedroom rental with built-in bookcases flanking a defunct fireplace, a balcony, hardwood floors, and lots of closet space for the amazing price of $365 per month, all in a place that was walking distance from the beach and lots of nice restaurants).

Anyway, yearning for a different place to live, I scoured the classifieds in the Chicago Reader week in and week out.  Most were retreads of what I was in–three flats, small brick apartment buildings, some swanky stuff on or near the Magnificent Mile.

But one day, I read an ad that piqued my curiosity.

They were renting a silo.  A real live, honest-to-goodness, grain silo.  Four floors, one room per floor, hardwood floors.

They also had a refurbished barn for rent.

It was way the hell and gone north of the city, but it sounded just too cool for words, so I called the owner up and set up an appointment to view the silo.

It looked great from the outside, but once you were in it, it was quite the letdown.  I had had visions of a spiraling staircase on the inside of the walls, circling up the interior, with each room using the most of the space (like this).  Alas, the guy who had done the work was…um…lacking in imagination.  Or dumb.  Or just plain weird.  Y’see, he had built this weird boxlike structure down the middle of the silo with the stairs there.  It ate up all the space.  What was left was, oh, four feet of space surrounding the stairwell.  And the stairwell was no great shakes, either; it was rickety and poorly built and looked like the slightest bit of wind coming through the cracks in the silo would have it all come tumbling down.

My heart was broken and I abandoned my silo dreams.

Years later, when I went back to college for the final time in the Bay Area, I knew I needed an inexpensive place to live.  So, once again, I found myself scouring the rental ads.  Interestingly enough, in the East Bay, there were lots of little cottages to rent–inexpensively, too.  But each time I called, the ad had been out for a day already, and the place was rented (no doubt to other penniless, hungry students).

One day, I found an ad the day it was posted.  I called the guy up.  I went to take a look.

And ohmigosh, it was just darling.  It was a tiny little 10×20 cottage in the back of a house at the bottom of the San Leandro hills.  It had a wall full of French windows, a teeny-tiny galley kitchen, an itty bitty bathroom with a shower stall, and exposed rafters painted white.  I was sunk.

The most interesting thing?  It started life as a chicken coop.  Yes.  I lived for two years in a former chicken coop–and I loved it.  There was an avocado tree right outside those French windows…there was a boxed flower bed at the foot of the itty bitty porch, which I filled with California poppies…there was a bottle-brush tree beside the porch…It was wonderful.  Best of all, I could pop into my car, drive up the hill five minutes, and be able to hike around the San Leandro Reservoir.

These days, of course, we live in a log cabin in the piney forest–a dream for many folks.  We almost bought an octagonal house, instead (apparently, they were all the rage for vacation homes in this area for a while).  But I still yearn for a yurt, or an earthship, or something equally offbeat, miss my darling cottage, and daydream about what that silo could really have been like, if the owners had just tried a bit harder.

Technorati: Silo, yurts, earthships, non-standard housing