My little baby calsabon is en route with her father to Toronto. There she will board a plane for Montreal, where she will change planes and wing her way off to La Belle France for six weeks. She spent this morning in a lather of "I don't wanna go" anxiety (which affects me, too, before a big trip), but I know she's going to have a great time. She's spending 4 days in Paris with a group of students and teachers from Pitt, and then they are all going to Nantes, where she will meet her French family and settle in for 6 weeks of classes and French life.

She's going to have the best time.

I want an industrial-sized dishwasher. I don't want to wash dishes in it. I want to be able to roll the bird cages in there. I'll take out the grates and stand them up in the rack, and the trays too. The cages and the stands will just fit in as they are. I will put strong dish soap in the cup, close the door, flick the switch and walk away. In 20 minutes I'll come back, roll out a sparkling clean cage, line it with paper towels and put the birds back, and then I'll do the next one.

I purely hate scrubbing out the trays with Poop-Off. And I have to take the cages outside to really get them clean, so that doesn't happen as often as I'd like it to.

I love my birds, but their cages are a trial.

Mr. OddP and I are in the market for a used dog. We don't want to deal with housebreaking and chewing, and the PSAs about adopting rather than breeding have gotten to us. So we made the rounds of the pounds this weekend.

Apparently small dogs touch down for about 3 minutes before they're adopted. From what one of the volunteers at Rochester Animal Services told me, there is a constant flow of small dogs going through their doors. They get adopted immediately.

I mean, I suppose this is good. Good for the dogs. It makes it hard, though, when the pound is open from 11:00 to 4:30, and I work. It seems that the best strategy is just to pitch a tent at the door and tag the dog your want as it goes in to be surrendered.

Luckily, this is the last week that I teach, so I really can just stake out the place until I find the perfect pooch for us.

In 1968 Alan Arkin starred in a movie made from Carson McCullers's book The Heart Is A Lonely Hunter. It was my very first exposure to sign language. I thought it looked so cool. That all of that intricate handwaving could have meaning... well, I was fascinated.

I suppose people have chosen careers for less thought-through reasons. When I was a girl there weren't a lot of female role models out there. (Oh, yes, there were, of course, but they were hard to find. We certainly didn't learn a lot about them in school.) Helen Keller interested me. I read all her books, and I read all the books I could find that were about her. I called the Tribune information desk and got her address. I wrote her a letter, and got a polite reply from a secretary. Ms. Keller must have been about 85 at the time; she died in 1968 at the age of 87. I looked up the manual alphabet in the encyclopedia, and my best friend and I used it to communicate behind the teacher's back in school. There was a deaf girl at Girl Scout camp one summer; I spelled a-b-c-d to her and she came alive. I taught a whole lot of the other girls to fingerspell. One of the reasons I chose deaf education for my graduate work was that I figured I'd have to learn to sign. And I did.

The funny thing is, in watching this movie, that I can't read Arkin's signs. It's partly because the camera angle is often bad, and he does a lot of fingerspelling. An amateur's fingerspelling is often hard to get; it's definitely a skill that gets better with practice. But some of the signs are just different, too. At one point he's assuring a friend that he'll visit on Sunday. It's an emotional scene, so the signs are being done fast and large, but still... his sign for "visit" is kind of backwards and the motion is different. "Sunday" looks like "great." They do have similar handshapes, but the motion is normally very different.

Very odd. I'll have to see if I can understand the scene where he interprets for the sick man and the doctor.

[ETA: I understood the patient perfectly; I think they got a gen-yoo-wine DEAF guy for that part, and his sign has appropriate rhythm and flow. Arkin's just a lousy signer. And they use a weird sign for "pain." Man, there was a lot about this movie that escaped me when I was 16. The racism theme totally went over my head. I don't remember it at all.]

(Blogging Against Disablism Day)

I have worked with Deaf and Hard-of-Hearing people for 30 years. That's what they call themselves; not "hearing-impaired" or any other euphemistic phrase. (It's amusing to watch a speaker from the larger hearing community fumble for the "right" phrase when addressing a mixed audience. They often opt for "non-hearing", to avoid the dreaded word "deaf." No need. It's not an insult in the Deaf community.) Furthermore, "Deaf" can be spelled with either a capital "D" or a lower-case "d." A lower-case "d" is easy; it's audiological deafness. It's a medical issue, it's a sensory deficit that makes it hard or impossible for people to make use of sound. Lots of people are deaf. My grandmother was almost completely deaf when she died, but she was Hearing. She'd grown up with normal hearing, and, when her hearing began to fail in her thirties, she coped. She had a hearing aid for as long as I knew her. She spoke, she listened, she did not resort to writing. She was Hearing, even when she became deaf.

There are fewer Deaf people in the world than deaf people. Deaf people, capital-D Deaf people, are a linguistic and cultural group, almost an ethnic group, in the US and Canada. (I can't speak for other countries or continents.) Their ears don't work all that well, but that is not their defining characteristic. What makes them Deaf instead of just deaf is their use of Sign Language, and their awareness of their small community as one with customs, tradition, art, poetry, literature and, above all, language. When older Deaf people meet each other, one of the first questions is likely to be "Where did you go to school?" Deaf culture is transmitted laterally; most Deaf people have hearing parents, most Deaf parents have hearing children. Unlike, say, African-American culture, deaf children don't learn about being Deaf from their parents. They learned it at one of the many residential schools for the deaf all over the US. Or they used to learn it. Mainstreaming deaf children into hearing classrooms keeps children home with their families, but it also produces an awful lot of socially and linguistically isolated children, who may be the only deaf child in their district, in a classroom with a teacher who knows little or nothing about teaching deaf kids. Mainstreaming has a lot to answer for. [ETA: I do not blame teachers for this. They play the hand they are dealt, and teachers have more and more dealt to them every year. I am firmly on their side in this; they should receive training and have the help of a teacher of the Deaf for regular consultation. They should also be paid what they're worth, and not have to fill in for parents in teaching values and self-discipline. But, hey.]

Cochlear implants are changing the face of Deafness, too. Hearing parents who find themselves with a deaf child and know nothing of Deafness, turn to their doctors for help. Doctors naturally look at deafness from the medical model of impairment; something is broken, something needs fixing. And cochlear implants purport to help that.

An implant can't make a deaf person into a hearing person. When the battery runs down, when the earpiece is removed, the deaf person is as deaf as ever. Actually, even more so, because the implant takes away whatever hearing that ear had left naturally. But Hearing parents too often look past all that, and see that this device can make their deaf child hear, and they want it.

Deaf parents, capital D-Deaf parents, are far more conflicted. The controversy over implanting young children is white-hot even within the Deaf community, and I won't pretend to understand it all. I am, after all, on the very fringes of Deafness. I am not Deaf (although I am deafer with ever year that passes). I know hundreds, perhaps thousands, of Deaf people, but even though my sign language is pretty good and even some deaf people (never Deaf!) have been surprised to find that I am Hearing, I will never be anywhere but on the edges of Deaf society, watching from the outside.

But what I can tell you is that it looks very different from the inside than it does from the outside. Deaf Pride is a real thing. Deaf people wouldn't opt for hearing if they could have it magically given to them. (Most of my Deaf friends admit that they'd like to try it, just to see what all the fuss is about. They'd listen to music, which is a mystery to a lot of Deaf folks. Trying to describe music to deaf people is like trying to describe color to blind people; you kind of have to be there. But they want to be able to turn it off.) They love their language, they love their community. They don't grieve the birth of a deaf child, they celebrate it. Deafness is a defining characteristic in Deaf people's identities, ahead of race, ethnicity, sex and gender. They are Deaf first, and they are tenacious in their insistence that they are not broken, they are not less-than. In fact, they have this lovely, lyrical, useful language that they use to communicate about love, about science, about politics. They compose poetry and plays. They create "books" on film. They have their own history of oppression and genocide, both cultural genocide and literal genocide. They are doctors and lawyers, teachers, scientists, even musicians.

This is something that Hearing people simply don't get, and I find myself helpless to explain it. A Deaf friend once told me "My disability is deafness, but my handicap is the way hearing people treat me because of it." I'm not sure I can say it better.

Honey, I'm home!

Holy cow, it's been about six weeks since I last posted! There is no real reason for my absence, only a lack of will, somehow; I don't really trust that anything I have to say is of interest to anyone else (I don't mean that in a "poor me" way), but isn't that the nature of a blog?

As faithful readers will recall, I've been at my present job for 30 years, and I am tired and sort of bored. Of course, 30 years of teaching Newton's Laws Of Motion, three times a year, will get to ya. But I've found ways to keep things interesting. Mostly I spend my time finding new/better ways to deliver instruction. I was one of the first faculty members at my school to use web pages. Of course, that's no big deal now, but then it was cutting edge. I use QuickTime movies in my homework (that is delivered and submitted entirely online), and I'm playing around with SketchUp to make movies of 3-D objects to use in homework and on exams. I enjoy it; I would love to be an instructional technologist, but it doesn't pay, and I am putting away as much as I can towards retirement now, so I can't take the cut.

Lately, however, I've become chummy with a younger faculty member. Until recently, I was the entire physics department, but now there's another faculty member, a young woman, who is also in physics. She's getting me back into the research side of teaching. I loved that aspect of graduate school. As the years have gone by, though, I've sunk more and more into the actual mechanics of teaching and instructional delivery, and incidentaly distanced myself from the academic side. But she was attending a journal club every week focussing on physics education research in another college at our institution, and invited me to go, so I have been attending. I've been enjoying it tremendously. The professor leading the discussions is a very enthusiastic, inquisitive guy.

I'd almost forgotten that I'm an academic, too. It's nice to remember. I'm getting involved in a couple of research projects with one of the educational researchers, and I'm coming up with interesting ideas for classroom research to do with my own students. I feel like I'm waking up.

---

It's coming up on the third anniversary of our purchase of this house. We've sunk an incredible amount of money into it since; I don't even want to think of the price tag. We've put in central air conditioning, refinished the white oak floors, painted the interior, made one of the bedrooms into a library with built-in floor-to-ceiling shelves and put in a new kitchen. Oh, and insulated the basement. And now we're having the exterior repainted. We had to do it. It was peeling like a banana. And oh, oh, oh... does it look good!

Before:

After:

Whaddya think? I love it.

---

Budderman is getting old. Most dogs aren't old enough to get driver's licenses; Buddy is. Sadly, his cataracts are so bad that he can't pass the vision test. He walks into things, including other dogs. Just forges on ahead and then *boomp*, right into a door, a chair, a person. He doesn't hear well either. But he's still my Buddy, still my little dog. We've been taking walks since the weather got better, and the exercise is doing him good.

Maybe I'll have the only 20-year-old poodle in the world, what do you think?

---

In our local Landmark Society newsletter I found a fun little web resource: How walkable is your neighborhood? You put your address in and it finds different kinds of community resources like groceries, restaurants and schools within two miles. They assign a score on a scale of 0 -100 according to how easy it is to walk to the things you want to do. A quote:

Your Walk Score is a number between 0 and 100. The walkability of an address depends on how far you are comfortable walking—after all, everything is within walking distance if you have the time. Here are general guidelines for interpreting your score:
90 - 100 = Walkers' Paradise: Most errands can be accomplished on foot and many people get by without owning a car.
70 - 90 = Very Walkable: It's possible to get by without owning a car.
50 - 70 = Some Walkable Locations: Some stores and amenities are within walking distance, but many everyday trips still require a bike, public transportation, or car.
25 - 50 = Not Walkable: Only a few destinations are within easy walking range. For most errands, driving or public transportation is a must.
0 - 25 = Driving Only: Virtually no neighborhood destinations within walking range. You can walk from your house to your car!

It's not perfect; my neighborhood got a score of only 54, and I think it should have been higher. But I've had fun perusing the list of businesses in my area. I like old city neighborhoods, probably because I grew up in Beverly Hills on Chicago's far souf side. I was pleased to raise my own kids in a neighborhood where they could walk to the convenience store for a popsicle on hot summer days, or go down to the park without getting in the car. (I didn't let them go to the park alone, though. There was a kind of sketchy apartment complex across the road, and I wasn't comfortable with them being alone with the teenagers from there who would hang out at the park.)

Some suburban communities around here, the newer developments, get zero scores; whatever those residents want to do, they have to get into the car to do it. Shop, eat, see a doctor. . . I guess they can walk to each others' houses. I wonder if growing environmental consciousness is going to make this kind of little homestead community (out on the prairie with nothing for miles around) less attractive. It's only going to get more expensive to put gas in the old SUV, and it's going to become socially problematic to drive everywhere instead of finding more environmentally sensitive ways to get from here to there. Personally, I hope more people come back to the city centers.

How walkable is your neighborhood?

From the Facebook(tm) "newsfeed:"



Um. Ew? "Shopping season?" We need a pink Mastercard for shopping season? Because girls know that "image is everything," and heaven knows that a pink Mastercard projects the image that "girls" want.

Note that there is nothing here that links this pink card to the breast cancer "everything-in-pink" stuff.

The snow has been falling all day, and the temperature is hovering at the freezing point. The trees and shrubs are laden with thick white snow. The lights from the houses spill out of the windows and light the front lawns, deep in their fluffy white blanket, and illuminate the flakes still falling relentlessly from the light sky.

We may curse this tomorrow as we struggle to get to work, but tonight, it's heart-stoppingly, serenely still and fantastically beautiful outside.

It is Valentine's Day and my darling Mr. OddP brought me long-stemmed red roses. Always go with the classics, that's my boy. (That's not criticism; I did too. Candy and jammies.) They actually have scent (I haven't had florist roses with fragrance for a dog's age; I don't know how or why they bred it out of hothouse flowers, but it seems they did) which is very pleasant and they look very pretty against the accompanying baby's breath in my dark red dining room.

The box, though, has a bit of doggerel on it that has me mystified. It has an undefined sort of Engrish quality to it, but not really Engrish. Perhaps the grower's little granddaughter fancies herself a poet and Granddad indulged her? I dunno. But here it is, reproduced exactly:

. . . When the winds are loud,
when the winds are low,
when the Roses come,
the Roses go;
one thought one feeling is all I know,
my dearest dearest heart

I do like being his dearest dearest heart. Assuming that's what it means.

... and I must obey.

In this post shysterb quotes a T/F quiz question that I wrote on Facebook. (Isn't quoting something from Facebook in a Livejournal entry going to cause a singularity?) It says: "I once warned off a small group of drunk men in New Zealand by faking a Brooklyn accent."

In 1994 I abandoned my children to go to New Zealand on a whim (and a plane) for two weeks to visit one of my invisible Internet friends. We hit the road for most of that time; it was early May and winter was a-comin' in, but winter in NZ is different from winter in western NY, so all was well. We went lots of places and saw lots of things, and found ourselves one windy cold evening in the coastal town of Napier. There wasn't a lot going on in the dark streets of Napier, but we found a restaurant and then went for a stroll. My companion took a few minutes to duck into a public convenience, and I just hung out on the sidewalk waiting. Well, I was thinner then, and had long hair; I could have passed for younger than 41 under a streetlight, where I happened to be. Along came a group of young men, clearly the worse for an evening spent propping up a bar, and, seeing me alone on the sidewalk, speculated aloud that I might like some company. I have no idea what their intentions were, although I didn't feel any real sense of menace. If I had, I might have reacted differently, but as it was, I bellowed "Wha', yoo talkina ME?" in my best Travis Bickle/Randi Rhodes imitation. They stopped dead. "Yoo got sumpina SAY?" I demanded, fists on hips. "Uh, no. No." They turned and wove off in the direction whence they'd come.

My companion was not happy when I told him about it, and I know it could have turned out badly, but I am a firm believer that not looking like a victim is a good strategy for not becoming one.

Anyway, that's how a bad Noo Yawk accent scared off a bunch of hoons Down Undah.

That album cover meme:

Follow these easy steps:

1. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random
The first article title on the page is the name of your band.

2. http://www.quotationspage.com/random.php3
The last four words of the very last quote is the title of your album.

3. http://www.flickr.com/explore/interesting/7days/
The third picture, no matter what it is, will be your album cover.

4. Use your graphics program of choice to throw them together, and post the result in your own journal:



I think it's one of those Canadian bands.


(Note: Edited to fix broken link.)

I was going to ignore this one until jonsiexxx took it, and then I wanted to see how I compared.

86% John Edwards
85% Hillary Clinton
85% Barack Obama
84% Dennis Kucinich
83% Chris Dodd
83% Mike Gravel
78% Joe Biden
76% Bill Richardson
39% Rudy Giuliani
27% John McCain
23% Tom Tancredo
20% Mike Huckabee
19% Mitt Romney
15% Ron Paul
11% Fred Thompson

2008 Presidential Candidate Matching Quiz

No big surprises, I guess.

Now and then I read through some of my old LJ posts. Some of them surprise me with events or thoughts that I'd forgotten about. Some evoke old feelings and joys and pains. So It occurred to me to ask you to rummage through your old posts, too. Post a link (in your own journal) to your favorite LJ post of all time, with a few words, if you like, about why it's your favorite. Then challenge your friends' list to do the same.

I guess this is kind of a meme; it's probably been done before, but I haven't ever seen it.

Anyway, here's a link to one of my favorites: Lives Shared, from September 2006. It's not about much at all, just a small window on one evening in my life.

My darling calsabon is leaving us on Sunday, to go back to college, and we won't be seeing her until Spring Break, unless she and her friends manage to figure out some way to go south for a week. In that case we won't see her until summer. But she's planning a 6-week term in France this summer. So what did I do all day? I worked. I posted lots of class material to my web site and wrote lots and lots of online homework assignments while she puttered around the house. I feel bad. It feels like wasted time. Although it really was very productive, I wasn't with my daughter and that pretty much sucks in all ways.

Oh, and I forgot my allergist's appointment this afternoon. That sucked too.

Who knows how to look at a thing with fresh eyes? I want to look at my job with interest and excitement. I am lucky that I am not a widget- turner, and that I have a huge huge amount of autonomy in what I do and how I do it. Really, I understand how rare that is in the working world, and I try to be grateful for it. I know people who are still teaching from their 1981 notes and I don't see how they do it without going stark raving mad. I never teach the same course twice. Oh, of course the topics that I cover are everlastingly the same, but I have all the control I could ever want over how I teach those topics and I spend a lot of time figuring out more and better ways to deliver more and better instruction. There's a lot of interesting stuff in what I do, and the possibilities are endless.

So, why doesn't it feel like a Shining Opportunity? I can theoretically shape my job in any way that I wish. So why do I feel so plodding?

How do I embue what I do with the old interest and buzz? I know people who have been doing their jobs, similar to mine, for as many years as I have (coming up on 30 now) and they love it. They look forward to what they're doing, they are captivated by the possibilities and they get important things done.

I want that, and I know that it has to come from me. But I don't know how to make it happen.

Stolen from jupiter9, alice_q and others:

I know very little about some of the people on my friends list. Some people I know relatively well. I read your journals, or we have something else in common and we chat occasionally. Some of you I hardly know at all. Perhaps you lurk, for whatever reason. But you friended me and I thank you for your interest in my words.

But here's a thought: why not take this opportunity to tell me a little something about yourself. Any old thing at all. Just so the next time I see your name I can say: "Ah, there's so and so...they listen in rapture to the love-music of she-turnips." I might feel compelled to mock your musical taste, but I'll certainly remember you.

I'd love it if every single person who friended me would do this. Yes, even you people whom I know really well. Then post this in your own journal and see what gems of knowledge appear.

It's Christmas Eve mid-morning. calsabon and I will soon be making Karjalian piirakka to take to her father's house for dinner. I'm watching a Hallmark channel Christmas glurgefest starring Neil Patrick Harris and Debbie Reynolds (I love these sentimental stories, shoot me now.) The living room is awash with wrapping paper and random strewn gifts, and inexplicably a box of espresso hair dye on the coffee table. I can taste coffee and ginger cookies. calsabon and I baked ginger cookies yesterday, ostensibly for the neighbors, but I'm not sure they're going to last long enough to get distributed.

We'll bake the piirakka before calsabon goes to her dad's to help with the preparation. This afternoon we'll bake the piirakka and an apple pie. We'll have dinner and exchange presents this evening with Laura's dad and his long-term SO and her mother. Hopefully this year we will be able to patch halfdreams and linaeloisetook in via iChat for the first time. Modern technology rocks when you have grown children who work retail and can't make it home for Christmas. Then off to church for the 11:00 service, culminating in candles and carols.

Home again, and tomorrow, while there won't be little feet pounding impatiently around our bedroom door, it'll be a warm and relaxed day. We'll do some cooking; our Christmas dinner isn't a giant production. We focus on quality rather than quantity, starring a tenderloin roast and butter-cognac sauce.

Gotta go roll out dough. More later.

And, for your gustatory pleasure:

Cognac Butter Sauce for Roast Beef

1 Tbsp Butter
4 med shallots, chopped
2 Tbsp Dijon mustard
2 cups beef broth/stock
2 Tbsp cognac
3 Tbsp minced parsley
1/2 cup butter cut into 8 pieces

Make this sauce after your roast is resting, before carving.


* If you browned your beef roast before putting it in its roasting pan, use this pan to cook your shallots until soft in the 1 T of butter. (If you didn't brown it, then just use any old pan, with a capacity of at least half a quart. )

* Pour off excess fat from your roasting pan. Add the 2 cups of beef broth to the pan, and set it on high heat, stirring up the brown bits.

* Add the broth to the pan with the shallots. Boil until reduced by one-half.

* Add the cognac, boil one minute. Reduce heat to low.

* Whisk in the mustard and parsley.

* Whisk in the eight pieces of butter, one at a time, incorporating well.

* Season to taste with salt and pepper.


Serve immediately in a warmed sauce boat.</lj>

This is the little bird that I left at Birds Unlimited this evening. Little Dexter has flown the coop. He's still not eating on his own, but he's fully feathered and is ready to fledge very shortly. Paul Lewis, the owner of BU, will hand-feed him until he is reliably eating on his own, and then sell him. He's being sold as a gray, although he's probably a pied; his pied markings are very inconspicuous, so gray he is. And a veritable rainbow inside! His grandmother is lutino, grandpa pied, his two aunts are pearl, another aunt is cinnamon, and his mother is a pied whiteface. Dexter's offspring could be very interesting.

It's a pity that I'll never know.

But Smudge has already laid two more eggs. I don't know yet if they're fertile, but they are a sign that it was time for Dex to hit the bricks. They might have started plucking him if he interfered with another clutch.

OK, the snow is picking up, and the NOAA is saying that there may be accumulations of 7 to 14 inches near the lake. Better. Much better.

It's looking quite pretty out there, and there is a pot roast in the oven. We are watching the Futurama movie, and later I will make some brine and set a pork roast to soaking for tomorrow. I need to do some preparation for tomorrow's classes, although, dare I wish.... Nah, no hope.

We need a lot of wind. Loooots of wind.