We're Still Here

My kid watches more TV than I like, less than he'd like, and I thank my lucky stars for offerings like Peg Plus Cat. This kid does dig numbers! He's tackling addition and things.

I do boot him out to care for chickens pretty regularly and things like that. We've recently taken up herding the chickens to places. It works best if I block them from going back to the pen and he moves them forward. It works least well if we don't divide the task and just dash around making the chickens all flighty. I figure he's learning patience and self-control -- and I am, too. There's also a certain amount of geometric thinking involved, and I wouldn't be terribly surprised if he does well in the physics of fields and magnetism after working with what's basically a negative-pole-to-negative-pole problem so many times. In short, you want the chickens between where you are and where you want them to go, but if that's not where they are, you have to move yourself to move them. We have invented a dandy brain game that also burns calories.

In the calorie department, I made a lentil stew yesterday, and the kid ate it! And wanted more for before-bed snack! This is exclamation-worthy, as he's been pretty off meat for a while and I'm delighted to find a complete protein source he'll eat.

1 leek
1 sturdy carrot
(Heat in a little oil at bottom of slow cooker before adding the rest)
1 1/2 c lentils
1 c kamut
1/2 c brown rice
Water
black pepper, lemon peel (dried), sea salt, and mineral supplement to taste. Goes well with corn chips or popcorn.

Self-Publishing While the Kid Watches TV

I am now on Lulu with two different publications in two different formats.  If you like small, lightweight paperbacks, I have those, and if you prefer ebooks and the instant gratification on order, I have those, too.  Both stories take place in a world where magic exists, is inherited according to the normal genetic rules for recessives, and isn't altogether popular with the rest of humanity.  I've written some short stories set there, as well, such as "Merlin's Dolphin" at The Future Fire.  Free sample!  None of the characters overlap, but the premises that magic isn't altogether nice and isn't supposed to be used in combat carry over.

Meanwhile the kid is watching Disney Junior and snarfing a brunch.  We've finally moved him into the big-boy form of his convertible bed and he isn't sleeping well, so he's sleeping long instead.  However, I think he's about ready to go romp outside with the chickens and such instead.  We have a garden to hoe and a flowerbed to dig.  Best to get on it, I say.

Fueling the Future

I’m watching a show on the end of oil, which is on CineMoi rather than the national news, and drinking coffee.  There is food for thought in there.  No oil?  No caffeine.  Ponder that for a bit; how much fuel does it take to get your coffee or tea into that cup?  How much does it take to synthesize caffeine?  There are probably sound agricultural reasons we don’t have a Colorado Coffee Company, but the USA runs on oil and caffeine.  Lose one, we lose both, and suddenly we are no longer a world power, but a sad lot of moping, headachy shut-ins.

Another sip, and then I shall go work on my garden a bit.  I’m trying to cut down our dependence on other people’s vegetables and melons, other people’s blackberries and eggs, but in the process I am using a gas-powered tiller, and must confess it’s saving an incredible amount of labor.  Otherwise the pit bulls would be hitched to a small plow, and even they are eating kibble that comes from a manufacturer in Texas.

They’re not happy that I’ve taken up composting.  The division of our garbage used to be recycling, bin, and dog treats.  Now it is recycling, bin, composting, and dog treats, and the compost pile reduces both from the bin side and the treat side.  They’re going to be even less happy when the chickens start eating more than chick starter; chickens make much better compostable material out of waste than dogs do, and guess what’s happening to more of the scraps?  If the poor canines could figure out how to lay eggs, they’d do it, I’m sure.  As it is, two of them are learning to pull and one is learning to herd chickens when it’s called for.  If they’re going to live here, they have to earn their kibble.

Though I must observe that the manuring they give the nut trees does seem to have a positive effect.

On the larger scale, I ponder man’s ability to invent his way out of all sorts of problems.  Whale oil getting hard to find?  Well, that boot-waterproofer works pretty well for a lot of the same things.  And look at that, the methane can be useful, too.  Running out of easy-access plankton from 100 million years ago?  Well, maybe our cooking oil can help out, too.  The question is, do we collect enough energy from the sun in growing the plant sources of the cooking oil to offset the energy burned in harvesting with the old cooking oil for fuel?  Or do we have to use the energy stored 100 million years ago to survive now?

I don’t have the tools to answer questions like that, but I’m finding that as I get older, I’m more interested in learning about these things.  I always was, but sometimes it seems more immediate.  Perhaps it’s the side effect of motherhood; now I’m investing in someone else’s future.  So, there’s a Victory Garden of sorts, to take us out of the demand side of the equation just a little.  I’m trying hard to develop the ability to say “No” to cheap plastic toys, or at least to buy used ones.  Someday, maybe, my son will let me pass on some used ones to other people, but right now he’s at the stage where he loves all his toys, no matter how outgrown they are.  A friend suggested gathering up a bunch and storing them, not for the purpose of getting rid of them someday, but for getting out on rainy dull days as a surprise.  Absence makes the heart fonder and all that.  I tried it, but he’s a scamp at finding stored toys, it turns out.  Judging by the clutter level, it’s time to try again.

He’s a grand little recycler, too.  We found basketballs by a river on one of Mommy’s more eco-oriented outings.  We filled two garbage bags and brought home three “new” toys, which he and the dogs have enjoyed.  I’m hoping none of them absorbed too much river yuckiness, and the basketballs are now falling apart sufficiently to hit the landfill after just a bit more use has been extracted from them.  The water-bomb toy gave one dog a great deal of pleasure and me a great deal of cleanup, but it did have one last hurrah before it, too, became landfill.  There’s not much else to be done with some of the products of our crazy culture.

On the other hand: seriously, why do we need mass-produced water bombs?  The kid and dog had a good time with it, sure, but they could also have a wonderful time with a magnolia cone.  Or a stick.  Or several other things that turn up in my yard for free and aren’t any harder to get out of the carpet once shredded, speaking of energy usage.

My mechanic, after observing my child on the loose in the waiting room for a few minutes, observed, “He’s easily amused.  That’s good.”  My remark at the time was, “He is,” with an eyeroll to indicate it wasn’t always good, but sometimes I think that’s what’s lacking in a lot of people’s children.  They can’t amuse themselves; they need something that took a hundred barrels of oil to produce.  My kid got half an hour’s entertainment out of someone else’s cast-off pistachio shell, and might have gotten more if his grandmother hadn’t gone and mistaken it for garbage.

With luck, this means he’ll be able to solve some of the problems that are absolutely positively guaranteed to come up in his lifetime.  There’s more water in the air (thus more snow and more flooding), and there will continue to be.  There’s more water in the oceans, being salty and polluted, and less in the glaciers, and there will continue to be.  There’s more need to find power that doesn’t involve burning anything, and there will continue to be.  I’m gently nudging him toward interests in practical things like agriculture, meteorology, and engineering.  He seems inclined that way anyway.  His father is nudging him toward more abstract things, like logic, and our son seems inclined that way anyway also; as Charles Lutwidge Dodgson (better known as Lewis Carroll) observed, it’s much easier to teach logic to children than to adults.

Of course, this is also going to make him into either the weird kid or the cool kid, depending on how he plays it and who his classmates are.  I’m hoping for the latter but trying discreetly to teach him the skills he needs to survive the former.  Gregarious little fellow that he is—he picked up TWO girlfriends at a play area yesterday, sequentially, as he’s also energetic enough to play three sets of kids into the ground before getting at all tired—he may never need to deal with being the weird kid, but instead with being the role model.  I’m not sure which is harder.

Like every mom, I spend some time looking at my child wondering who he’s likely to be.  Right now it’s not fair to guess.  He’s interested in everything, energetic as all get-out, and gregarious, but he’s also three.  All of these things are perfectly normal.  It’s on me to channel the drives rather than squash them, and at least I have a little practice in that department.  Maybe everyone should have to train a working dog before having a kid.  I’ve also encountered the idea that before anyone can have a child, they should be required to train a chicken.  Now that I’ve tried to take twenty of five chicks from coop to box so I can clean, I think there’s something to that.  An obliging German shepherd can help mightily with both processes.  “You want the chicks to stay in the box?  Okay.  You lost the kid behind the hedge again and want me to find him?  Okay.  By the way, you know chickens smell bad, right?”  My dogs feel free to editorialize.  Since I feel free to expect them to contribute something to the household, fair is fair.

Still, it bothers me that although French parenting was the talk of the town a year ago, a French take on consumption of world resources seems to be meeting with a vast yawn.  The two do go hand in hand on more than mere Frenchness.  Why are we so determined to load our kids up with boxes that go bing, as Douglas Adams referred to them years ago, instead of teaching them the joys of stick plus dirt, as one of my more cosmopolitan friends advised me to do?  Is it really that much easier?  In the global, thermodynamic sense of energy, we’re now spending incredible amounts more of it to keep our kids amused than we did when we played with them, or when we handed them a shucks dolly to keep them out of our hair while we put our own energy into getting food.  It makes me wonder if we’ve all gone a little nuts.

Mind you, I say this as a mother who does use the Electronic Babysitter to keep the kid busy while I get the food or sweep the floor, but I’m seriously considering cutting the power—“Oopsie!”—and handing him the shucks dolly just to see what happens.  It may be that our house will start suffering more power outages in the next few months than it already does from outside forces.  If nothing else, hitting the circuit breaker now and again might cut our bills a bit.

Speaking of, time to stop thinking deep thoughts and go pay ‘em.  Ah, modern living.

On Chickens

I am one of those peculiar women who always wanted to have a few chickens.  This desire came about when I was quite young, and my parents actually considered getting a few, then, through some decision process I was not a party to, didn’t.  Then there was a flurry of overly urban life, dormitories and apartments and whatnot, and then there was the constant mobility.  Now, I am in my early forties, and my son is in his mid-threes.  And he wanted chickens.  “Science project,” thought I.  “Nice creatures who convert yard pests and weed seeds, both of which we have in plenty, into eggs.”

We have five Buff Orpingtons, a week old, peeping away in his room now.  They’re rather charming little things, feathering up nicely, each with her own personality.  I say “her” with a slight reservation, as though they are supposed to all be hens, one has a decidedly stumpier, rounder tail and a slightly more arrogant personality, and also a much greater confidence in her (his?) wings.  I shall have to consult the feed store about him/her and see if an exchange might be possible.  We do still have neighbors, and also, I wish to try herding these chickens with my dog and do not need a creature with spurs in the equation.

Yes, you read that correctly.  As I research chickens, I am learning a great deal of the Buff Orpington, and have concluded that it is the Golden Retriever of the chicken world.  Inexperienced owner?  Get a Golden – er, Buff Orpington.  Parent wanting an agreeable chicken for the children?  Buff Orpington.  Petting zoo owner wanting to branch out?  Buff Orpingtons.  Crazy lady wanting to herd chickens with her herding dog without inducing mass poultry heart failure?  Er...  How about some nice Buff Orpingtons?

The dog has taken to them immediately, and wants to know why I have not simply dumped the crate of fuzzballs out in the yard so he can boss the birdies.  I feel that a week old is too young for bossing by a German Shepherd.  Instead, I put their box on the floor, or even hold it, and tell him “Away to me.”  He obligingly circles counterclockwise until I tell him “Stop,” and then circles the other way when I tell him “Come by.”  We’re getting our directions that much more solid with no particular trauma to the chicks.  Meanwhile, the big brown eyes plead, “Please, please, please put them on the floor.  Or the grass.  Or anywhere at all.  Let me move this livestock!  If I cannot have sheep, O let me work those fuzzy peeping things!”

Dustin has never realized he is not a Border Collie.  He’ll herd magnolia cones if nothing better presents itself, though he’s expressed grave doubts on the subject of ducks.  They move too easily to interest him, mostly, though the dog-indifferent Muscovies at the park excite him greatly with their utter rocklike stolidity.  He likes to push.  I’m still not sure exactly what a dog does when he pushes on stock, but sometimes I can feel it, too, and I’ve seen Dustin part crowds of people who aren’t even facing him.  Subsonics?  Some sort of pheromone?  Psychic powers?  No idea, but it’s fascinating to watch him lie at the starting post and push sheep back to the fence fifty feet away by choosing to do so.  Also, annoying.  One of the things I want from these chickens is to get “Push” hooked to a command, regardless of what it is that the dog is doing when he does it.  If they choose to flop rather than move, as experienced herders tell me they might, they will provide the perfect opportunity.

Still, at this point the chicks are at the science-project phase of their lives: show the small child what it is to grow from a baby, while he watches what that is in the plant world as well.  It is spring, the time for baby things to be growing up as though we’re watching time-lapse photography films instead of real life.  The tomato seedlings are striving out the window; the bell peppers are following.  When we turn up the garden soil, we find small earthworms who will soon become huge on the manure and scraps of the compost pile, though I hope the non-regional mango and banana peels do not give them tummyaches.  I’m trying to make a quiet lesson of our worm safaris and garden work, though the immediate advantage is not academic, but agricultural; nothing but nothing pulverizes clods of soil like a small boy on a quest to find every worm in the garden.

I measure the quality of our day by the amount of sediment left in the bathtub at the end of it.

Today, perhaps, we will finish turning and cultivating the end of the garden destined for cold-weather crops, the peas and spinach and Brussels sprouts, and plant them.  As they fade, that end will be planted in squashes, whose pests are said to be repelled if you leave a few straggling, woody radishes among them.  We shall see; we always miss a few radishes in the lot, so they may as well do some good.  The other end of the garden, which is being reclaimed after perhaps a decade of disuse (and this, too, is an adventure), is intended for the warmer-weather plants, the tomatoes and corn and peppers and peppers and peppers.  I hope some of the latter survive, as it appears that my pots now hold about ten bell pepper plants and a similar number of hot-pepper-mix results.  However, in past years of planters, the peppers have all blossomed like mad and failed to set fruit, looked spindly for a bit, and then died.  I’m hoping our garden soil serves them better.

I am also hoping that before I get planting on that section, the chicks can be put out there to scratch and peck for a few days.  I have a chicken-tractor setup worked out, and they could cover a block of some sixteen square feet or so for a day, get moved over, and keep me company while I dig up yesterday’s bit and they peck today’s.  I could toss them unearthed grubs and delight their little chicken hearts.  One thing at a time, though.  Today they need their chick crumbles and their newspaper, and they are telling me so.  Peep, peep!

Cross-Posted at my Goodreads blog

Mercy Me

Hard to believe, but the boy's turned three. I'm considering changing his online name from Mowgli, though it still has its apt points, to Yossarian. He falls in love like a Yossarian.

And he is three. He is three all over the place. His way is always best, and he's a contrary little cuss much of the time. This would be fascinating if it were not so annoying and exhausting. He's such a little PERSON, which is funny for a little fellow who is determined to be a baby elephant when he grows up. His toys pretend to be other toys; he pretends to be Peso the Medic from the Octonauts; he goes hiking with me and is determined to climb up and down "rocky cliffs" of fully half his height.

As far as his eating habits go, his fondness for ice cream and donuts is balanced halfway decently by his fondness for avocado, dried apricots, and broccoli, that last because he can pretend he is a giraffe while he eats it. He's still not crazy for most meats, but we can make up for that with dairy things and peanut butter. Luckily that last is not a brand recently recalled!

He's interested in planets, bugs, and anything with wheels. He's interested in robots. He's interested in how the world looks through his magnifying glass. He is not interested in toilet training. He mostly shares his toys and he flirts with little girls in pink. Mommy is tired, but generally delighted. When we're not fighting.

Growing, talking, climbing

Imagine that, I'm the mother of a toddler and I haven't been blogging lately!

Mowgli occasionally makes a soft popping sound of displaced air and then doesn't fit into the legs of his trousers the same way. If I'm measuring right, he's back up to the 90th percentile after a bit of a lag. This despite the fact that he's still largely a fruitarian--we have reached the compromise position that pizza and noodles are also acceptable, and he'll go for yogurt or eggs now and again as well.

Or, as he would like to add at this point, "donut!" It's his best word. I try not to give in to this request too terribly often, but it's hard to deny a young beanpole the odd bit of junk food.

He has the habit of repeating a new word with a question mark, then solidly with an acceptance: "Ambulance," I say, and he echoes, "Am=lan? Ooooh, am-lan!" as though he should have known it all along but just couldn't recall. It's cute. It was particularly cute when we said we had to buy his new Percy toy, not just run out of the store with it, and he said, "Oh, buy!" and ran to the counter. Since there were already people at the counter (they were already grinning at this, too), we said, "No, we have to wait our turn." "Oh, tun!" he said, and grabbed his new toy off the counter to scoot back to his parents. We laughed. Total strangers laughed. And we told him he was doing very well. For his age he's really pretty patient. Of course, that makes it all the more astonishing when he actually acts two and isn't patient at all.

He also loves to go to the local bounce palace, Leapin' Lizards. He'll bounce for three hours solid, right through nap time, given the choice. He also likes to balance on the log in our yard, run races, chase the dogs and cat, and play the up-down game, the last of which is developing great little child abdominal muscles. Mama should be slimmer from chasing after him.

We're managing. He's Thomas-obsessed and Cars-fond, he's addicted to his bedtime books ("More! Read!"), and he's pretty good about washing his hands. In other words, for a twenty-seven month old boy, he's perfectly normal perhaps with a drift toward the well-behaved side. I remind myself of this when he drops food on the floor and then screeches at whistle-style pitches and volumes when a dog eats the droppage.

Watching the Kid Grow

Mowgli has experienced Star-Crossed First Love now. In the Wal-Mart yesterday, checking out balls and things with wheels, he found a Lightning McQueen and a Mater, just shy of shoe-box sized and rated for rather older children, and fell in love.

However, I'd been more in the frame of mind to spend maybe three bucks on a ball or a wheeled turtle, and furthermore it was time to go home for lunch and dog care. I insisted that he could have one minute, counted it down, and put away the Cars cars.

He was heartbroken, of course, and also hungry enough to really pitch a fit. Ah, first love, always the toughest. I told him I completely understood how he felt, but that it wasn't going to change anything. He pitched more fit. I did buy him a squeeze-pack of applesauce, which improved things somewhat. I did wash an apricot for him (he'd already given it a nip in the produce area) once it was paid for, and that too went a long way toward cheering him up.

I'm not sure how long a child's memory lasts at this age, but suspect we will find out very soon. I missed a couple of necessities at the store, and we'll have to go back.

Trips to the toy store

Classically, when parents go to a toy store, it's their job to say "No" a lot. We're far from classical, apparently.

Mowgli now has a toy drum because his father thought he needed it. He agrees with his father, as it happens, but it wasn't his idea. Neither were the wooden puzzles, though he loves them, or the new vocabulary-building board books which give him so many opportunities to announce "Wheel!" and "Door!" He did pick out the little football, though.

The funny part is, we were looking for an airplane. Nothing fancy, just the kind of airplane a small boy can run around the house with, holding it overhead and going "Vwoooosh!" It appears that these toys are simply not available. He seems to be perfectly happy to let his foam letter T perform the office. No doubt this is good for his imagination. We live near an airport, which has turned out to be an unexpected boon to raising a happy child. He loves that we can say, "Hey, let's go look for airplanes!" and generally get one within a few minutes. He loves chasing them across the yard.

Things I've Learned From Children's Television

People with small dogs didn't love their puppies as much as they could have. (Clifford)
8 plus 12 divided by 2 equals 10. (Crashbox)
If you are lost in the woods, follow a frog. (Wow Wow Wubbzy)
Nature and animals are all friendly. (nearly all of them)
No-one can do anything alone. (WonderPets)
The use-mention distinction is irrelevant. (Word World)
Unaccompanied monkeys can accomplish a lot. (Curious George)
Corollary: Adults don't know much.
You can influence what happens on the TV. (Most Nick JR programming)
Cockoos have family ties. (Go Diego Go)
Pigs are a lot like people. (Olivia, Peppa Pig, Toot and Puddle)
Gorillas have kings, lines of inheritance, and coronations. (Go Diego Go)
A map doesn't need to indicate direction, forks in the road, or distance. (Dora the Explorer)
Dogs, cats, and other common pets don't talk; other animals do. (Most)
The wind will change direction 180 degrees when your boat reaches the other end of the pond. (Little Bill)
Rivers may be found next to gorges. (Go Diego Go)
Fairy tales all have happy cooperative endings. (Super Why)

The State of Mathematics Education in the USA

I have the National Geographic channel on for the nifty astronomy and am thinking deep thoughts about humans' ability to consider powers of ten.

You see, the show is one of those terror-producing explorations of the impending doom of the Earth when the sun goes into its red-giant phase. It'll happen, and "sooner than we thought!" There is much emphasis on how one solution, pulling the Earth into a wider orbit, would take six thousand years to take effect and had to be accurate to within a billionth of a degree of arc. We could colonize Mars. We could travel to other suns.

Of course, when they do admit to a timeline, the events in question will occur in five billion years. That's billion, with a B. To astronomers, this is perhaps imminent. To geologists, that's the age of the Earth's crust. To biologists, this is 2 1/2 times as long as there's been identifiable life on earth of any kind whatsoever. The dinosaurs died out about 65 million years ago -- approximately 1/100 the scale of time we're talking about here.

I may not be able to say a lot about what life, if any, will be on the Earth when the sun expands, but I can say one thing for sure: the pronoun "us" is probably not going to have a lot to do with it. DNA just isn't that stable a molecule.

Likewise, I have to grin a little at the Congressional attempts to balance the budget of the USA. Trillion-dollar deficit, addressed with a proposed $61 billion in budget cuts. Most of these are on the order of scrapping the money for the Museum of Cowboy Poetry, a few thousands, which is almost certainly all wages for the employees. This is akin to breaking your kids' piggy banks to pay off your mortgage, and will be about as appreciated by the owners of the piggy banks. Seriously -- that's $61 billion in money that's employing people. By my math, at $50K per person, that's another 1.2 million unemployed people. Isn't that just exactly what our economy needs right now? Lately, we're happy if the economy gains that many new jobs in six months. There's gotta be another way.

Local Wildlife, Atlanta Suburbs

The little tyke is asleep at last, and I'm trying to get some writing done. Blogging sometimes gets the ideas flowing.

It's hard to switch gears to fantasy worlds from the grim gritty reality of trying to get the little one to eat ANYTHING other than fruit. Also from the grim gritty reality of grim gritty reality, where it's a fine and wonderful thing that the child is fond of the Swiffer and not so wonderful that he's scared by the vacuum cleaner. The dust wolves were getting scary, though, so he had to put up with at least some of the roar and whoosh this morning.

Speaking of dust wolves, we had a peculiar canid running around our neighborhood last week. We heard something that sounded like a dog in dire trouble in the wooded lot next door, and the creature ran away when my husband went out to check on it. A night or two later, I caught something sable-ish, pointy-eared, and long-tailed in my headlights near the elementary school a block away. I pulled into the lot to do the whistle-and-coax routine, got a better look, and instead said out my window, "You're not a dog, are you?"

Cheeky coyote looked back at me, not at my headlights, and said pretty plainly, "Nope."

"You don't need any help, do you?"

"Not a bit," said coyote, standing calmly at the edge of another wooded lot.

"All right then," I said, and turned the car around as the critter vanished into the woods.

It looked like a young one, and after one more yap-fest I haven't heard it around again, so it may have been passing through on a quest for territory, or it may have been shot. Sad to say, this suburban neighborhood has a fair amount of shooting going on now and again, and when our roof was checked recently for damage, a bullet turned out to by lying atop our den. That's the sort of thing that puts my sympathies with the coyote. Mowgli is never out alone, of course, and generally has an honor guard of dogs who weigh probably from five to forty-five pounds more than any coyote, never mind that young one. I doubt Master Coyote takes passes through our yard if he can go around, in fact.

Still, he's something to consider if we decide to get a few hens!

Wow, it's been a while

Mowgli has reached the age of grabbing the computer keyboard whenever I turn on the screen. This has, obviously, made typing more than a little difficult. Today he is taking an unusually long nap, allowing a certain amount of typing to happen. Despite the impediments, I have a new story out at Enchanted Conversation and have a couple more that need to be edited and sent around. Half-Sick of Shadows could do with more sales. Seriously. Also, it could do with reviews at Goodreads and other pats on the head.

However, that doesn't mean I'm not enjoying the little one, even if he is stealing all my writing materials (he loves pens) and hanging onto my leg. He's a clever, inquisitive, and bold little creature, which means we both learn a lot as he trots around the house, yard, or library. We've made it to a few of the nursery-rhyme events at the public library, and he enjoys exploring places like malls and grocery stores. I have begun to use his baby-leash, which looks like a monkey backpack with a really long tail. It's been quite handy for keeping him nearby while I pay for his new hat and mittens.

Perhaps a few words about Half-Sick of Shadows are in order. Once upon a time it was part of a fanfiction saga. The saga itself turned inside out and upside down in my head (I was taking a prescription dose of codeine cough syrup at the time, though I'm not sure how responsible that was) and landed in its own dark little magical alternate universe. The current work is part of that set, the part I could get together the most readily. Somewhere, someone claimed that one of the basic plots begins "Someone goes on a journey," and this is one of those stories. During the Blitz, little Elena's parents stuff her onto a train and send her to her aunt in Wales. Dreamer that she is, she dreams herself into a romance much too young, and returns to the town when she is old enough to act on that romance -- never mind that Johnny Howell was recalcitrant material at best. He never intended to fall for a witch, for a start.

The rest of the set is concerned with their son, Ichabod, and with other members of the family tree. The one most likely to be published next is Carried by the Tides, which takes place around the time of the First World War and Russian Revolution. It begins with the mirror of the above plot-seed: "A stranger comes to town." Ichabod's tale is still working itself out, as it is a complex thing about a complex person, but is looking to begin with an amnesia.

I also have a poem, of all things, out in print. I'm on page 109 of Through The Keyhole, which is published to benefit the charity Room to Read. Room to Read builds libraries and schools, supports local-language authors, and promotes secondary education for girls in areas that traditionally favor educating boys. MNFF promotes the idea that fanfiction can be a tool for learning to craft a well-written story. You might say I'm a fan.

Obliviously Obvious: the Blurb

Copied book blurb:

Where you ever in Quebec ? Were you ever responsible for a yard sale, for a bake sale or for the resale of overly ambitious hedgehogs? Even if not, join the celebration taking place in Oblivious to the Obvious: Wishfully Mindful Parenting of junk mail-fashioned sculptures, of hungry, angry, riotous quolls and of shiny, acrylic pantsuits. As you turn this book’s pages, you are invited to sigh, to pout and to otherwise chortle in unison with KJ Hannah Greenberg as she tells tales about raising modern children.



In Oblivious to the Obvious, the joys of nay saying gothic nail polish and the horrors of encountering roosting lizards are explicated. Children who argue over their portion of motel rooms, siblings who fight over car seats and youngsters who go into battle over whose turn it is to empty the dishwasher all are included.



In this book, family life is not merely one mom’s experience of shouting down the hall to demand that the kids lessen the decibels issuing from their stereos, Ipods, and stringed, electric instruments nor is it merely one mom’s exploration of teenagers’ uncanny fashion sense, of nursing toddlers’ surprising schedules or of elementary school children’s notions about how to construct good sandwiches (marshmallow fluff coupled with pickles chips ranks fairly high on such lists). Rather, Oblivious to the Obvious is also concerned with nodding at broken heaters, at flooding toilets and at scores of uninvited visitors, both human and multi-legged in nature.



Sit back and laugh as Hannah chooses, daily, between five minutes of sleep and hot water for her shower, as her furballs succeed in reigning supreme, except for when they knock over her antiques, and as her family’s craft materials breed faster than do most of her dust bunnies. Smile, too when Hannah’s children discover that there’s no more ketchup in her entire house or when they realize that the singular piece of athletic gear brother needs for a sporting event has already been absconded with by sister for a drama presentation.



It’s not remarkable to be possessed of a husband, of a bevy of children, of a home, and of a job. Sadly, however, it’s becoming increasingly rare to be able to beam about such assemblages. Oblivious to the Obvious: Wishfully Mindful Parenting can bring that solace back, can help you work your smile muscles and can aid you in stretching what’s left of your sanity.



Join Hannah in frenetic her romp through exhausted printer ribbons, busted vacuum cleaners, and tuckered out grandparents. Find your inner oven mitt, retrace your report card traumas, and laugh, just a little, over lice, brown rice, and the nice things most of us tend to say about smelly, sticky babies.



Oblivious to the Obvious will not get your kids to bed on time, will not remind your husband to leave you love notes, and will not cause your employer to give you a raise or to stop asking you to make coffee. Oblivious to the Obvious will, however, help you express amusement at such small things.




Oblivious to the Obvious: Wishfully Mindful Parenting is available now! Please visit Oblivious to the Obvious: Wishfully Mindful Parenting! for excerpts or go directly to Amazon to order.

A House Divided

I'm trying to complete rewrites on my Science In My Fiction entry. I am also trying to keep little Mowgli under some control or at least observation. He's determined to crawl after the dogs, the cat, and any fancy that strikes him. I'm determined to produce a good story.

The story, however, is nearly as recalcitrant as the baby. Half of it is now in past tense, half in present, with switches in mid-paragraph. Since new sentences tend to be in present, I'm trying out the whole story that way; if it stinks, I'll try all-past. Plotwise, it's almost where I want it but I can't seem to see what it needs when the file is open, only when it is closed -- and then when I look for where to put the new bits, there's no such place.

The story is also supposed to have links to new scientific events which have inspired it. There are plenty of those, as I am something of a science nerd, but the roots go deeper than that. When I was eight, I was torn between becoming a veterinarian or a meteorologist (yes, always something of a science nerd). Or, of course, maybe a writer. This story has some of both of those, back when I was blissfully unaware of all the dreadful things vets sometimes have to do, back when climate change was a rumor instead of something every yahoo what's had a drop of rain fall on his head has an opinion about. At least when someone ventures an opinion on some story of mine, I can be confident they've probably read some other ones by other people as well.

Maybe that's why this story is turning out to be difficult. It requires research, but most of my stories either require it or come from it spontaneously. It's in a new voice, but what fun is a story in the same old one? But it also comes more from my own past and present than most, and is at the same time about the end of the world. This is a most uncomfortable literary apocalypse, then.

But enough grumbling. I must go recover the baby from the next room before he does something dreadful.

Testing -- Facebook link

I'm also trying to get more people into the Travelers' Tales group, so if you want to follow my latest writing and publishing news, please join!

Chasing the Baby

On The Move

The baby is teething, crawling, kneeling, sitting, and doing his darnedest in the standing and walking departments. He's eight and a half months old, mind you, and I keep telling him there's no hurry. He disagrees. What he's not doing much of is sleeping.

In the course of writing that last paragraph, I pulled him out of a corner, sent him after a push-and-go toy, and...

and recovered a stray kibble of dog food from his grabby little fingers. It's no wonder I'm not posting much! Anyway, in the near-ish future, look for announcements regarding an online buddy's book, a review of my camera, and other such news.

Meanwhile, though, I will announce my own book, or rather ebook. Half-Sick of Shadows is now out at Shadowfire Press. I feel odd calling an ebook publisher a "Press," as nothing is pressed except perhaps time.

Where Have I Been?

It's been a busy couple of weeks. Shadowfire Press picked up a set of stories I've been working on for some time, and the first will be coming out May 21. For those of you looking at your calendars, yes, that is SOON. Half-Sick of Shadows will be available in ebook format, and soon after, perhaps, the rest.

This means that for the last few days I've been working on art request forms, taglines, and the like. For whatever reason, a fifteen-word tagline is much harder to write than an 18,000 word story. It comes off cryptic, or inadequate, or dull, or too much like a fortune cookie. The author bio is even worse, or at least it is if you've lived a writer's life: baking bagels, training dogs and shoveling kennels, flipping burgers, adjunct teaching, periodicals checkin at the library, and so on. I tend to think that a bit of variety feeds the muse. The muse may, at this point, get indigestion.

The little fellow is fine, though. He wallows around on (and off) a blanket on the floor, attempts to eat my laptop, swats at keys, and generally makes himself helpful. He's getting interested in Cheerios now, though has not yet worked out the art of putting them in his mouth himself. He'll eat them from my fingers. He's grabbing at them happily. The bridge will eventually connect here to there. I'm now finding that babies are crawling into all my short story efforts.

Happy Earth Day, Dear Mowgli

I just signed up for Boobquake on Facebook. Earthquakes have been on my mind lately -- and probably a good many other people's as well -- and it's both a good experiment and a good excuse to wear something low-cut. Unfortunately, we have a design flaw in the experiment, namely, that there are so darned many earthquakes lately that it'll be hard to separate signal from noise.

Recently I was watching TV while nursing the little one. This happens a lot; he tends to keep my hands too full to do much of use, so I try to put it on something educational for one or both of us. This particular time, I was learning about the last great ice age and glaciation, and that the mass of ice on the center of North America was sufficient to bend the continental plate, heaving up such features as Florida.

You know. Nothing big. Just Florida.

Then we had a nice run of quakes and volcanic eruptions all over the place. This sort of thing makes me thoughtful, and that's like the TV-watching. There's more time for it these days when I'm pinned under a breast-feeding baby. Eventually I wiggled free and played with Google. You can get some very interesting scholarly papers from 2006 or so predicting that decreased glacier mass would cause reduced downward pressure on continental tectonic plates and therefore more volcanic eruptions and more earthquakes.

I noticed that the first few results said nothing about the corresponding increase in pressure on the oceanic plates. Granted, every inch downward the oceanic plates are forced is an inch less that the ocean rises to swamp continents, and that's great if you're on a continent and rather sucks if you're on an island. However, it seems to me that taking this pressure into account makes the melting of glaciers an even bigger problem. Surprise! It's all one planet, and when something changes in the atmosphere, that can affect the crust.

So, what can one worried mother, who would feel bad bringing forth a son into a world of lava falling from the sky onto the constantly trembling earth, do?

I can drive less, and decrease my carbon footprint (and expenses). I can eat less beef, and decrease the methane footprint. Surprisingly, a great many green choices save some green in the other sense: living on whole foods is cheaper than living on processed ones, and there's a lot less discarding of peels, cartilege, and so on in home prep, especially if you give yourself a jaw workout on the cartilege. I'm hoping to replace our energy-sucking fridge with one that would pay for itself in about two years. All of these are small acts by one small person, but it beats not doing them.

Naturally, this is when Georgia in its infinite wisdom thinks it'll help people's finances by NOT funding public transit. Whose finances, exactly? Public transit tends to benefit those who cannot afford to drive, and I'm not too clear on what they're supposed to do without it. Gas prices are supposed to go up right in time. We chose this house because there was a bus stop at the end of the block; being near public transit lines was the big selling point of this lemon.

Big and Tall Babies

I went shopping for a new sleeper for Mowgli yesterday. He's six months old now, and finally ready for those six-month-sized summertime sleepers everyone gave us in the belief they were getting things timed just perfectly.

Problem is, the nine-month size goes up to 27.5 or 28 inches in most brands. He measured as 28 inches two weeks ago at his well-baby checkup, and probably has added a half-inch by now. He's not fat, inclining more toward the bean-pole build of his father, but the distance from the shoulder of the sleeper to the foot is the part that matters, and lesser circumference about the waist doesn't help much.

The real problem, however, is that we've reached another point where the design changes to accomodate developmental stages. A twelve-month-old baby is presumed to be sleeping under a sheet, so his pajamas don't have feet and come in two-piece sets. A six-month old baby in those will wiggle backward and end up with the pant legs up around his thighs, the top bunched under his armpits, and drafts on places he's used to keeping warm.

We had exactly the same problem with newborn clothing, which Mowgli outgrew in his first few weeks. Newborn sleepers come with cuffs that could be turned over into little mitts. A newborn's circulatory system can leave him with shockingly cold hands without those little mitts, we discovered because we couldn't find any bigger sleepers that had them. Poor baby was also upset because he liked sucking on his mitts for comfort, and sleeve cuffs were apparently a poor substitute.

I may have to break out the sewing machine and learn to sew summer-fabric sleeper sacks. In this world of supersize everything, where are the supersized baby clothes?

Exploring the World

Brightly colored toys are all the rage now. We've started on pop beads as a good outlet for Mowgli's desire to pull things apart and feel mighty. This desire has been very hard on his books! Also, ours. We're reading to him a little less now, but I'm trying to make up for it with lots of real-life experiences like textured quilts to crawl on and mango baby food to sample.

Mango was okay. It was worth two wrinkled-forehead moments, but vanished all the same. However, Mowgli prefers his father's Elder Scrolls official game guide. Nummers!

Happy birthday, Grandpa!