daily scatterstatus

  • Nov. 7th, 2009 at 11:30 PM
  • 17:18 Tying narrative/learning to search/info on WWW:
    bit.ly/VoUmr

daily scatterstatus

  • Nov. 6th, 2009 at 11:30 PM

daily scatterstatus

  • Nov. 4th, 2009 at 11:30 PM
  • 11:57 is "officially" on maternity leave with new baby girl, Abigail, 10 lbs 1oz. Yay!

daily scatterstatus

  • Oct. 26th, 2009 at 11:30 PM
  • 10:44 Ideas for Leaders 12(4): Meta Leadership Across Organizations - eepurl.com/esbh

daily scatterstatus

  • Oct. 25th, 2009 at 11:30 PM

daily scatterstatus: notes from a KidSwap day

  • Oct. 19th, 2009 at 11:30 PM
  • 10:38 Client newsletter: full version on site; mailable ver. ready to go after one last client check... Phew! Time to stretch...
  • 10:52 blog.echovermont.org/
  • 12:18 For the 3rd time this past week, a hairy woodpecker is tapping on our house. Not sure whether to worry about the house or the woodpecker.
  • 18:56 Great afternoon with kids b/c of sisterK! Yay! She's so awesome.
  • 23:10 Thanks to GM for ordering http://www.cafepress.com/whimsicaldreams.27285886 !! Much appreciated!
  • 10:46 Involved in conversation about God, world as it is...I find I can discuss this without having same belief in God as my friend has. Cool.
  • 12:04 Did I mention it's SUNNY??!! Glorious!!
    (Must rest now; was stacking some wood in lovely sun + breeze. Slowly, I promise! Very slowly!)
  • 17:05 Uncut version of client newsletter finalized, as are newest contacts. Phew. Now to make website version, cut version, & get it mailed.

Re that God bit: One thing I found interesting was how in the course of responding to some posts recently is that many of us responding felt it needful to clarify our own lack of similar belief. Some of us, not so much. So I was wondering: is it necessary to say you don't share the same ideas (full disclosure sort of thing)? If someone asks for "your thoughts and prayers be with us" or something like that, do you find it needful to explain that you can't quite do as they ask because your beliefs are different? What if the requester is a believer in Faeries, or Norse Gods, or Christian God, or Judaic God? Does how you respond change? What if the believer is sort of similar to you in belief, but not quite? What if you are vastly different? What if the requester is atheist or agnostic, and asking only for well-wishes, and you want to also pray for them?

I'm perfectly happy to talk about my beliefs, but I'm not always sure that mine are particularly relevant to a conversation. This leads me to wonder: can one discuss, debate, analyze, and tease out theological ideas without getting into one's own beliefs, and still do this honestly? I hope so, since that's what I've been doing...I feel like I can ask relevant questions, suspend (as it were) my own disbelief (if any) long enough to say "if so, then what about...?"

Anyway, this natter is mostly an outgrowth of thinking about stuff [info]jaipur has been posting, but not just there (of course); my family has a fairly diverse range of beliefs from member to member, and I'm often interested in exploring the consequences and ramifications of a set of beliefs without wanting to get into who's got the truth of it and whether or not we should agree. I suppose this ties into my sense of a sort of independence of validity (someone's feelings about a circumstance can be valid and appropriate regardless of whether I would have the same feelings about or in those circumstance).

Clearly, I am beginning to ramble. Ooops. Better head off to bed. Or to watch some very silly TV streaming on Hulu. ([info]jere7my, thanks for the recommendation for FlashForward. I like the characters less than in Fringe but think (so far) the story has more interesting layers. Fun combo.)

daily scatterstatus: Ewwwww! Cool.

  • Oct. 13th, 2009 at 11:30 PM

Gotta Good Con? Let me know!

  • Oct. 12th, 2009 at 11:30 PM
  • 10:59 just updated some SF/Fantasy Convention Listings at emg-zine.com/calendar.php for Oct- Feb.
    Always looking for additions/changes!

not crop circles

  • Oct. 11th, 2009 at 11:30 PM
  • 16:18 Lovely time at our first corn maze with MamaJenn, Preston, Grayson! Thanks!
The corn was SO tall! And the sky lovely blue above, with occasional glimpses of gorgeous foliage where the hillside rose enough behind them.

After meandering slowly (me) and racing up and back (kids and Jenn), we found the treat tokens and the 5 clues, but no painted ears. We did learn that the paths made (from above) the shapes of a barn, a silo, and a tractor. How is this done? Can a corn-planting machine be made to lay seed in patterns like a sewing machine can be programmed?

We lounged on the grass near rows of for-sale pumpkins for a picnic, and then bought some brownies from a local school fundraiser, a few tiny gourds, and petted a young Bernese Mountain Dog. I got (unsurpisingly) that much more sore* but it was pretty well worth it.

Mo and I came home, chilled out, my on the couch resting my pelvis joints and working on our Hallowe'en ears and him playing some PBS kids games online** until he talked me into getting up to feed him and make some paper airplane thing...

* The front bone in your pelvis is actually a joint, bound strongly with ligaments. When (if) your body is preparing to deliver a baby, this starts (ideally) to stretch, in part because the baby's head is pressing the hell down on it most of the goddamn time --ahem--at least near the end of the pregnancy. It can hurt. Mine hurts like hell for about half of my waking hours (the other half it's either rested from the night or I'm doing something else and not paying attention to it).

** I try to limit him: One hour of banal repetitive DVD I hide from v. one hour of online somewhat educational games that I can observe while working. Only sometimes it's both. I feel vaguely guilty the whole damn time (why are we not helping each other with chores, doing crafts, building castles, playing music, ...?) even though I know my own grandmother, who I respected deeply, allowed me a similar hour. Ah well! Parenting. Silly thing.
  • 12:11 FASCINATING The Telltale Wombs Of Lewiston, Maine Data show getting paid per procedure is factor in health care.
  • 16:47 Mo and I are making ears for our Hallowe'en costumes. I love making things. He's learning to sew too!
Kind of unrelated posts, there. The skewing of medical procedure frequencies amazes me without surprising me. I really love data-driven stories like this, when we take "Well what's actually happening? Let's find out!" approach. I want to know why the county I grew up in has the highest breast cancer rate in the state (Does it really? Were our docs more likely to diagnose it? What's the recovery rate? What's going on here?).
Are these women more beautiful afterward? Not to my eyes. Certainly the first one is more polished and cleaner-appearing afterward, which is pleasant, but still I think a uneceesarily exaggerated. Would I have seen it, just looking at the billboard?

How shall I help teach my children to see real people, to (if they choose to draw and paint) to include both the real and exaggerated (I certainly do the exaggerations, but not always these directions), to celebrate all of it, in themselves and beyond themselves? Given that so much of the art about faerie and such has for so long (centuries) also had some exaggeration in this way, what does that mean about us humans and what we seek to see? (I mention that more because that's the slant my own art takes, usually, not because I think that's the sum total of art worth seeing by any respect). It's how we internalize our image of ourselves as bodies, but more than that.

Bless Rubens and Paul Gauguin, and that's just the first two that come to my own mind, and they too exaggerate as I think all artists must somehow...
  • 09:19 Joyful thanks to [info]awa55 for fixing our car stereo (and dome lights, clicker, etc.) yesterday!!
the rest of the story... ) For thanks, I bought DAW some coffee and doughnuts; he told us of the other things he's removed from car stereos: small plastic rabbits, coins, legos, keys... I felt (feel!) lucky.

Mo and I sang along to the radio all the way home.

daily scatterstatus

  • Oct. 3rd, 2009 at 11:30 PM
  • 09:39 Sanders amendment to DoD appropriations: Pentagon must calculate the total $ going to companies that have engaged in fraud: bit.l ...

daily scatterstatus

  • Oct. 2nd, 2009 at 1:56 AM
  • 05:54 Google Earth Plug-in: Climate change predictions bit.ly/9vo3v
  • 08:02 Another newsletter draft & a logo added for client review. Got my news thing out.

    All done now; stay-home-kid-who-had-fever is up.
  • 17:42 Even though at-home-with-kid, got some work done (e.g., archiving). Also made soup, other useful chores. Now bellydweller has hiccups. Hee!

daily scatterstatus

  • Sep. 29th, 2009 at 11:30 PM

Defund Acorn ... and others?

  • Sep. 28th, 2009 at 11:30 PM

Forget Baby Einstein

  • Sep. 26th, 2009 at 11:30 PM
Many think that babies, like adults, should learn in a focused, planned way. So parents put their young children in academic-enrichment classes or use flashcards to get them to recognize the alphabet. Government programs like No Child Left Behind urge preschools to be more like schools, with instruction in specific skills.

But babies’ intelligence, the research shows, is very different from that of adults and from the kind of intelligence we usually cultivate in school. ... But babies and very young children are terrible at planning and aiming for precise goals. When we say that preschoolers can’t pay attention, we really mean that they can’t not pay attention: they have trouble focusing on just one event and shutting out all the rest. This has led us to underestimate babies in the past. But the new research tells us that babies can be rational without being goal-oriented.

Babies are captivated by the most unexpected events.