SL 731

~ Laura ~ 4 Comments

Two good videos – a movie trailer (Thanks, Amy P) and a music clip….

In about twenty years, half the population will live in eight states.

Baby zucchini are beautiful right now. Go to your local farmer’s market and get them. Slice up. Throw in a pan with some butter. Add some parmesan cheese while they’re cooking, so they get a little brown. Pull out of pan before they get soggy. No need for soggy zucchini. Add more parmesan cheese. Here’s a recipe if you need that sort of thing.

Where are the educational deserts?

 

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SL 730

~ Laura ~ 21 Comments

After a day or two of yelling at Jonah to get a job, he sauntered into a couple of restaurants into town and got a job in fifteen minutes. The bum. I’m not sure if it’s a full employment moment or it was good timing or it was big green eyes and blond hair.

Anyway, he’s working at a fancy brick oven place where all the ingredients are in Italian and the prosciutto is sourced from a small village in Northern Italian where they only feed their animals acorns or something. He loves it. In between clearing tables, he vapes in the back alley with the tattooed, bearded waiters. So proud.

Anyway, let’s see what’s going on before I have to drive Ian to his jazz drum lessons.  Hmmmm…

Of course, there’s the ongoing insanity in Washington. I still can’t believe our country is being run by the Insane Clown Posse.

How to live on a $25 per hour job in New York City? Get lots of help from the parents! (I had to google Brazilian Sugaring.) (And she goes to Equinox! Ugh. She roughing it!) LINK FIXED

Cities are taking the lead on universal Pre-K.

Work at Home Discipline

~ Laura ~ 22 Comments

Jonah finished his summer class last Thursday. After some debate, he decided to come back home and get a job, rather than taking another class for the second summer term. On Friday, his best friend, who moved to Michigan last year, came and crashed here for four days. They slept late, played hours of Fortnite, and hung out at other friends’ homes until two.

Now the friend is gone. He had a week break from his studies. And my patience with late nights and Fortnite is done. (Though Jonah showed me how to play yesterday, and it was pretty fun.)

I roused him out of bed at 9:30 this morning with a lecture about appropriate activities during the weekday. They include exercising, job hunting, school work organizing, brother entertaining, reading books, pre-studying for classes, and home choring. World Cup watching is okay, too. I gave him the family as an anthill, working together for the common goal speech. He loves that one.

I have a HUGE project that I have to finish in the next week before we take off for the beach. I can’t work if others around me are being slothful.

It’s super hard to get stuff done outside an office, but I’ve done it for years. It requires lists, tricks of the mind, and lots of rules. I’m trying to teach those rules to a teenage boy. hahahahahaha

Party Planning

~ Laura ~ 27 Comments

We hosted two different kinds of parties in the past couple of weeks. Two Sundays ago, we had a small dinner party with a group that we’ve known for 30 years. We spent six hours around the dining room table eating and drinking. The booze and the conversation flowed. Last Saturday, we invited everybody that we know to a backyard keg party.

The small dinner party was easy. The bigger party was more difficult socially, because we have moved a lot and have friends in very different groups. The professors don’t necessary mix well with bikers, although we have one friend who is a center of that Venn diagram. I get nervous when I’m not sure if people are having a good time, so it was difficult to relax until the crowd thinned out to a small group in front of the fire.

Few people host parties these days. (Here’s a how-to article.) I get it. It’s stressful and expensive. People’s social skills are rusty, which necessitates that I flit from group to group to make sure that people are having fun. But big parties are so important. It’s only through socializing that we improve. And being social animals, we need to fight for our right to party.

Have you hosted a party lately?

I, of course, was too busy to take pictures during our party. Instead, I took pictures of the leftovers and the day-after mess:

 

What’s Going On Here

~ Laura ~ 7 Comments

Summer’s here. I went out for a jog this morning. It was a lame jog because I’m still recovering from a cold, but I went out and came back dripping with sweat thirty minutes later. Humidity sucks. I signed up for a 5K in two weeks, so I had better get out there every morning.

Typically, I don’t get much work done in the summer, because I usually have a ton of driving duties as I take the kids to camps or work. But this summer, my driving duties are light.

Jonah is driving himself around; my parents gave him their old Toyota. He’s taking a summer class at his college right now. He’s living in his off-campus house four days a week, and then coming home for three days. I send him off on Monday morning with tubs of leftovers and he returns with moldy containers and dirty laundry on Friday morning.

He’s redoing his bio class that gave him some issues last fall. With another year of maturity, he’s doing great now.

Jonah has surprised us all with a sudden passion for agriculture. And not little organic farming stuff. He likes genetically modified, better living through chemicals, sort of agriculture. His teacher recommended that he get an internship with Dow or Dupont next year. Around the dinner table, he gives us hour-long lectures on wheat that can be engineered to feed all of Africa. He’s adorable.

The class ends on Thursday. He still has to decide if he’s going to do one more summer class until mid-August or get a job as a busboy until the fall.

With one foot in special ed and one foot in the regular world, it’s always tricky to find something appropriate for Ian. Last week, we put him in a 9 to 5 computer camp. We were very worried, because he’s never done a full day program aimed at typical kids. Would he be too weird for them? Would he be able to function without an aide keeping him on task?

He did great. Sure, the first day, the teacher had to get used to him, but then there was nothing but smiles at pickup time for the rest of the week. He kicked ass. He learned the computer program, Unreal Script, which is the engine used to program Fortnight. I’ll sign him up for the entire summer next year. It’s a crap-load of money, but it’s worth it.  Computers are Ian’s ticket out of autism.

In fact, he’s doing so well that I’m not sure what our next step will be. Could he do college? I’m not sure.

Now, he’s got two weeks of summer school at the local high school, with an internship in the computer lab. After a couple of weeks off, he’ll have three weeks of social skills camp and then band camp.

I have some driving duties, but it’s so minimal compared to the past. So, I’m working. I’m working on long term projects, book proposals, and reviving old pitches that fell flat.

The Good News, The Bad News

~ Laura ~ 18 Comments

Two big stories of the day.

This morning, the chatter was all about Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.  There lots of links to her article on Catholicism and criminal justice reform. Check out the commercial that got her the win.

And there’s the awful, awful news that Trump is going to get to nominate another Supreme Court Justice. Ugh. Do you really think that Roe v Wade is in jeopardy? I can’t imagine.