Fun With Limericks

So, the Happy Boy has a problem that we suspect most kids his age have: his shoes just want to be free. Either that, or his feet just want to be free. That is, his feet and his shoes don't mind their relationship, they'd just rather that it wasn't so... close.

And, the Happy Boy has another problem that many kids his age has: molars. Now for kids this age, molars are a big problem. They hurt. Here are these huge teeth trying to push their way up through the baby's gums! Ow. And as just about every parent will tell you, when the baby is teething, nobody's very happy. (Least of all, the parents who have to change the diapers. But this post is not about baby poop, so let's just leave that topic right there, shall we?)

So the Happy Boy has sore gums, which he likes to soothe by finding handy objects that he can cram in his mouth and gnaw upon. Or rather, he likes footy objects. That's right, this semi-mobile genius has discovered a use for shoes that don't stay on the feet.

His sisters think it's funny when he takes his shoe off and crams it in his mouth. Frankly, I do too.

So, in the spirit of the moment, I popped off with an appropriate Limerick I've known since childhood. (And Lord knows, there are plenty of inappropriate Limericks out there; I didn't pop off with any of those.)

There once was a man from Peru
Who dreamed he was eating his shoe.
He awoke with a fright
In the dark of the night,
And found it was perfectly true!

The Pillowfight Fairy loved it, and had me repeat it. Then she had me repeat it again. Then, when she wanted me to repeat it again, I turned the tables and had her repeat it. After all, she's pretty good at memorizing poetry, and I figured it was good to get her started on the Limerick form. So pretty soon we were taking turns spouting off about the Man from Peru.

Now I remember a melody that I was taught in my elementary school music class, way back when the earth was cooling, that we could use when singing Limericks. I don't remember the title of this tune. And I don't want to go through all the work of recording a sound file for you to download to give you a sense of what it sounds like. Instead, just imagine a bit of music sounding a little like the "Mexican Hat Dance" with the right number of syllables that one can sing a Limerick to it. Got that image in your head? Good.

So I sang about the Man from Peru to this very upbeat, silly melody that sounded like the Mexican Hat Dance, and the Pillowfight Fairy loved it. After about five or six repeats, the Fairy had the tune pretty much down, and was singing along.

But after a while the Man from Peru needs a little rest (not to mention a liquid diet), so I decided to pull out some other ones I knew. I started with the one that I composed way back here:

One thing I discovered is true:
It's quite a bit harder to do
A limerick that's pure,
Discrete and demure,
Than conjure a raunchy haiku.

Of course, I sang it to the same tune as the previous one, and I put in a little Satchmo growl on the last line. The Fairy loved it. So, on to the next one, which I learned from my dear Sister-In-Law, and which I now sang in a pirate accent (Arrrrgggg!):

The Limerick is furtive and mean.
You must keep her in close quarantine,
Or she slinks to the slums
And promptly becomes
Disorderly, drunk, and obscene.

We were having a great deal of fun now, so I started pulling out every clean Limerick I could think of, and singing them to that ridiculous Mexican Hat Dance tune:

A bather, whose clothing was strewed
By breezes, which left her quite nude,
Saw a man come along--
And unless I am wrong,
You thought this line was going to be lewd.

...well, not entirely clean. But she's five.

Well, this was a whole lot of fun, and I was running out of Limericks, so I pulled out my copy of Selected Poetry of Ogden Nash and started to mine it for gems:

There was a brave girl of Connecticut
Who flagged the express with her pecticut,
Which her elders defined
As presence of mind,
But deplorable absence of ecticut.

Ok, this was fun, but it was going on a bit long, and getting a wee bit too close to the edge. But the Pillowfight Fairy was loving it. So she decided to do some. Now the Fairy, when she wants to make up poetry, doesn't sit down and start working out rhymes. She doesn't say to herself: "Ok, I'm doing a poem about bunnies, so I need to find all the words that rhyme with bunnies, like funnies, and honeys, and monies...." No, when she writes a poem, she doesn't work out the rhymes in advance--she just starts freestylin'. And if the word she puts at the end of the line happens to be something like purple, she's just out of luck when she gets to the next line and can't come up with a rhyme on the spur of the moment. But then she'll do a little of the Ogden Nash thing and make up a word that fits, darn it.

And I was pretty impressed with what she came up with. I must apologize that I can't remember any of her Limerick creations; they had so many neologisms in them that it would take a team of linguists (and psychologists) weeks to figure out what was going on in her head. But I noted that, even though we haven't done any formal studying of poetry at all, she has the Limerick form down cold.

Of course, after this whole Limerick episode was over, and the Fairy had gone on to play with other things, I started finding and remembering other Limericks that would have worked beautifully in our little game. Another one from Ogden Nash:

There was an old man of Calcutta,
Who coated his tonsils with butta,
Thus converting his snore
From a thunderous roar
To a soft, oleaginous mutta.

I am, and shall always be, in awe of the genius of Ogden Nash, the man who could put "oleaginous" in a poem and get it to work. I wouldn't be surprised to hear that he woke up one morning and thought to himself: "Hmm. What should I do today? I think I'll write a poem around the word oleaginous."

Much fun. Anyway, I'll close out with one more poem from Nash--not a Limerick, and wouldn't fit with the Mexican Hat Dance song, but I came across it in my Limerick hunt and loved it:

Here is a dream.
It is my dream--
My own dream--
I dreamt it.
I dreamt that my hair was kempt,
Then I dreamt that my true love unkempt it.

I Really Do Have Excuses--Lots of Them

Well, when I started this blog, I was thinking I would try to keep up a pace of one blog post per day--that seemed reasonable. And then I found myself skipping days, and making up for it on other days with two or three short posts.

And then the holidays hit, and I was out of town. But I was able to keep up a reasonable pace there for a while!

But nothing could save my blogging from its latest challenge: ennui. Sheer, unadulterated ennui.

For one thing, I ran out of interesting things to write about. For another, my wife has been feeling under the weather, and needed more of my attention (and just more down-time in general), and this necessitated me not spending so much time on the computer. For another, we've had some videos lying around that we haven't finished watching yet, and we wanted to get to them--and we don't use a TV, we just play videos on the computer (thus no blogging). For another, Tonya has become addicted to playing Sid Meier's Civilization IV.

Heck, I've become addicted to playing Sid Meier's Civilization IV--but not like Tonya. Unlike her, I can stop any time I want. ;-)

Just kidding; I'm just as bad as she is. Last Thursday, after I put my kids and my then-ill wife to bed, I found myself starting up a game and losing all track of time--not shutting the thing down until 12:30 or so. Tonya didn't do much better last night (Saturday); she didn't shut it down until 12:15. I think the pattern is that I don't play as often as she does, but when I do play, I just... can't... stop....

I say, that is a truly evil game. Too bad I can't find more time to play it.

But this week was spent getting back into a normal routine, and Tonya and I are very happy about this fact. We're getting our strength and sanity back. And this was the first normal weekend we've had in a very, very long time. No traveling! No performances! Not even any rehearsals, for crying out loud! We had time to lounge about and have one of those Sabbath thingies, the lack of which I've lamented before.

Oddly enough, the off-schedule-ness of the last few weeks has hampered my blogging, not enhanced it. You'd think that a person would run out of ideas while living in a regular, daily routine, and would come up with new ideas while doing new and exciting things while off the routine. I find that this isn't the case. When I'm on my routine, I actually have the chance to learn lots of new and interesting things, and I have some time to myself so I can think. Furthermore, my children's homeschooling progress and antics are major sources of ideas for blog posts. If all these wellsprings of ideas are disrupted, I quickly run out of things to say. Those of you who don't blog (or don't blog regularly) would be surprised how hard it is to come up with even one interesting thing to say each day, every day. I find that when I'm blasted out of my routines, I'm often out of touch with my regular muses, so to speak--or that when I do come up with something interesting to say, I'm away from my computer.

Anyway, now that the routines are starting to be re-established, hopefully we'll all get back to being ourselves, and I'll be blogging a bit more regularly again soon.

In the meantime, here are a few items I found noteworthy over the last few days:

• Very, very briefly this week, I found myself wishing I was in Baghdad rather than here. As you may imagine, the feeling went away very quickly. Still, I found that to be one of the happiest news stories I've seen in a long time.
• We got our minivan back from the body shop! We are now using our own set of wheels again. The kids are once again fully separated and unable to play the "quit touching me!" game. This goes back to the idea of we're finally back in our own routine. And this is a wonderful feeling. Now if we can just drive a little more carefully, we'll be OK.
• For those of you who are wondering: no, Tonya's not pregnant yet. We were wondering when she got sick this week if that was the case, but it's not. We think she was done in by some overripe thousand-island dressing she put on a salad. As for me, I stay healthy by avoiding the salads entirely. :-)
• The Pillowfight Fairy keeps bending the English Language to express her mighty will. Two from today: while trying to coax her out of bed this morning, the mostly-still-asleep five-year-old intoned: "I'm unawakeable." Then about dinnertime tonight, while contemplating the pad of paper where we write our grocery lists, she said, "You need to write love here. We need more love."

We explained to her that you can't buy love; but we had to concede that yes, more love would in general be a good thing.

Unfortunate Pattern

There's a great scene in the 1984 comic movie All of Me (starring Steve Martin and Lily Tomlin) in which the Swami (who's been brought to America to perform this weird soul-transference ritual, but who knows nothing of life in the west) is exploring his hotel room. He happens to flush the toilet, and is rather startled and confused by the weird noises the thing makes. But right at that moment one someone calls the hotel room (trying urgently to reach one of the other characters), and the phone rings. The Swami looks up, and the light of comprehension goes on: so he immediately flushes the toilet again... and of course, the phone gives another ring. So he happily flushes a third time, and the phone gives another ring, and so on....

This is an example of what people mean when they say "Correlation is not proof of causation." Of course, normal people don't say stuff like that in everyday conversation, but if they did, this would be an example of what they mean.

Of course, that doesn't keep us from speculating. If we see A happen a lot, usually followed by B, it makes us suspect that A has something to do with B. If the correlation is strong enough, it usually means that there is some kind of causal mechanism. The trouble is that we tend to jump to conclusions before we have a meaningful sample. After we've seen A and B happen together two or three times, we tend to start thinking that A and B are linked--even though there's still a good likelihood that it's a false correlation, caused by random chance.

So why do I bring this up?

In part, that's because I'm not a normal person, a la Paragraph 2.

But, Tonya observed a pattern today that is simultaneously really annoying, and downright hopeful. You see, Tonya and I have been considering trying for a fourth kid. After all, we really like the three we have, and we've decided that we could really use a little more chaos in our lives.

Ahem.

So here's the annoying pattern. Every time Tonya has gotten pregnant to date (with all three kids, and with the pregnancy that we miscarried), she has always come down with some hideous feverish plague of some sort within a month or so before conception, that causes her to lose any interest in food for at least a week. Every time, her weight has taken a huge drop within the month before conception--and this isn't the kind of weight loss that one feels good about. (Tonya was one of those women who as a young lady had trouble keeping weight on--and before you ask: no, she did not consider that a blessing.)

So, now that we're trying to get pregnant again, Tonya has come down with some kind of evil bug that's pretty well laid her out flat. The very smell of food--the mere thought of food--is turning her stomach. She tried to take the kids to the library today, but thought better of it just as she was approaching the library door--so they dropped the books off in the depository, turned around and came straight home. She tried to do her nails today (since the girls wanted theirs done too)--and the smell of the polish nearly wiped her out after she'd only finished one hand. She had no dinner; only a little water to keep herself hydrated.

Now, there is no rational reason to think that this sickness presages another little bundle of joy. I am completely unaware of any reasonable mechanism that might link a nasty bug and sudden loss of weight with fertility. But darn it, when something as yucky as one of these bugs comes around, it's very tempting to reach for any reason at all that can possibly justify the suffering. After all, Tonya had this stuff happen to her four times already just before getting pregnant; why shouldn't it happen like that again?

As I've said before, reason is overrated. :-)

And do keep Tonya in your thoughts and prayers.

Craft Time Just Got a Lot More Interesting

Well!

We thought it was very interesting when our five-year-old developed an interest in Thneeds, but that phase passed, as these phases often do. But you'll be happy to know that she is still interested in making things that everyone, everyone, everyone needs. Well, half of us, anyway.


Can you guess? Take a moment and guess. Hint: I decided to pose them here next to the Naked Lady we have on our dinner table.

Ok, time's up.

Out of the blue today she announced that "I need some paper. I'm going to make a bra." And she did--she made the pink one.

And that was so much fun, she decided to make a whole set, in different colors! And as if that wasn't enough, her 3-year-old sister decided she wanted in on the act too, so the Pillowfight Fairy made her the one in white (obviously, since it has a smaller cup size than all the others).

Actually, given the lack of cleavage involved here, these bras would work just fine. If they had some sort of clasp mechanism involved, that is. And if they weren't made out of construction paper. (Like a lot of fine lingerie, they'd just fall apart in the wash, don't you know...)

So we had a rather amusing evening tonight, as my two daughters were running around the house wearing these things. Of course, they couldn't get them around their bodies, due to the aforementioned lack of clasp (and the fact that they would have been really really tight); so they were running around the house wearing them on their necks, which made for really weird visual images when you imagined that those were supposed to be bras. It prompted me to comment to my wife something along the lines of "We appear to have a serious outbreak of boob-on-neck plague in here tonight."

Forgive me Father, for I have sinned....

I've Been Threatening...

...to start taking up the crafting of chainmail.

"Seriously?" I can hear you saying.

Um... not really. I have no idea when I'd actually have the time. I'd probably have to quit blogging. ;-)

But I've been threatening. I guess I was just inspired by the mail I saw for sale back in November, that I blogged about here. But I thought, "Why buy it? Wouldn't it be fun to make it myself?" And it would, of course. So I threatened: "Honey, one day I'm just going to have to start putting together a suit of chainmail!"

And she wearily replied, "Of course you are."

Well, today I came across a site by a veteran chainmail-maker selling some books that explain in detail how to do it. And I wasn't even looking for it! Really!

(I know, I know; that sounds about as credible as saying "I only read it for the articles." But it's true, I swear!)

Well, it looks like a lot of fun. Take a look: it's here, with the interesting stuff (to me, at least) starting on this page.

That is, it looks fun if you're not prone to repetitive-strain injury. Otherwise, you'd be better off taking up croquet or chessboxing or something.

Teaching Strategy to Five-Year-Olds

Now, some would say that five-year-olds can be pretty crafty, and I would agree with them. I would respond that a cat can be pretty crafty too; but you don't generally try to teach them chess.

So anyway, just before our unexpected trip to Southern California last week, I figured it was time to teach the Pillowfight Fairy how to play a strategy game.

Now, we don't play a lot of board games around here. I played them a fair amount when I was growing up; but I haven't had many ready opponents in recent years. My wife and I don't generally enjoy the same kinds of games, for one thing; I'm the kind that goes for pure strategy, like Chess or Stratego; my wife is more the kind to go for word games, like Scrabble. And there are a bunch of really good boardgames out there (like Clue, or Risk, or Monopoly--known in Tonya's family as Monotony, given how long it takes to finish a typical game) that really require more than just two people. It's often a big hassle to get a game night organized, given that there's Tonya, and me... and three kids who are at an age where they need a whole lot of supervision. I suspect Game Night at our house would resemble nothing so much as several rounds of that Chessboxing sport that I blogged about back in November.

Besides which, I have a really competitive streak that I'm not particularly proud of. That is, I get really invested in the game, to the point where I start feeling dark and evil feelings toward my opponent. I get so invested that my own sense of self-worth starts to get tied to how well I'm doing. If my opponent(s) deliver me an embarrassing defeat, I become, well... embarrassed. A couple of years back I was involved in a game of Risk with a bunch of old friends, among whom I'd somehow gained a reputation as some kind of strategic genius; but I hadn't played Risk in a long time, and misjudged my position, and played too aggressively, and spread myself too thin, and wound up getting wiped off the board long before anyone else. They were all surprised that Suuuuuper-Genius got knocked out so early; and frankly, I was too. It smarted. I admit it, I'm something of a sore loser.

(That is, I'm only a sore loser in strategy games. I was actually rather amused by my low placement in the recent Homeschool Blogger Awards.)

So I tend to shy away from strategy games these days. I can be pretty good at them, but I don't like the way I feel about myself after I've finished them.

Nevertheless, I remember that my own Dad taught me to play Chess when I was in the second grade; and I knew how to play Checkers, and a bunch of others, well before that. And the Pillowfight Fairy received a few strategy board games for her birthday, so I figured it was time to start teaching her to play. We started with something simple: Tic-Tac-Toe.

Now, when I was growing up, Tic-Tac-Toe was something that was just played on a piece of paper with a pencil. But apparently that's not sophisticated enough for some people; my wife found a carved, painted wooden set as she was shopping for Christmas. Good Grief! What will they think of next?

So she bought it.

Her reasoning was that the Adrenaline Junkie would probably learn better with the pieces she can manipulate by hand, as she's not very deft with a pencil yet. Yeah, yeah; leave it to my wife to come up with a practical reason for whatever it is....

I pulled it out and undid the shrink-wrap, and then noticed it: there are five O's, and only four X's. What's up with that? Everyone knows the X's are supposed to go first, and that means there have to be five of them! Who designed this set?

(Answer: someone who figured that it costs less money to carve O's than X's. After all, with O's all you have to do is drill-press through the center of a big dowel. With X's, you have to attach your Dado-head blade to your table saw and make a whole bunch of cuts. The former is easier and thus less expensive, obviously.)

So I asked the Pillowfight Fairy whether she wanted to be X or O, and she chose X. Then I explained that we would be taking turns putting our pieces down, and that the goal was to make three in a row--and I demonstrated all the different ways that the X's could be arranged into a winning pattern. Then, with the rules (but no strategy!) explained, we started.

Red to move.

I picked the center-left space, thinking: I don't want to beat my daughter up too badly the first time we play a strategy game. So I intentionally picked a weak opening, in the hope that my daughter would be able to take advantage. After all, Tic-Tac-Toe does not require players who can look forward six moves--especially given that the O's only have five pieces to play, and the X's only have four.

Black to move.

A most promising beginning! The central square is the most strategic location in Tic-Tac-Toe; possession thereof almost guarantees that the possessor won't lose. Almost....

Red to Move.

And what was Red's move? To throw a fit: "I was going to move there!" But honey, that's the way strategy games work; I move wherever I want, then you move wherever you want that's still legal; then I move wherever I want; and each of us keeps trying to limit the other's option until one of us is crushed under the other's sheer force of logic.

Note: I didn't actually say that. I was a little more accommodating. In fact, noting the essential symmetry of the board, I magnanimously offered to move my last token to a different spot--all while noting the deadly fact that I now knew her next move in advance! (Cue loud Mwahahahahaha sound....)

Red to Move and Lose in Three (Mwahahahahaha!)

The trap thus being set, I allowed my prey to proceed apace toward her doom:

Black to Make A Big Jerk of Himself

Of course, there really is only one correct response to this move, If one is strictly following the rules of the game.

Unfortunately, it was I, playing as Black, who was being suckered into a trap. Like I mentioned in this post, "If you aren't winning, change the rules." It appears that the rules were about to change; I had underestimated my opponent, as I was about to discover.

Black About to Touch Off a Screaming Fit By Red, For Refusing To Take Back That Move!

My trap was sprung! Or so I thought. After all, if we were strictly following the rules of Formal Tic-Tac-Toe, play would proceed: "... A2, C1 Mate" or "...C1, A2 Mate".

But as (I think it was) Eisenhower once said, "If you can't solve a problem, enlarge it"--meaning, of course, that intractable problems aren't always so intractable if you widen your scope of operations. In closing off the avenues of victory in Tic-Tac-Toe, I opened up my daughter's eyes to all the other wonderful things there were to do that day. She very quickly decided that since I wouldn't recant that move (and believe me, it is not easy to explain the concept of "Touch-Move" to a five-year-old), that her Daddy was mean, and that she didn't want to play anymore, and she went off to play with all those toys with the blinking lights and annoying sounds that all her other relatives got her for Christmas.

So, we're going to have to try this more in the future. After all, after we've mastered Tic-Tac-Toe, we've got a Mancala set we haven't done much with, and Backgammon, and Dominoes, and Checkers, and (of course) Chess.

So do any of my readers have success in teaching strategy games to young players like the Pillowfight Fairy? If so, how did you go about doing it? After all, Tic-Tac-Toe is an odd place to start, because the strategy is so simple that it's only possible to win if the opponent makes errors, which simply doesn't happen once the person gets past a certain level of experience. How did you teach your kids more sophisticated strategy games?

Back in Town

This is just a note to let my loyal readers know that I and my family are back in our hometown. The memorial service and visitation went well; we got to see a lot of family and friends, share stories, and the like. Granny had a lot of fans, it appears.

Some odds and ends:

• My three kids have now officially been introduced to the "Quit Touching Me" game. Since we weren't in our own minivan, but in my in-laws' borrowed SUV, we had to put all three child safety seats next to each other, so they could all grab each other. Even the 11-month-old Happy Boy got into the act; he got quite a kick out of gently grabbing the Pillowfight Fairy's nose when she let it wander a little too close. We had to tell everyone to knock it off on plenty of occasions. Geez, it's frightening how much I sound like my dad.
• On a recent library trip, my daughter picked up this book. She fell in love with it. (I however did not, for reasons that are a bit too long and dour to relate in this post.) At any rate, the Pillowfight Fairy decided that she wanted to be named Chrysanthemum, just like the eponymous mouse in the story. She has been introducing herself under this name to everyone she happens to meet--like the child care people at the memorial service. They never did figure out her real name until we came to pick her and her sister up. In fact, they tried to get the real name out of her younger sister, the Adrenaline Junkie. Unfortunately, the Junkie (who was being as helpful and as truthful as only a three-year old can be) still can't quite pronounce the letter "R" properly--it comes out like a "W" sometimes, a la Elmer Fudd. The Pillowfight Fairy's true name is short, unusual, and has an "R" in it, so the Junkie's Elmer Fudd impression of her name was every bit as incomprehensible as the Pillowfight Fairy herself.
• Sacramento is still here, but barely. It seems that while we were away, the city was hit by a whopper of a winter storm, with wind gusts topping 80 miles per hour. As we were heading home tonight, we occasionally saw evidence of this fact. Most buildings and trees looked all right; but there were a few orchards outside of town that had trees down, and there were some trees and signs down inside the town. Our own neighborhood looks to be intact, but a little ratty from all the debris. As a side note, just after we moved into this house four years ago, we had an old, giant California Blue Oak in our yard blow over in a similar storm--damaging the second story of a neighbor's house, and taking down a whole bunch of fences in the process. Well, just down the street there is another Oak of similar size, age and species, and (thankfully) it is still up. We were wondering there for a while, as we were hearing news stories about various hundred-old trees going over and flattening nearby houses.
• My older brother and his wife flew down to Southern Cal for the memorial. They got lucky. If I remember their story correctly, their flight down (on Thursday) was delayed by less than an hour. Had they taken off on time, they would have had clear sailing. But about twenty minutes after their scheduled departure time, as they were still waiting on the ground, the rain hit--in torrents. The plane had a rather bumpy take-off and climb-out. But had they been delayed much longer than that, they would have been completely canceled, along with every other flight in and out of Sacramento. And say a prayer for them--last I heard, their flight (scheduled to take off 6:00 this evening) had been delayed at least until 10:30 tonight.
• For those in my readership that aren't up on their California geography, Southern California is separated from the Central Valley of California, where Sacramento is, by a decent-sized mountain range called the Tehachapis. There aren't too many ways to get from the Los Angeles area to Bakersfield, because of all the mountains in the way. There are two good-sized mountain passes, and there is a coastal highway, and that's about it. There was some question after this storm as to whether the mountain passes would be open; and we got lucky, as the coastal route would have added at least two hours to what was already going to be a nine-hour drive. Anyway, we took the route home that gets the least traffic of the three, and we've decided we like it the most. This route goes north out of San Bernardino across the Tehachapis, and through the Mojave Desert (which was absolutely beautiful after all the rains!), then west to Bakersfield and up Highway 99. It may have been a little longer of a road trip than our previous regular route. But I have to say, Highway 99 is more interesting than I-5, and the roads through Mojave and Tehachapi are much more interesting than the I-5 Ridge Route. There's so much more to look at, and there's a lot less traffic. I think this is going to become our new regular route, for the next time we go down south.
• Speaking of which, we're hoping that's not for a good long while yet. It was certainly good to see the family, but we are exhausted. We didn't get a whole lot of rest this Christmas season. I'm even finding myself looking forward to going back to work so I can relieve some of my tension. ;-) Routine is my friend! Repeat it with me now: Routine is my friend!

I hope your holidays were a lot more relaxing than ours, and I wish you all a smooth reentry into real life.

Update on the Never-Ending Backyard Thingy

I decided to take advantage of the good weather yesterday and today to get a little more done on the Never-Ending Backyard Project (which you can read more about here, if you're so inclined). I hadn't had much opportunity to work on it since mid-November, but I had been looking forward to finishing as much of the project as possible over my two-week Christmas break. Sounds like a plan, no? Well unfortunately, life occasionally has a way of scheduling your free time for you.

But I still had yesterday and today to get some stuff done. So the first thing I did was to get some good, fine-grit sand that could make it in the cracks between the cobblestones. Then I used a trowel and filled the gaps between the outer stones and the plastic border pieces that are keeping everything in place.

When that was finally done, I started dumping the sand on top of the patio and walkway and sweeping it in the cracks. And I have to say, the whole thing looks much more finished, much more professional, with the sand in there. Even where there is a ragged edge where a hand-cut stone has a gap with the edge of another one, adding the sand made it look as if I meant to do that.

Now, the next thing to be done was the tamping. And I had been envisioning (since the beginning of the project, back in October 2006) that at this point we would be renting one of those vibrating tamper things. Unfortunately, we've found ourselves a little short on funds this season, what with Christmas and a gaggle of unexpected expenses and all. So I decided on a whim yesterday afternoon to see if I could get adequate results using this thing:

That's right, I took that thing--which probably weighs upwards of twenty pounds, as that bottom plate is solid iron--and I literally pounded the pavement. Probably over a thousand times. I bet the neighbors are really upset with me. I know my shoulders are.

The thing about that tamper is, when you drop it downward (putting a little of your own weight behind it, too) and it impacts the pavement, you want to have it exactly vertical, or bad things happen. If you're just a little off, the handle will tend to give a powerful jerk as the tamper tries to upright itself--and your hands absorb the impact. My hands feel today like a prizefighter's--with several blisters, bruised knuckles, and sore muscles that are crying out for my lovely bride to tenderize them with her fingers. (And no, I'm not entirely sure how the knuckles got bruised seeing as how they weren't impacting anything except the inside of my gloves. Anyone got an explanation?) In summary: Ow.

Oh, and one other thing I noticed after I was finally, finally done tamping down the patio. Take a look, and see if you can spot it:

Did you catch it? No? Well look again, closely. The answer is in the next picture.

Ok, here it is:
That's right, my solid iron tamper needs to be retired now. All those impacts with the stone in the walkway started damaging the tamper. There are even some deep gouges on the bottom of the iron plate. As I was doing the tamping, I would occasionally look down and notice, "Hey, there are some cracks there!" And I would look down a few hundred impacts later and notice, "Hey--those cracks are a lot longer now, and they're starting to join up with each other." Had I kept it up much longer, I wouldn't have been surprised if the thing eventually ruptured and sent sharp shards of iron in every direction.

But--it's done, and the tamping did exactly what it was supposed to. My wife and I have both noticed that the stones in the walkway are a whole lot more even than they had been. They were pretty good before, but it looks a whole lot more professional now. (There are now several cracked pavers, too; but we figure that they lend character to the whole thing, and I'm too lazy to dig them out and replace them.) And the sand that had been swept into the cracks, settled a lot with all those impacts sending vibrations through all the stones. In some places, the gaps between the stones reappeared, with the sand in between them compressing downward by a half-inch or more.

So when I was done with the tamping (and after a good lunch), I got out there and swept a bunch more sand into the cracks. Then I decided to see what would happen when I watered down the walk. After all, we're expected to get a whole lot of rain in the next few days, and I was curious to see what it would look like when we got back from our trip. (I know I could have just waited and seen, but then--I'm the kind of guy that often can't resist reading the last page of the book first.)

Hm.... Basically, I'm going to have to sweep more sand in before I put on the lacquer sealant. The sand is still pretty loose, at least near the top, and I fully expect the rains to wash a fair amount of it out. We'll see what happens.

Anyway, here's something of a before-and-after. The first picture is one that I took back in November, after getting all the stones in place. You can see that it looks nice and orderly, but that there are gaps in between the stones--especially the angled ones, which were cut with a hammer and chisel.

Now this last picture shows the same corner up a little closer. Note how the sand in between the stones gives it a somewhat more "finished" appearance:

So, what more remains to be done? Well, I need a dry weekend to come along first. After all, this fine sand will only flow into the remaining cracks if it's not wet. The final sweeping in of sand should only take an hour or so. After that, I need to apply the sealant. I'll brush it along the sides of those gray stones, and then apply it with a roller (on a pole, of course) to the tops of the stones. Hopefully that won't take too long, and I'll be able to apply a couple of coats in the course of one day. After the sealant is in place, all that remains is the backfill--digging up all the excess dirt that I excavated early last year, which I dumped in our proto-garden area, and lovingly building up the surrounding earth until one can only see the tops of the stones rising above the ground.

And I have a bit of a deadline--my wife really, really wants to have a vegetable garden this year, and so I need to have the whole thing done by the end of February. Now that may seem like a lot of time, until one realizes that this is our rainy season, and I'm not even guaranteed one dry weekend between now and then. And I suspect my bride will be really put out if she can't get her garden in. So I'm really motivated to get this done. After all, I have to sleep with her.

The 105th Carnival of Homeschooling is up!

Over the last few weeks I haven't been involved much with homeschooling. Mainly, I've been fighting off colds, handling Christmas for a grumpy family, trying to get crunchy vehicles home without getting arrested, and so forth. In the meantime I haven't been writing much about our homeschooling, I haven't been posting to the Carnivals of Homeschooling, and I haven't posted any links to them.

But I'm back! For now, anyway. The 105th Carnival of Homeschooling (Second Anniversary!) is up over at Why Homeschool.

My post entitled Vertical vs. Horizontal Socialization is featured.

There's a lot of other good stuff there. I particularly liked this post on how to introduce Great Literature to young children. Her strategy? Beat it to death. She starts with abridged children's versions with really pretty pictures; then, when they get familiar with those, she gives them versions that are a little more advanced, then a little more.... Eventually, her kids are so familiar with the story that they aren't fazed by the originals. It's an intriguing idea, I think.

My Grandmother Has Passed Away

For those in my readership who aren't in my family and therefore don't already know the news, my maternal grandmother passed away early this morning. She was 91.

Granny, as we called her (although there was some difference of opinion as to whether her title was to be spelled "Granny" or "Grannie"), was the last remaining of my grandparents.

She was, as grandmothers are supposed to be, immensely proud of her family and very interested in all the family news. We think that this is one of the things that kept her going so long; she wanted to know what's going to happen next in her family: which of her grandchildren was going to have a baby next? What mischief has this- or that- great-grandchild gotten into now? And it was nice for all of us to know that she was there, keeping an eye on us (even if from a distance). And she was full of stories about what everything was like when she was a young woman. Some of us feel that we know her ex-suitors pretty well by now. ;-)

She hadn't been in good health the last few years. It seemed as though she had one serious injury or illness every year for the last half-decade or so. One year it was a TIA; another year it was Diverticulitis; another year it was that she fell and broke her femur. Yet she always seemed to bounce back from these minor setbacks. She had an ornery streak a mile wide (which we all admired and loved about her), and the doctors would always say that she had the body or bones of a woman twenty years younger.

Well, she suffered a serious stroke about two weeks ago that left her with Aphasia. She suddenly was left without the ability to speak comprehensibly or (to our knowledge) to understand what anyone else was saying--with one important exception. She did have the ability to speak simple phrases so ingrained in her that they were complete thoughts in and of themselves--stock phrases, if you will, that she had used so much during her life that they were lodged much deeper in her brain than the mere speech centers. So it was that she was able to tell my mom and dad "I love you" a couple of days ago.

But there were signs that she was unable to recognize many of the people closest to her; and as I mentioned, her love for her family had been the big thing keeping her going. Although the doctors said shortly after her stroke that she was physically healthy (except for the specific damage that the stroke had done in her brain), she went downhill very quickly in the last few days.

The memorial service and funeral will be held later this week. My wife and kids and I will be heading down to Southern California on Thursday (in our borrowed SUV! That will be exciting). There's a major storm system moving into California on Thursday and Friday, so pray that everything goes well with all the traveling everyone will be doing. And pray that some of the mountain passes out of Southern California aren't completely snowed in when it comes time for us to drive back up north--or we're going to have a really, really long drive on Sunday. And I can't guarantee to any of my loyal readers that I'll have any time or inclination to do much blogging until we all get back safe and sound.