Photography, 10/27/31

No new lessons here, just a few more recent, decent live subject shots.

lazy but cute

They are discussing whether it's best to try to get a few inches closer to pet Pumpkin, or leave him alone and hope he will come to them. I'm not making this up. Pumpkin actually did sit on Boy 1's lap earlier that day--the first time, ever--so until this moment, there really was no choice in the matter.

"Take a picture of my favorite library book!"

bath time, joke time, yell time, whatever

"I hug da pukkin."

Our new boarder

Meet Skelty.

The kids had been making Halloween decorations for the last few days. There were dozens of their original paper jack-o'lanterns, bats, and ghosts around already when they set their minds to making a skeleton. I was doubtful, but Boy 2 kept asking. So he and I set out to build Skelty for our "art day" activity yesterday.

It was a pleasant way to spend the morning. Lots of drawing and cutting and taping, and a curious conversation about anatomy with a nearly-5-year-old.

"Hey Mama, what's this part I just cut out?"
"It's a rib."
"Oh, okay. Ribs," holding up a few. "Do I have ribs?"
"Yes. Feel here?"
"Oh. Yeah. But why do I have ribs?"...

The project took about an hour and a half to finish, so imagine this exchange, or something like it, repeated for a half dozen other bones, too.

When Boy 1 got home from school, we gave him the job of looking up the human skeleton drawing in his encyclopedia and checking our work. He was eager to get involved at first but ended up getting interested in the book and just wandering away with it by himself, while Girlie, Boy 2, and I put the last of the tape on Skelty to hang him.

Poor Skelty. What Boy 1 didn't tell him is, his spine is completely fused. His tarsals and carpals are interchangeable. The rest of his hands and feet--and lots of other bones, too--are altogether missing. Good thing Skelty has no flesh, because that misshapen pelvis couldn't hope to bear its weight. His overly square jaw puts The Incredible Hulk's to shame, and he would benefit from major dental work.

But we are proud of our Skelty. He was fun to make and is hanging right in the midst of the action, on the sliding glass door in the living room. He's here to stay. At least, until Halloween, or someone accidentally rips a bone or two off.

Photography*, 10/24/13

*with notes to explain this "Food, Glorious Food" edition

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Again with the macro close-up
I've learned to use this feature better, finally. You can actually read all the words now.

We love, I mean L-O-V-E, peanut butter in this house. See how the PB tub is twice the weight of the jelly jar? Yet we'll go through only 1 jelly in the time it takes to use up nearly 3 PBs. Oh, and on the question of creamy vs. crunchy: We alternate. Everyone wins sometimes.

More adjustments to white balance
Ahh...this one still needs more practice. The colander below should be a medium blue, not grayish--but also not the sharp, eye-prickling blue I got on my first few tries. The tomatoes are too yellow, too. Close, but no cigar.

We're still getting lots of tomatoes from our summer garden. Actually, tomatoes are the ONLY food left in our summer garden now. But as much as the temp has dropped these past few days, I doubt they'll last much longer. Eat 'em while you have 'em!

Good lighting and good white balance--twice!

Here are some of the same tomatoes just before they got roasted. What a difference the right lighting makes to color! (also in the mix: yellow squash, onion, eggplant, plus a sprinkle of pepper and dried thyme)

This batch of bread is a variation on that sourdough recipe I got from my former piano teacher 8 years ago. The starter is still going strong. If you're local and want a cup of starter and the recipe, yes, I'll share!

Photography, 10/13/13

Here are a couple of the ideas I promised but didn't get into my last photography post.

Getting around a distracting foreground

These birds are among my zoo favorites. They're called blue-bellied rollers. Brilliant colors, very social, noisy, and fun to watch. If only you could see them through the screen.

I knew I'd read in the camera manual that there's a setting that specifically ignores foreground focus, but for the life of me I couldn't remember what it was. Just like all the zoo trips before this last one. And so every blue-bellied roller picture I've ever taken looks something like these.

I was annoyed enough this time around to remember to look it up in the manual when I got home. Aha! The landscape setting.

I didn't have any rollers around to practice on at home (darn!), so I focused on my newly needle-strewn back yard--through an upstairs window. These are pretty uninspired pictures, but they definitely demonstrate the focus difference.

On the regular auto-focus setting:

On landscape setting:

Next time I'm ready. I'm going to catch a picture of those birds yet!

Using the after-exposure crop feature
I'm noticing that I get better results if I post-process in a zoom using the camera's crop than I do if I use the actual zoom before taking the shot. It makes no sense to me that this should be true, but for some reason it is.

The original lions--not bad:

The lions post-zoomed slightly--lo and behold, still not bad:

More on controlling the flash, and lighting in general

Strangely, when I turned my camera to "fireworks" setting, it insisted on using the standard flash. This room was lit only by that one candle before the camera intervened.

Same room, still no lights on, still on "fireworks" setting, after I manually selected NO FLASH.

Same candle later. I thought the melted wax pattern looked interesting. But this picture stinks. There's nothing remotely interesting about it here. (full auto setting)

On portrait setting instead, with fill flash. Much better effect, I think.

The last handful of dragon's tongue beans from our summer garden, cooked with a handful of rice and some curry, turmeric, and dried celery leaves. Yum, but you wouldn't know it here. (full auto setting)

Aha! That looks more like it! (macro close-up with fill flash)

I have discovered that I need fill flash most of the time. But manual overrides (fill flash is one of them) don't stay in the memory once the camera is turned off. I have to tell it to use fill flash over and over again. Annoying, but I'm getting better at remembering to change it before I miss shots. I'm not sure this need to reset is a normal thing. It also has begun to forget time and date settings occasionally--seems to be more of a low memory thing.

Close encounters

This is the south side yard of our house. Part of that flower bed there is new this past summer, finally, after many bare months since we had that too-close tree removed last year.

Nice dappled-sunny spot, isn't it?

The cat thinks so, too. He loves to sit in this window seat, soaking up sun and surveying his (imaginary...he's a house cat) domain. Yes, the blinds are uneven. That is courtesy of the cat, too.

Serene. Scenic. Wait, what's that weird dark area on the brick under the window? Look closer...

Closer still...

AGHHH! Yellow jackets! Hundreds of yellow jackets!

Fortunately, they're dead yellow jackets. UNfortunately, they are in that state after I discovered the nest while weeding that lovely new garden in late August. Believe me, the weeding ended there that day. I dropped my trowel and ran.

It took a few unsuccessful tries on our own, after dusk, with hornet spray, before we asked for help. When my termite-barrier came out for the house's quarterly treatment, I mentioned it to him. He tried with his industrial-grade stuff but warned that it really wasn't rated for any kind of bee.

Sure enough, it worked only to a degree. Some yellow jackets died--but not before they got away.

Away from outdoors, that is. Into the house! I vacuumed up dozens of dead ones in the next few days, and my curtains buzzed ominously for a few days more.

My termite guy recommended another company who specialized in this kind of thing. I called and they came the same day. Now THIS was something to see. A team of three showed up, all decked out in those crazy protective spacesuit get-ups beekeepers wear. They no sooner walked around the corner of the house and got their first look at the cloud of critters buzzing loudly in the sun, and they, too, turned right away, back around the corner and out of the insects' sight.

I quote: "Ma'am, that is a VERY large, VERY aggressive colony you got goin' there."

Well, that was the climactic moment for me. The magnitude of the problem was definitely not my imagination if three full-grown men in sting-proof garb wouldn't stand around talking within earshot of these critters. You can guess what happened next: I paid them to get rid of it.

So, here my suspense story sort of fizzles. They sprayed down the side of the house and all over the surface of the window box (from a nice distance) with water, then pumped the wall cavity around that window box full of a dessicant dust that would turn to a longer-lasting gel. One of the team members stayed inside the house during the pumping and used some this little electronic gadget to measure the insects' movement in the wall and directed the pumpers, with a series of knocks on the window, where to send the dust stream. He also tracked to find out where the dust was coming into the living space of the house. It was alarming! Until all those stingers with wings had gotten into the house to die the week before, we'd had no idea there was a big honking gap around that window, neatly covered by fancy molding but definitely NOT sealed. Sigh...Add one more item to the repair list.

13 years we've lived here, and until the yellow jacket incident, I'd never had any reason to look at this lovely picture window from outside, underneath. Now I have, and it ain't pretty. A wood cover under the box, but unsealed and untreated, not quite fitted to begin with, and contracted by drying out until it's even gappier--that space all around is where the yellow jackets came in and out.

Who knew?

The good news is, we can get someone out to do the repair work now since that corner's no longer a horror movie in the making. The pros weren't exaggerating when they said it was a big colony. That pile of insect bodies above? That's just the ones that fell immediately below their nest entry hole. There is a layer of many more bodies sprinkled across that whole section of the flower bed, too.

Egad!

Not to mention, WHEW. We managed to get the beasts out without anyone being stung.

Home: the foundation and buffer

Really that title is shorthand for this larger idea:

I believe that for us, what we have and what we do at home provides a firm educational foundation for the kids--a foundation that can also rise to be a buffer against many of the negatives that come along with the typical one-size schooling.

Our local school system has a persistently poor reputation. Every once in a while someone asks me whether I am (or will, or have) home-schooled the kids. It happened again today, in fact. I haven't, for one big reason: Regardless its faults*, it still looks to me like the faculty at our local school is getting it right a vast majority of the time. Maybe even more than I would be able to pull off myself if I were to home-school. I do, after all, have a failed career to cast a rather severe shadow of doubt over my own teaching skill.

But that doesn't mean I or we don't teach our kids. We have school, as in the building down the road. But there's really no bad time for learning. Every moment is teachable.

We let the kids be a part of the things we do. We talk to them, and I think we do a pretty good job of not talking down to them. When the kids are curious, we answer questions or let them explore. They all love books. They all like going out for a walk and talking about what they see. When they see or question something we don't know much about in the garden or at the preserve or in the pages of a new book, we make a point of searching our bird guides or map books or Google and finding out more.

And then they often take what they've learned and do something new with it--all on their own. Out of a few facts about a new animal, for example, they may make drawings and tell a story, come up with a game, act out some adventure, build a home or habitat or the creature itself...I see the way they think, and it reminds me of my first ed. class in college. Just give them a little comprehension-level fuel, and they'll burn all the way through Bloom's taxonomy.

Mostly, I don't teach this. Mostly, it's what naturally happens when curiosity is permitted. Maria Montessori was onto something.

Better yet, many of those fun-but-also-thinking things, the kids do together. I like that despite the chaos of our juggled schedules, we do get to spend a significant amount of time with each other, both two or three at a time and as the whole five (plus Pumpkin) of us. They know each other and like each other. I wish they didn't fight, and they do--but I believe they learn plenty from that, too.

So that's how I see home as their learning foundation. Here's where home morphs into buffer, too:

I am hopeful that because they have this positive experience under them already this early, before they start (startED in Boy 1's case) in the more rigid classroom learning model, it will give them the momentum to keep moving through the parts of the institutional school that are tedious or unfair or not quite the right fit for Kid X's preference or style.

Having to adjust and learn and produce even when conditions don't suit you is itself a good life lesson. Being able to work well with a teacher or classmate who has a completely different preference or style can be excellent wider-world preparation. I don't think there's a lot of academic value in some of the homework we see some days, but there certainly is a value in learning perseverance. Some day the kid who "doesn't want" to study spelling words is going to be the adult who "doesn't want" to complete a 1040 form...but will have the discipline and patience to get. it. done.

But back to that buffer. I love the idea that if a particular school day is especially difficult, my kids have home--and us, and each other--to turn to to find comfort, laughter, and a little bit more freedom to be themselves.

A former pastor described the spouse's role as "a soft place to land" when the other spouse needs it. I think of our family, our home, the same way. I think they've begun to do that, too.

That you have something reliable to come home to--that's a pretty valuable lesson. One that would require some pretty seriously bad days at school to shake.

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* When I say "its faults," I mean exclusively the ones of which I have firsthand knowledge. To date, I have seen zero evidence of the kind of severe troubles the rumor mill circulates.

I will end with one more big ol' asterisk. Everything I've written about school this week is based on the public school experience we've had here thus far. The situation could, of course, change with a major policy shift or new administration or very incompetent teacher or move to another school some time down the road. Or we could discover that one of the kids has some kind of special need that can't be met in a standardized classroom. A thousand things could happen. At that point, I would not hesitate to weigh other alternatives.

What I really like a lot about our local school

Yesterday's post was prickly, but I have good things to say about school, too.

1)  teamwork, at every level
From the start, our school has given me the impression it's doing more than just going through the motions.

Every day, our principal or assistant prin., or both, is just inside the main doors among the students. They are visible. They greet every student and parent coming through those doors personally. They make it clear they are on top of things, but at the same time, they don't behave like prison wardens. It's clear also that they put a lot of trust in the staff and believe in the students.

Professionalism plus warmth. It's a balance that not every school administrator can strike effectively.

The same attitude carries among the faculty, too. They pull their own weight, but they cooperate and help each other, too. We see evidence of team planning as well as friendly exchanges. They seem to genuinely like what they do.

No school is without its problems (and many of the problems schools have, I think, are more indicative of failings at the larger institutional level, not the individual building level). But when the people in charge really know what they're doing, they can make it work.

2) community
We like where we live, and we have some good neighbors. Every family's busy doing its own thing, though, and we don't see them all that often. I'm a little bit of a loner myself, but the kids really love seeing each other. Unfortunately, almost every time the kids ask to go play with their neighbor friends, it isn't a good time for one or the other family.

But this year, Boy 1, one of the girls next door, and the boy behind us all are in the same class. I like that they get to be around each other, even if it isn't play time.

These kids were in some ways a community already, but I'm willing to bet they're learning something extra about what makes a community now that they work together in addition to knowing each other as friends. That's one of the good things about neighborhood schools in general, I think. The school is itself a medium for bringing together people from all over the area it serves. It has little to do with education, but it's a benefit just the same.

3) getting it done
Yes, I think the homework is over the top, and a few other things (yesterday's post again) make me grit my teeth. But from what we've seen so far, this school is getting the job done.

And getting it done better than I believe I could do myself.

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And that actually gives me a nice lead-in to the last topic tomorrow, so I'll leave it at that for now.

What I don't like about school

I've had several school-related topics on my to-blog list for a long time. I just kept putting them off because I tend to haul out my soapbox over this stuff. And I know that when I do that, I don't articulate sensibly. Delay again.

But then yesterday, my local writing group buddy Pamela wrote about a few of her family's tough-but-right education decisions--and her reasoning really resonated. So I think I'll take Pam's cue and get my ideas together now. You know I'm long-winded. It'll take me three parts over three days to get it all in. On the bright side, though, I guess that will mean each one will stop at a reasonable length! The plan:

Part 1:What I don't like about school

Part 2: What I like a whole lot about our local school

Part 3: Home: the foundation and the buffer

What I don't like about school

1) unforgiving schedules
It worked very well for routine-driven Boy 1. I think Girlie probably will do fine, too. But I'm not convinced all-day kindergarten is the best plan for every kid. I guess we'll just wait and see how well the much more abstract-thinking Boy 2 takes to having his every moment scheduled in another year.

But for now, my gripe with the daily schedule is mostly logistics. Boy 1's school day starts at 9:15. Girlie's starts at 9:00. Boy 1's ends at 4:00. Girlie's ends at noon.

Get in the car. Get out of the car. Get in the car again. Get out of the car again....

2) fundraisers
By the end of Week 2 this year, between the 2 schools, I had been smacked by no fewer than 5 different fundraisers.

I hate catalogs full of overpriced junk.

I hate the hype they use to get the kids to participate.

I hate that all the money, time, and effort spent on the hoopla results in only a fraction retained by the school.

I passionately hate the newest school fundraiser tactic: No risky door-to-door sales! You don't have to ask anyone to buy at all!! You only have to give us their name and address, and we'll put them on our direct mailing list instead!!!

This year, I hate in particular that for Boy 1's school, we've never been told exactly what we're raising funds for. It's just WHAM! Money, please!

The whole business gets my blood pressure up, so I bowed out (I hope) gracefully just as I did last year: wrote a letter to the school saying we declined to participate, and gave a $50 donation instead.

I don't know for sure what fund I donated to, but at least I can say honestly that I did not sell out my family and friends to some marketing company.

3) testing
I swear I'm not going to go off on the SOL tests. (Ah, about that acronym. For the out-of-staters among you, in Virginia, SOL actually stands for Standards of Learning. NOT the other acronym that when cleaned up translates to "luckless and hopeless"!) I don't object to the SOLs themselves, and to a certain degree I don't object to the tests. Measurement is good. What bugs me is that we've allowed testing to overshadow the larger philosophy.

A former teaching colleague summed it up well: Weigh the pig. Weigh the pig. Weigh the pig.

But when it's time to line up at the scale, everyone forgets to FEED the pig. They just keep putting it back onto the scale and wondering why it hasn't gained.

My little pig and his classmates lost a huge chunk of the last entire quarter of school last year in deference to testing. There's the required testing. There's also an assortment of testing that applies only to the grades who do not take the required tests. All this testing has to be proctored, and the specials teachers were assigned that duty. So, once all these rounds of testing began, there was no more library, art, computer lab, or music. PE was out, too, because the laptops used for testing were set up in the gym.

My pig won't get weighed for the first time (on the state scale, anyway) until 3rd grade. Two years away...but because older piggies must be weighed during those in-between years, he and his fellow pigs will likely not be fed those last few weeks again this year.

I will say that I thought Boy 1's teacher last year was terrific. She managed to find ways to keep the class engaged despite all the restrictions, and she filled in the blanks left by the missing specials a whole lot better than I could have done in her shoes.

But still. Why should this be necessary? What's wrong with this picture?

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Well, I see that starting near midnight and taking a shower between draft and edit have pushed me waaay past the deadline for this Oct. 9 post. But I will not concede! I hereby declare my Blogtober 2013 NOT to be a failure! At least, not yet!

Another school year

(Yes, school has been in session for a full month now. See what I mean by needing to catch up with blogging?)

Right on schedule--that is, the day after Labor Day--our new school year rolled in. And this year, we have not one, but two Little Ms attending.

Boy 1 is now in first grade. We all had a big, fun summer, and he was not very happy at the prospect of getting back into the school routine. But that's really all the hesitation was about: routine. Boy 1's like me that way, usually a little more comfortable when he has an idea what's coming next. All it took for him to get excited again was to attend Open House the week before school started. Once he'd explored his new room, seen his very own name pasted on a specific desk, and learned his teacher's name and face, he was just fine. The grump turned back into a smile.

See?

(Aside: I'm tempted to now launch into a wandering recollection of my own elementary school...but I won't. Let's just leave it at, every time I notice the 70s-era pods-not-classrooms structure inside this school, I get a strong sense of nostalgia. I wouldn't be at all surprised to see Miss Haynes and Mrs. Henry, my own K and G1 teachers, poke their smiling faces around a corner.)

Those photos were actually taken on the third day of school for Boy 1. I'd forgotten to charge the camera ahead for his real first day. But his third day WAS the first day for Girlie.

Does she look a little uncertain as she checks out her 3-year-old classroom? She was, but that was brief. She's attending the preschool inside our church, so the location and even this very room are pretty familiar. Even one of the new faces wasn't so new. Her good church buddy J is in the same class. She LOVES preschool. Every single morning she wakes up and asks, "Issa pizcul day da-day?" and breaks into a sweet little "yay!" complete with clapping hands when the answer is yes.

Now you might be doing the math and wondering why Boy 2 isn't in school. If he were just six weeks older, he would be. And frankly, I'm glad now that he's NOT six weeks older.

When I say the pre-K and K are rigorous around here, that's no exaggeration. It's serious business. We're talking 9am-4pm, five days a week. There's curriculum for reading, math, science, social studies, library, computer, and PE. Both years. Homework is daily, and yes, it's checked, not always just free practice. There are even a few independent projects.

I'll withhold my opinion on all that until another post. For now, suffice it to say that Boy 2 simply isn't ready for that kind of structure. And, for all the rigor, I'm not even sure he needs it. He's a joker outwardly and a serious thinker underneath.

Boy 2's number sense is very strong, and from Day 1 the boy has thought in 3-D (I swear he has a future in engineering--more on that later). His grammar and vocabulary are exceptional (I'll write about those later, too). His grasp of the written word has been a little behind, though, in that he doesn't yet understand that our words are written left-to-right and top-to-bottom, and that letters always face the same direction--he sees no distinction yet between p and d, M and W. When he asks me to spell a word out loud so he can write it, he may start at the center of the paper and work in a sort of spriral to make all the letters fit.

I'm told that's all pretty normal at his age, so it doesn't worry me much. But I do think that given the rigors of "real school" to come, he could use more reading foundation.

I'd thought about signing Boy 2 up for the public pre-K that Boy 1 had attended. Boy 1 adjusted to the full day after a couple rough weeks--but he really did need full-day. He benefited from routine and interaction and having to find his place in a class that was really much too big for the age group. He needed that kind of social challenge. But Boy 2? Well, they are very different kids.

Boy 2 had not said anything much about the pre-K during his brother's year there, so I didn't know what to expect this past spring when I asked him whether he was excited about pre-K in the fall. His answer: an unequivocal NO.

But Girlie piped up. "Yeah! I wanna go pizcul!"

It was cute, but I didn't pay much attention at first. Only, the conversation didn't die. For the next few weeks, out of the blue Boy 2 would get a blank look on his usually animated face and deadpan, "I don't want to go to pre-K." And there Girlie would be, saying "Me! I go pizcul!"

I may be slow, but I do eventually take direction. Girlie got her wish, and so did Boy 2. And so far, it's mostly good for everyone. (Once again...say, it looks like my to-blog list is growing rather than shrinking!...more on that "mostly" some other time.)

Boy 1 is doing well in G1, Girlie is enjoying preschool, and Boy 2 and I are enjoying our quiet time. He's my middle child, and he got the middle-child bad draw. Having him, just him, at home during school hours this year is a chance to right some of that innate competition. We do lots of his-choice activities, and because he gets his choices so frequently, he doesn't protest when I insist on sitting still and reading a book or cutting out letters or doing a pencil puzzle or some other thing that wasn't on his Top 5.

A few months ago (not long after the initial preschool/pre-K scene), he really started making progress. At this new pace, he WILL be ready for our super-serious K by next fall. Even with Mama Time instead of a structured pre-K in between.

Oh, and me? Yeah, I'm dealing with the school year too, in my long-accustomed way. I had the usual three weeks or so of August nightmares involving missing lesson plans, overloaded classes populated by delinquents, vermin (real vermin, not distasteful students) infesting the classroom, insufficient seating space (and sometimes insufficient clothing), and the sudden, unpleasant discovery that I was not the just student teacher but actually IN CHARGE of the whole madhouse. *shudder*

It's a new school year!

Happy Blogtober!

Several people in my local writing group are participating in Blogtoberfest, and I've decided to join in.

The basic idea is simple: Blog each day in October.

There's a more complex way of interpreting that. It includes sticking to a relatively narrow (or at least mostly defined) topic and planning the 31 posts ahead by determining a list of titles first. And everything I've read implies all 31 posts should be done on a single blog.

I'm not usually a seat-of-the-pants kind of girl. I mean, I plan and schedule EVERYTHING. Dusting my house? It's on the calendar. I'm not even joking. But this Blogtober thing...it's an exception. I'm tossing all that fine print. I know what my schedule looks like, this month and...usually. If I'm really going to make it 31 days in a row, and still do all the things on my actual calendar, Blogtober will have to be simple. That original, basic idea works best for me.

So. Expect to see more of me soon--mostly here, but also on my business blog and my crafting blog. (I won't post their addresses here since I prefer not to create obvious connections between this one and the ones that aren't anonymous--but if you e-mail me privately, I'd be happy to share.) Because one of the reasons I decided to do this was that I have a long list of partially-completed posts sitting in the drafts folder at EACH of my blogs. Blogtober, for me, is a way of clearing the backlog.

In fact, I think "clearing the backlog" sounds like a good Blogtober theme. I did something I called Operation Clean Slate a couple years back, and it was so refreshing. My stacked agenda could use a little refreshing now...

Yeah. That's it!

Clean Slate 2013...ready, set, go!