ROGUE-ALICIOUS

Saturday, September 30, 2006

GROOMING

“That one’s that skinny, and that one’s that skinny,” Aubrey says, pulling my face close and grabbing my eyebrows into an uneven pinch in each hand.

My right brow looks like it always looks after I wax. Subtle. Full. A clean crescent. My left brow I must now lovingly refer to as “the skinny brow.” Not so subtle, not so full.

Yes, Aubrey sat in the bathroom and watched me accidentally remove the lower half of my left eyebrow this morning. Much of it. Oh, and she listened to some expletives.

Somehow, when I gave the wax strip that glorious, edifying pull from the outside of my eyebrow inward, I had a line of eyebrow hairs the equivalent of a pigeon feather stuck in the strip.

Oh, vanity.

And since the wax strip hadn’t gone all the way to the inner tip of my eyebrow, I had about a half-inch square of brow bulk next to the sleek little line I’d just made.

Given my competence level at this point, the thought of re-waxing it brought visions of no brow at all to mind. However, that inner bulk was so ghastly next to said skinny brow, I knew something needed to be done.

With the help of our hair-cutting scissors, I went to work. It improved, but let’s just say I eventually ended up with a nick of skin visible in the thick of the brow (bringing to mind the lines the boys at my high school etched onto their scalps in the late 80s) and a look of perpetual perplexity.

Oh, vanity.

Eventually, I patched up the nick with some brown eyeshadow.

Then I changed my hair part.

And, no, I will not be cutting myself some bangs anytime soon.

And, I’m going to guess Aubrey’s not going to ask me to do hers either.

Friday, September 29, 2006

Recent Reads
(Covers January through September, so read the term "recent" loosely)

Fiction:
Angle of Repose, Wallace Stegner
The Attack, Yasmina Khadra
Book Doctor, Esther Cohen
Breakfast of Champions, Kurt Vonnegut
Ghostwritten, David Mitchell
July's People, Nadine Gordimer
Montana, 1948, Larry Watson
Nights in Rodanthe, Nicholas Sparks
The Other Boleyn Girl, Philippa Gregory
Peach Cobbler Murder, Joanne Fluke
The Sea, The Sea, Iris Murdoch

Poetry:
Axe Handles, Gary Snyder

Nonfiction:
-environmental memoirs:
Body Toxic, Susanne Antonette
My Story As Told By Water, David James Duncan
-creative nonfiction, essays:
The Boys of My Youth, JoAnn Beard
Distance and Direction, Judith Kitchen
In Short: A Collection of Brief Creative Nonfiction, ed. Judith Kitchen
Small Wonders, Barbara Kingsolver
-journal:
A Journal of a Solitude, May Sarton
-historical/journalism:
The Professor and the Madman, Simon Winchester
-memoir/geographical journalism:
Walking the Bible, Bruce Feiler
-on writing:
Zen in the Art of Writing, Ray Bradbury

Note: Email me if you want the low-down on any of the above, or if you want to tell me what you're reading.

Thursday, September 28, 2006

Creature Comforts*

Dane, my five-year-old, is sitting on the couch watching Prehistoric Planet, his favorite DVD about dinosaurs. Leiopleurodon—an ancient whale-like sea creature whose jagged-tooth jaws have just been likened to a giant car-crusher—has eaten, well, a dolphin thing. (Dane, of course, could tell you its name).

Dane’s cozy under his afghan but his hands are cold. He woke up too early today so I sit out here watching the video with him. I hold a homemade hot latte in my hands. It feels so good I think Dane will like holding it too. He holds it and looks so comforted I tell him he can have a sip. He raises an eyebrow and cocks his head at me.

“Go ‘head,” I coax with a nod.

He brings the cup to his lips, tips his head back a little, drinks a sip in. He slowly brings it back down to his lap, looks over at me, and smiles the smile of a conspirator. I smile back a knowing smile.

“Good stuff, huh?”

I feel like a junkie who’s just scored a kid his first hit.

Since he’s able to recall every arcane detail about the Triassic, Jurassic, and Cretaceous periods, I’m tempted to tell him that these are Blue Bottle beans, voted by some to be the finest coffee beans roasted in San Francisco, home brewed on our Rancilio espresso machine.

Instead, I just let him hold my cup as Leiopleurodon makes his way further into the deep.

*I submitted this entry to the writingmamas.com blog. Hopefully it's in the queue for next week.

Tuesday, September 26, 2006

Angel Island Pix
(from earlier/July entry)

A short break along the Perimeter Trail.

Hydrating--it was HOT that day, pushing 100.
LOTS of water and Gatorade.

The Angel Island Immigration Station (known as the "Ellis Island of the West" and very important to Chinese American history) was further down the hill from our 5 mile perimeter loop, so we didn't attempt it--the perimeter loop was enough for the new cyclists. (Maybe next time.) So, no pix of that National Historic Landmark; however, the island also had old buildings where soldiers from WWI and WWII received support. We explored those for a while.

Above, inside one of the military support buildings.
Lots of cool old stuff like this to stick your fingers in.

I took a picture of Aubs on the ferry.

Aubs took one of me at the support station.

On the trail.

Trail-a-bike.

Monday, September 25, 2006

First Day of School Pix

Dane at his backpack/coat/helmet hook

Dane with our zippy little neighbor, Geornae.

Aubrey and Mom returning from first-day drop-off at school.

Thursday, September 21, 2006

Writing, School, Camping

Dawn Yun, the leader of my Writing Mamas writer's group at Book Passage, has just launched a website: www.writingmamas.com. Check it out if you're curious to see what I/we've been up to. I've submitted one piece; I hope to submit more soon. (Yours truly is also in a photo.)

In other news, Dane's still enjoying kindergarten (will post pix as soon as I can download them) and Mick took his last final at 2pm today. Done with quarter #5. This one just sort of snuck up on us!

We're going camping this weekend at Mackerricher State Park, about three hours north of here; will pull Dane out at lunchtime tomorrow and start driving. Bringing bikes, kite, s'more fixins.

Sunday, September 17, 2006

Ms Get Smashed By As

$2 ticket night at McAfee Coliseum earlier this summer. Picked Mick up after school and drove into Oakland to watch the Ms lose to the As something like 7-zip. No worries, though. The kids just had an experience similar to our Mariners experiences in the 80s--well, maybe even the 70s and the 90s too. Like all seasoned Ms fans, we knew to turn our attention to food, clapping to the organ music, picking candy up off the ground (oh, c'mon, everyone gets a one-time shot), and trying to ignore the boos of Oakland fans. Ichiro got an earful. (Youch. They're ruthless!)

Saturday, September 09, 2006

Excuses First, Updates Second

My computer monitor red-lined two weeks ago, so I've only been nabbing computer time on an occasional evening when Mick lets me use his laptop, or for fifteen minute stints at the library when I log on for all I'm worth. Additionally, we've had the start of the school year and out-of-town guests. (Those are two things I can appreciate though.)

Dane's thrilled to be at school. He loves bike riding to commute, playing at recess, and... being a SUPER STAR! To clarify, the teacher uses a 5 star ladder system to encourage or discourage various types of behavior. Everyone starts each day in the middle/third star and is moved up or down accordingly. Let's just say little Dane Reynolds has got it goin' on. Every single day he has been a Super Star, and one day he was the only Super Star in the classroom. That meant that on Friday, his teacher surprised him by having him stand up and go to the cupboard to pick out a prize for being the only student with two full weeks of Super Star status. You should've seen him run down the hill toward me after school yesterday with two huge gold star stickers on his green uniform shirt and a surprise in his backpack. When asked what it takes to be a Super Star, he said he had to be the "behavedest." That's my boy!

Other than that, he's reading and spelling all the time at home, always asking for a piece of paper to use with his pencil. I find little lists like: DISHS, UVINTOP, FLOR, VACUM, UVIN and BATHRM (after a particularly helpful day), or AUBREY, DANE, LUKE, CATE, CAT (when he's thinking about his sister, Star Wars, and who knows what else).

Aubrey's enjoying words too. Here's what she recently wrote: SIT, LIP, SIP (with a smiley face princess at the top of the little piece of paper). I think she's up to snuff with Dane, but she's laying low for now. She's adjusting well to Dane's day-long absences (8:15am-3pm). This week she had Grammy Jan here for paper dolls, and Monday she starts her classes at the Mill Valley Rec Center with Miss Jane again. She'll do a 10 to noon pre-school class and, on Mondays, noon to 1pm Yoga Bugs class, and on Wednesdays, noon to 1pm Twist class. That'll give her some good structured time, and it'll give me a good three hours of free time twice a week. Since she and I will commute there via trail-a-bike, I'll hang out somewhere nearby, starting or revising/polishing essays.

I went in on Thursday for a cleaning at UoP with Mick. My teeth feel gorgeous, slippery, sparkly. It was interesting to watch him think through processes-- like how he'll establish a pattern for himself for the teeth cleanings, or how he'll adjust the chairs and his arms to reach for certain parts inside the mouth, or, most importantly, how he'll hold his arms so he doesn't brush up on the chest of the female he's working on. (I caught him using my chest as an elbow rest once, but I think he knew exactly what he was doing.)

I'm pleased to report he has a gentle, confident manner at chairside and it's very clear that he's embarked on a fitting career. It's really exciting to see him working so hard at school (and at home).

Signing out.

Monday, September 04, 2006

Deja vu (with a twist)

"What are those little bumps on your face?" Dane asked while studying my face this morning. "On your nose and next to your nose?"

"Those are moles, also called beauty marks," I said, raising my finger to his face. "You have one here by your eye and one on your cheek and one by your eyebrow..."

He waited a second and then said, "Mole marks? Mine are made by raccoons."

Sunday, August 27, 2006

Little man starts school tomorrow. I was surprised at Longs today, while buying Dane the last of his school supplies, that there was a quick catch in the throat: I'm not ready! repeated three or four times in the head. But, really, I am. And so is he. I'm so excited for him to enter this new kind of life, and I'll do my best to see that it goes smoothly for him, to keep guiding him. I say that knowing too though that so much of it is in his court, which is probably the part that parents find hardest to accept. He gets to show up on his own now, as Dane, applying all that he has and is to the social and academic scheme of things. Thank goodness he's a smart, strong, sweet, happy guy. Will let you know how it goes.

Oh yeah, we'll be riding bikes to and from school. He'll ride solo (and he gets to lock his bike up at the bike rack!), and Aubs and I will ride together with the trail-a-bike. She and I are helping out at lunchtime tomorrow; we'll find out later what kind of regular weekly volunteering we (I) can do--an hour a week in the classroom, I'm hoping. Aubrey has permission to come along to campus anytime I'm there, which suits her and Dane just fine. She'll start six hours a week of pre-school on September 11th.

Thursday, August 10, 2006

The Same Sky

This morning Aubrey studied my face. While sucking her thumb, an activity she’s slowly eliminating from her routine, she pointed to my face with her free hand: “You have a dot here, it’s brown,” she said, pointing to the bridge of my nose. “And a dot here above your lip,” pointing next to my nose. “That one’s the same color as your skin.”

She studies me the way lovers study each other, the way I study her father, tracing the details of the skin—the marks along the cheekbone, the spine, across the shoulder blade, around the ankle. She looks at me with such love and familiarity I recall studying my own mother’s face when I was four. I pointed at the brown dot on each cheek, the perfect symmetry. “What are those?” I’d asked. “Some people call them moles, others call them beauty marks,” she’d said. “I’ll call them beauty marks,” I’d said, caressing her face, drinking her in. A couple years later, I would fold pink construction paper in half for Mother's Day, and draw her dark curly hair, her square jaw, her brown eyes—such a contrast to my own hazel eyes and straight blonde hair. And, finally, I’d make her cheeks rosy, with a brown dot on each. Unmistakably my mother.

Now I look into Aubrey’s face (every day, as much as I can) and memorize the little mark below her eye, the one next to her nose, the one across her face on the other side of her chin. And Dane, my boy, I memorize his too: at the outer tip of one eyebrow, one next to his nose—on the opposite side of his sister’s—then across his face to his cheek, and then on the edge of his chin. I think Little Dipper, Orion, my own little constellations.

At my yearly physical, the doctor checks my skin, the marks on my body. She looks for the mark that might not belong, because our moles grow in families, she says. Wherever there’s one of a certain kind (in color or shape or size) there’ll be another somewhere. That’s how we know what belongs. I think of my mother, my husband, my children. I put our faces side by side in my mind. I think of these families of moles, passed down to generations, our beauty marks to memorize and recall, our own little constellations hailing from the same sky.

Tuesday, August 08, 2006

Holy ER Cost!

Mick held up his insurance statement last night and said, "Guess how much my trip to the ER cost."

I started high, or so I thought: "$1500."

"Nope. Guess again."

"$3000."

"Nope. Give up? $7000."

Wow. The statement was divided into three or four amounts, and we're not sure which monies went where, but we figured the CT scan took the big portion of it, and then the urine test to check for the kidney stones, etc., etc. Wow. Thank goodness for insurance, but that just blows our minds. A two-hour visit!

Monday, August 07, 2006

Jan Took A Spill

Here's what she had to say about it:

Took [this photo] this morn, 24 hours after I was walking with Indi to
Barritt's t-ball game and the sidewalk just up and tripped me. My chin,
nose and forehead - basically my face took the brunt of the impact.
Cement and one's face make for quite a dramatic and painful experience.
Must have frightened Indi a bit with my nose bleeding and also bleeding
from the cut on the bridge of my nose. She was a real trooper - thanks,
Indi!  I look a lot like Mike did after his boating drama. I head to
Hawaii for three weeks in two days and then on to San Fran for two
weeks. The first two weeks in Hawaii I'will be a black eyed 'Susan' -
no that'd be a black eyed 'Janice'. Have a headache most of the time
and  some neck and lower back and knee muscles that are conversing with
me. My one healthy major joint, right knee, was first to hit the
sidewalk and is abraised and bruised and hopefully not triggered to
lose it's cartilage like the other joints have done.

[Other than the obvious "Poor Jan!" comments, fyi: I'm still working on pix/entries from our trip north, as well as Minihawks updates.]

Thursday, August 03, 2006

I'm sad for Maureen today. She had to put her sweet old dog Ally down this week--Ally who was never more than three feet from Maureen in the house, sleeping at the foot of the bed, clicking her toenails against the wood floors, head in Maureen's lap for movies. Ally was ninety-something in dog years.

Photos:
1. Sadly, I don't have a picture of Ally. This is as close as I've got for now.
2. Maureen and me after Portland Marathon in '04.

Wednesday, August 02, 2006

The day we returned from our cruise I met up with my friend Karen. We've been friends for twenty years now, which seems really wierd to write, and she knows and understands me well. We spent the night at her place in Ballard, where we drank coffee, watched movies, and got our toenails done. (We like to think we're tough, but these girly things appeal to our sensibilities.) The next day, she made Aubrey's hair and fingernails pretty (see happy little miss above) and played Pirates with Dane.

Lately, Karen has been my reader, providing feedback and encouragement for works in progress. She also reminded me I have nothing to lose by writing S.E. Hinton an email requesting an interview to do a write-up for my writer's group at Book Passage. It's a long shot, since S.E. Hinton doesn't do interviews or readings any more, but I'm hoping to ask some questions about her perspective on what it took her to write as a mother, versus what it took her to write as a teenager. *(I mean, she's extraordinary: she wrote The Outsiders at sixteen when she was fed up with the quality of young adult (YA) literature. And the quality of her literature was so high and so fresh that it changed the face of YA literature for good.)

*Will make a note in the blog if anything comes of my request.

Friday, July 28, 2006

Sleepover at the Mazzucas

Above photo: Peggy, Anjie, Mick, Patrick
(Note: Yeah, this is the kind of picture you get with an eight-year-old
at the camera and a blogger who doesn't know how to PhotoShop.)

After Mick's last final, back in early June, we packed up the rental car and drove through the night to Issaquah, WA. Driving up the I-5 corridor through the night in 2-3 hour shifts worked well for us; it cut down on a surplus of backseat conversations and potty pitstops from you-know-whom. My cousin Patrick, whom I haven't seen for about three years--I spent a good portion of my childhood free time with him and his brother Deric-- picked us up at the rental car company and took us to his home.

Wednesday, July 26, 2006

Picklejuice Popsickles

their idea

Tuesday, July 25, 2006

First Patient and First Major Family Ride

Mick met with his very first patient yesterday, an eighty-year-old woman of great patience and kindness, he says. I don't think I risk violating privacy rights when I tell you he performed steps 1-5 and took x-rays. (Yeah, I don't have a clue what steps 1-5 are either.)

He's got another new patient scheduled this week, and another couple for the next. He was assigned about ten patients and he's responsible for scheduling them himself. When his class meets for clinic--a few hours four times a week, I think--if he doesn't have his own patient scheduled, he spends time assisting another second year student.

In other news: last Saturday the whole family drove to Tiburon (about 10 minutes away) and took the Angel Island Ferry to Angel Island State Park. There, we rode our bikes--Dane SOLO and Aubrey on the trail-a-bike--around the hilly, roasty toasty five mile perimeter loop. The kids did great: Dane learned to really control his speed on the downhills so his handlebars wouldn't go wobbly, and Aubrey pumped like such a champ up some of the steep hills that we got to pass other riders walking their bikes up. The temp was in the 90s, with better breezes on one half of the island, but we had fun as we guzzled Gatorade, ate granola bars and explored old barracks. There's also an old immigration station there (on the National Historic Register) but it was down a really steep hill, so we'll have to save that stop for next time when the skill and energy levels are better-suited for it. As it was, we were gritty and salty when we returned home four hours later, but it was great fun and it sure beat sitting around in our hot apartment.

Chock one up for the Reynolds' most recent step toward a new independence.

[Will post pictures soon.]

Thursday, July 20, 2006

Here's a write-up on Willow Creek Academy. As residents of Marin City (the other side the Sausalito tracks, so to speak) we wrestled with public vs. private before choosing this public charter school. Dane will attend Kindergarten there this Fall; Aubs will start in '07.

WILLOW CREEK ACADEMY, 2001
Facilities are a challenge for most charter schools, some of which occupy church basements or storefronts. Instead of having to scramble for a home, Willow Creek is lodged in the spiffy upper half of the Bayside School campus. The classrooms were to be a middle school when the handsome facilities were built 10 years ago. But the middle school wound up in Marin City. Instead, Willow Creek, chartered by the district, moved into the classrooms next to Bayside Elementary. Like many charter startups, Willow Creek adds a grade each year. It is now K-7 and will top out with an eighth grade next school year. Willow Creek has 105 students, the same as K-6 Bayside next door, with which there is delicate coexistence.

For half a century the Sausalito Marin City School District has struggled with having one foot in predominantly white Sausalito and the other in predominantly black Marin City. Many Sausalito parents who could afford to do so sent their kids to private schools, leaving the district with lots of money (two or three times as much per pupil as the rest of Marin), lots of problems (ranging from discipline to test scores) and lots of tension. Willow Creek was founded by Sausalito parents who wanted to re-establish publicly funded education as a core civic virtue rather than as a source of enduring dispute.

Head of school is Carol Cooper who, like the administrators of Marin’s other charter schools, has a remarkably strong educational background. Cooper has degrees from Oberlin, the University of Chicago and UC Berkeley; worked 18 years in the Marin County schools office; took off five years to try her hand at the flower business (Hastings and Hastings in Mill Valley); and four years ago went back to what she loves most—education. Willow Creek has a strong academic focus that features project-based, interdisciplinary learning. About 80 percent of the diverse student body is from the Sausalito district.

Here's a brief analysis of Willow Creek and the other three charter schools in Marin county. Marin’s four charter schools are clearly different, but in three big ways they are quite alike:

1. Small size. Although student-teacher ratios at Marin charters are about average for California public schools, the charter schools themselves are relatively small, from 25 students at Phoenix Academy to 243 at Novato Charter. Every study since Roger Barker and Paul Gump’s groundbreaking work in 1964 (Big School, Small School) has agreed that small schools are superior to large ones in nearly all aspects: attendance, student involvement, academic achievement, the serving of minorities—the works. At Marin’s small charters the kids say they feel valued, there are no dismissive cliques and drug use is either a small problem or no problem at all.

2. Strong parent involvement. At Willow Creek Academy and Novato Charter School, parents must sign on the dotted line and pledge many volunteer hours of work. Parent involvement at MSAT and Phoenix Academy is less structured, but firmly expected. In the broader educational universe, a huge factor in any school’s success appears to be parent involvement. When Bill Honig was superintendent of Marin’s Reed School District, and before he became state superintendent, parent involvement was significant as he propelled Reed from a good district to a great one.

3. Rampant enthusiasm. Almost without exception, the charter kids love the teachers, the teachers love the kids, administrators are friends rather than scary figures and parents feel good, too. Sometimes kids don’t fit. But as four MSAT 10th graders explained, “Some kids aren’t here by choice…Their parents forced them, but they get weeded out…It’s usually mutual. At the end of last year there were kids who didn’t want to come back, so they were replaced and so the 10th grade class now is really just a great group.” The replacement process is a luxury not available at traditional public schools. Kids who don’t want to be there are usually forced to be there anyway.

Source: http://www.pacificsun.com/marinscharters.html