Sculpey New Year!

After an all-too-brief interlude with my parents (complete with cross-country skiing!), we're back with John's family. I idly considering using the cold, cold, cold Vermont snow as a way to make an attempt at teaching myself a bit of tracking, but it was a no go -- sad but true, not only was there snow, but there was also ice and sleet, a good bit of it. Ew.

Back down here, though, today was a day for sculpture. And, weirdly, after the total failure of SassyCat this fall, I was apprehensive. In order to avoid the total collapse I went through earlier, I build an armature out of unbent paperclips and newsprint, then covered the whole shebang over with polymer clay. The design was more based on Mondrian's "Red Tree" than on an actual tree from nature (though it has certain similarities to a tree across the street from John's parents' house), but ultimately there's also some, um, either artistic license or missing skill there. John's sister recommends using it to hold jewelery or something like that, but we'll see.

Texturizing the bark was much more work than I'd expected, and I got bored a few times and took a break to watch Burn Notice and knit, but in all, generally successful. I wish I knew how to make the branches a little spindlier or better-forked, but in all, I officially nominate myself for the sculpt-from-nature component of the badge (so far). I still need to wait for the tree to harden a little bit so I can remove some of the paper armature without things entirely crumpling, and then the whole thing needs to bake for a while. As it stands now, though, the tree is at least mostly-completed. Hooray!

It's shaping up to be a pretty low-key New Year's Eve, which I don't mind even a little. What's your plan?

Institutional memory

I'm visiting John's family for Christmas, and it's been making me think about family traditions, though not necessarily the Christmas kind. (There's some of that too, of course, and the in-church moment of lighting candles during "Silent Night" gives me a little twinge because I'm not with my dad in Pennsylvania. This is, of course ridiculous, especially because my parents haven't lived in Pennsylvania for years. But still.)

What I'm thinking about, even more, is the kind of stuff that turns into family legend. This morning, my mother-in-law told me about John and his sisters' childhood favorite book. It's about the adventures of two wily cats, and it's entirely in Danish. Do any of them speak Danish? Not really. But it was a childhood favorite based solely on the pictures of adorable cats doing comical things and the truly excellent delivery of my father-in-law. It's that kind of thing that I'm thinking about today.

And it relates to the Handbook, too. Right after the section I was reading most recently, addressing camp sanitation and not addressing latrines, there was a brief series of weather-related axioms. One of them, "rain before seven, clear by eleven," made me jump.

It's my own family legend.

See, my paternal grandparents lived a large part of their lives in upstate New York, the real, small-town farming country of Brother's Keeper (my grandfather grew up down the road from those guys), the kind of place the Handbook was built for. They're both also great lovers of folk wisdom and country phrases, describing a long day of traveling as having been "all round Robin Hood's barn," that sort of thing. They observe the clouds on a Tuesday and have a rhyme to explain how the weather will be the following weekend, or see a particular type of bird and declare that it's going to snow in six hours. There may be some truth in it, for all I know -- I'll admit, my outdoor observational skills aren't where I'd like them to be.

My father operates a little differently, and the rhymes were never for him. As a kid, he came up with a way to put the lie to the folk wisdom once and for all. And one rainy morning, he presented the family with a rhyme he'd made up himself. "Rain before seven, clear by eleven." To his delight, my grandparents took it up at once, as if they'd been using it all their lives.

Like my in-laws' Danish storybook, my dad's weather axiom became part of our family's mythology. On a rainy morning, one of us might look at the other and wryly observe "rain before seven . . . ," knowing that the others would see both our optimism and our wariness -- it wasn't, after all, actual folk wisdom -- just my young father's creativity. (Before you think my father was a bad kid, let me tell you otherwise. He was a Boy Scout himself, and, with a few other boys from his neighborhood, went so far as to form a secret club dedicated, of all things, to helpfulness. So don't worry. He was a good kid, just driven to distraction by all this infernal rhyming.)

Regardless. For my entire life, plus fifteen years or so before I was born, the fake weather axiom remained. But today, but lo! In 1911, fully (at least) fifty years prior to my dad's invention, the Boy Scouts of America picked out this very bit of country wisdom for Handbook inclusion. So where does that leave us?

Had my dad heard the same phrase before? Probably. Heck, he was just a little kid. Had my grandparents? Absolutely. But, regardless, "rain before seven" is never going to turn into a legitimate piece of advice for me. It's always, always going to remain one thing and one thing only: a story about my family. It crystallizes a moment, one I never saw but that, thanks to repetition (and to knowing all three major players so well), I can picture exactly. It's as good as a photograph.

How about you? What kind of family phrase or story brings you back, even to a place you never went or a time before you were born?

Don't even think I will do this.

http://chestofbooks.com/crafts/popular-mechanics/The-Boy-Mechanic-1000-Things-for-Boys-to-Do/index.html

Now I'm going to talk about poo. A lot.

The Public Health call to explain proper camp sanitation confounded me for a full half-second: when I was a kid and camping with the Girl Scouts, we never went anywhere without running water, and so the concept of having to make sure no one was peeing in your camp was . . . bewildering. Then I remembered: my troop was a bunch of wimps.

Now, the Handbook itself seems a little confused about how to talk about camp sanitation without either a) getting a little overly familiar with bodily functions or b) reminding scouts that they are not the invulnerable supermen the Handbook usually encourages them to be. In fact, the entire sanitation section spans a little less than a third of a page, largely exhorting the campers to burn or bury garbage and to make sure their water supply is "carefully examined," though there's no real explanation for how to do it. Of course, if I were a 1911 boy (lots of big hypotheticals there, buddy), I'd lean towards boiling, followed by the addition of a few drops of 2% iodine or bleach. Now, I might even consider some water purification tablets (or the kind of awesome-looking portable pumps), though the last time I did much camping I just hauled around a big honking jug of water. The water purification advice, though, is one where the Handbook shows its age. Rather than giving much advice for how the scout can tell if water needs purification or not -- and rather than advising the scout to just go ahead and boil all his water anyway -- it sort of throws up its hands, urges immunization, and moves on to the next bit.

Surprisingly, also, there's no additional advice regarding the location or construction of one's latrine, which was always a big concern of a friend's father, who kept urging my preteen Brownie troop to consider -- just this once -- forgoing the campsite-provided restrooms. Weird. The friend's-father had a lot of suggestions, many of which sounded nightmarish to me at the time, and at least one of which, I'm like 90% certain, involved installing ropes along trees so we could lean back over a latrine pit without falling in. (I can find no confirmation of this kind of thing on the internet, so it may just be that I was nine and had an incredible imagination, because I always pictured this as like the American Gladiators of bathroom-use, and I would be delighted to have someone confirm this for me.)

I have a feeling the Handbook would have some great suggestions -- and some elaborate ones -- for latrine building, if only they had the nerve to publish them. It's delicacy, I think, that's holding us back, not a lack of ideas. Even something simple -- that a latrine should be downhill from the campsite, far from water, and several feet deep -- would do the trick. But, in 1911, I think the Handbook wants to preserve our decorum more than it really wants to help out.

As usual, the Handbook delights me the most when it totally abandons all attempts at any instruction that's not of a moral nature. One agreeing that we'll all look real close at the water and nothing else, the Handbook emphasizes the importance of following its agreed-upon rules: "A scout's honor will not permit him to disobey in the slightest particular the sanitary rules of his camp." Right on, buddy.

If you'll excuse me, I have to go cook dinner.

I really, really, unjustifiably (?) hate the word "app"

I'm not the only modern Boy Scout. The iTunes store (and the BSA) is currently offering a downloadable edition of the 12th edition of the Handbook.

I'm conflicted about this, largely because of my secret feelings that (1) the iPhone is an unnecessary gadget largely because (2) if I had one, I would do nothing but spend my entire day playing computerized Skee-ball. Also, though, I have some mixed feelings about the direction a lot of things with scouting are going -- and, not insigificantly, the way the Handbook has changed. Go check out the virtual handbook at bsahandbook.org and take a look -- is it a nicer-looking, better-designed document? Sure. But a lot of what makes the original Handbook great (the summaries of personal health and world history, the encyclopedia renditions of farming knowledge, the spectacular section about fending off mad dogs) is gone, replace by pull quotes and pictures of fresh-scrubbed boys white-water rafting.

Maybe I'm just ridiculous (and often I am), but I wonder if this shift in the Handbook, if its lower reading level and brighter colors, is more significant. What we're seeing, really, is the removal of what made the Handbook great in the first place, and what makes is so all-fired interesting to me right now. (For the record, expect another edition of Handbook Book Club in the next few days.) Sure, you can make the argument (and I hear this a lot, as a teacher) that our responsibility is to put material in a format that's understandable to the reader, or that, well, kids today, they just read differently.

That's crap.

Here's the real story, somewhat modified to include my own view of reality. When you see widespread poor reading, a big, big chunk of what you're seeing is a lack of challenging, interesting material. If we cut out all the best bits from the original Handbook, repackage them in neon and Photoshop, then yeah, that's going to be what kids read. Because it's what we're giving them, and because it's easy. The original version had some big words and some ridiculous ideas, sure, but there's a lot of merit in giving our young Scouts something that's a little more interesting, and something that's a lot more useful.

Anyway. The iPhone app. I said I was conflicted, and I meant it -- because really, my issue with the app Handbook isn't with the app-ness, but with the Handbook's modification to remove a large amount of the actual content. For what it is, the app Handbook has a lot of merit -- it packs lightly, it's easily portable, and it's searchable for quick "OH MY GOD WHAT SHOULD I DO WHEN I'M BEING CHASED BY A MAD DOG" situations. Of course, it won't survive a fall into those rapids the Handbook boys are shooting, but then, the paper Handbook might encounter some trouble there, too.

Enough curmudgeon'ing for one day, pals. What do you think? I know that I'm not fully valid on my reading-and-kids theory, but that's because I was a dorky, bookish one and most kids are not. So tell me where I'm going wrong.

Faking it

It's 20-some degrees out, and I was going to post tonight about making rice pudding (a requirement for the cooking badge). There's only one problem: I cannot come up with a food that sounds grosser to me than rice pudding. Sure, I've never eaten it. And sure, what's not to love? Rice? Fine. Milk? Delicious. Sugar? Yes please. Hell, Alton Brown has a version featuring cream and coconut milk, which can be nothing but tasty. And yet, the notion, or the notion of the mouth-feel, particularly, just gives me the willies.

Anyway, today I've been thinking about phoniness. In one way in particular -- faking illness. See, last night I was feeling pretty cold-y and out of it, and I was seriously considering calling out of work today. I didn't, though, and for one major reason: I am terrified of calling in sick. Or, more specifically, of calling in sick or otherwise declaring myself in poor health and of having someone not believe me.

This isn't something new. When I was a kid, I would tell my parents I wanted to go to school, almost no matter what, not because I was an enormous dork (well, I was, I mean, but that's not the point), but because I didn't want them to think I was trying to get out of gym class or something ridiculous. (This doesn't mean I was a particularly stoic kid. Just an antsy one.) Please bear in mind, of course, that I was never faking. But I was terrified of the accusation.

It continues today, but in slightly different ways. I don't worry about my parents thinking I'm faking sick anymore (yay adulthood), but even still, doctor's appointments and things like that make me kind of nervous. While I sit in the waiting room, I'm running through symptoms in my head. Sure, my knee swelled up like a grapefruit last winter when I tore my MCL, but did it really look bad enough? Was the doctor going to laugh at me? Would he think I'm a wimp? Am I a wimp? This is the opposite of the usual doctor anxiety, I think -- my sense is that usually, people who are scared of the doctor are worried it'll be worse than it seems. I'm terrified that what I think is painful or infectious or troubling isn't really bad enough.

I wonder: is this an artifact of being a sort of generally nervous person, or is it something else? I tend to be pretty driven (in many situations) -- do I want to be so good at being sick that it'll impress the doctor, which makes me resistant to admit to more minor illnesses? I'm really curious about this. Is this more normal than I think, or do I sound like a lunatic? I'd love your opinion.

Typhoid oy vey

I am ready to admit something absoutely mortifying: I had no idea that people still died from typhoid.

In my head, it's an old-timey disease, the sort of thing that's totally horrific, of course, but that really isn't a risk anymore. Like smallpox or polio, it's something characters in novels get but people in real life just . . . don't.

Holy crap am I wrong.

So, somewhere in the vicinity of 17 million people get typhoid per year, though only about 400 Americans. (This either exonerates me from not thinking of typhoid as much of an issue, damns me for being pitifully America-centered, or both. I lean towards both.) This is largely an issue of clean drinking water, and in fact US typhoid levels declined almost to nil (well, to 400 per year, including travelers) quite quickly following the advent of chlorination. Interestingly enough, there are rumors floating around the internet (though, of course, there are rumors floating around the internet about pretty much anything) suggesting a link between cystic fibrosis and typhoid resistance, but that's really beyond the scope of where I'd like to go right now.

Regardless, in the 30 seconds 'til I go to bed (it's been a busy day today, including a Papier Mache Incident in my fourth grade class, and I just need to get off to sweet, sweet sleep), the thing I've spent all day thinking about:

The CDC suggests that somewhere around 5% of typhoid patients (who recover) can become asymptomatic carriers. This is bizarre and fascinating to me, and leads me to Typhoid Mary, and not just because everyone loves a scandal (except the people whom it hurts). She infected 20-some people and, at least in part because she was a woman and Irish in a time when it was good to be neither, was locked away in quarantine. (Should she have been? Debatable. If the CDC numbers are correct, which I have no reason to doubt, then there must have been tens if not hundreds of other carriers walking around New York in the early 1900s. That said, things get weirder.) Mary got out of the hospital (on North Brother Island, which should maybe become a Handbook field trip) after 3 years, swore to avoid all food service jobs, and then, promptly, got a gig as a cook and infected another 27 people.

At this point, the public health authorities declared enough enough, restored Mary to quarantine, and kept her there for more than twenty years.

Now, I'm a little torn on this. On one hand, was she dangerously irresponsible? Absolutely. But was she the only one? Not hardly. 1910's New York Times ran an article about Typhoid John, a mountain guide who had infected more than 100 people. However, the article informs us that there is "no law by which 'Typhoid John' can be isolated." Oops. Someone should have told Mary. The authorities let TJ go free.

I'd like to look into this more and to spend some more time thinking about it, but I think I need to cut things off for tonight. I meant only to talk about infection rates, not about illegal imprisonment.

Seriously. I have paid this much for brunch.

Rather than thoroughly addressing the spread of malaria (thanks, mosquitoes, we're done.), this seems like a better moment to address something: I am really, really lucky. So are you, probably, in that you have internet access and can spend your time reading my site rather than filtering your water, mending worn-out clothing, working 16-hour days, things like that.

Instead, I'd like to refer you to the Nothing But Nets campaign, devoted to sending mosquito nets to Africa. The thing is, malaria causes something like 500 million infections each year, and somewhere in the vicinity of 1 million deaths, most of them children, and most of them in sub-Saharan Africa. (This, by the way, works out to roughly 110 deaths per hour. Think of that next time you're watching 60 Minutes.) How easy is this to stop? I cannot even begin to tell you. Ten dollars buys a mosquito net, which NBN will ship and distribute.

Anyhow. Check it out. I"ve donated tonight, and I highly, highly recommend it.

(Another thing, from exploring the website: the Union for Reform Judaism and the United Methodist Church are two of NBN's biggest partners. Coincidentally enough, I grew up attending both a reform congregation and a Methodist church. Go team!)

Dome photos

As promised, I've got me some dome photos. Despite serious after-school effort (in which I was aided by whole battalions of first graders, and in which I was able to make the dome stand up if I sat inside it and pushed against the top center), the dome is dead.

Long live the dome.

I'm out of masking tape, my hands are permanently be-newsprinted, and I will scream if I have another paper triangle conk me on the head. (Also, please note that my classroom is usually much cleaner, but it's impossible to vacuum underneath a giant, newspaper dome, and things are getting a little skeevy under there. Ew.) So, while I'm reluctant to abandon a project like this, I think the time has come.

Tonight, in honor of John's birthday, I made an enormous number of bittersweet chocolate truffles, some of which were flavored with balsamic vinegar and some with vanilla. Oddly, I am firmly on team balsamic. The kitchen (well, the section of my apartment's living room that acts as a kitchen) is covered with chocolate, but it's also covered with delicious. I favor the Alton Brown recipe, but without brandy because a scout is temperate and also because I don't like brandy. Give it a shot, folks -- labor-intensive but delicious.

Tomorrow? A return to public health. In the meantime, be sure to wash your hands, boil your water, and pasteurize your milk.

Why I am not a pioneer

First, happy 50th post!

Phew. Done with the pleasantries.

Now, I knew from the beginning that I wasn't going to earn the Pioneering badge. There are some aspects of it that are just incompatible with my city-bound lifestyle -- (requirement 1, for example: "Fell a nine-inch tree or pole in a prescribed direction neatly and quickly.") While I can get away with a lot in the park, chopping down trees would probably not fly. (Neither does the kite I built. But still.)

That said, I thought I had a great intersection between my working life and my pursuit of badges -- I'm teaching a unit on architecture, and I thought it would be really, really fantastic to link it up with the Handbook. Pioneering requirement 6 calls for the aspiring scout to "build a shack of one kind of another suitable for three occupants." While there are no guidelines for size, shape, durability, anything like that, the general size seemed prohibitive. Until I decided (because I am an idiot) to build a geodesic dome.

Now, I do not eat only sprouted breads. I don't even wear hemp socks. But a geodesic dome? This seemed like the kind of hippiedom I could get behind. Plus, it's just triangles! Even I understand triangles! I made a bunch of tubes out of newspapers (for the frame) and set to work.

An aside: When I was a tiny kid, my parents decided that I was ready to enter kindergarten early. I was reading, writing, all that. So my mother took me to the school board offices to enroll me, only to learn that I would have to pass an entrance exam. I would have to show my prowess. My intellect. My insight. I would have to draw a circle and cut out a square. And? I failed. This is the level of crafty coordination I displayed as a child, and it's pretty much where I still function.

Now then.

Three hours later? Still on the floor in a tangle of tubing and tape. I can't get the damn thing to stay up, try as I might. And I KNOW it's doable -- I'm using these plans (go to the website and see kids a third my age (gah!) building one successfully), but things are an absolute mess. Bits of tape got stuck in my hair. At two separate points, I was holding up different newspaper tubes with each hand, the top of the head, and my mouth. (By the way, spit? Does not contribute to the structural integrity of the newspaper.)

Okay. Also? I have to go to bed right now right now right now because it is a big, long day tomorrow. Except some disaster-dome photos today. (And yes. I have been calling it Thunderdome in my head, because wouldn't you?)

Thanks.

Happy Thanksgiving, folks.

I'm out of New York for the next few days, visiting my parents in Vermont, and right now I'm enjoying some pre-dinner ice cream while John and my folks watch some sort of James Bond movie. (Which one? I have no idea. Carly Simon sings the theme song.)

My original VT plan of completing the Astronomy badge seems to have fallen to pieces thanks to days of rain and cloud, save for a few gorgeous hours this afternoon when we took a walk around the lake. However, given that those gorgeous hours were, well, this afternoon, using them to observe the stars might not have been entirely successful. And, in fact, it wasn't. So there. We did, however, see a monument to Lord Jeffery Amherst, best known for Amherst, MA (and, later, Amherst College) and for early germ warfare via the distribution of smallpox-infested blankets.

Instead, though, I do have something of a Thanksgiving post for you. I guess it's pretty unsurprising that a document like the Handbook, which so admires and idolizes hardiness, manliness, and woodland endurance might find the Pilgrims of particular interest. And, in fact, it does.

We only hear a little bit about the Pilgrims, mostly about their place within American mythology. "When the Pilgrim Fathers founded the American colonies, the work of Arthur and Alfred and the other great men of ancient days was renewed and extended and fitted to the new conditions and times." Wow. Plymouth Rock as Camelot, and how. The Handbook goes on to compare Jamestown (not Pilgrims, I know, but still) to the foundation of "a new race of men" and "a new kind of knight."

Both Thanksgiving and the Boy Scouts themselves are really about this kind of popular legend -- the idea of the iron-constitution'd woodsman tromping through the forest with an axe in one hand and a blunderbuss in the other, creating his own kingdom in the wilds of the frontier (though, of course, the frontier had moved considerably from 1621 to 1911). It's a superhero story, when you get down to it, and it's perfectly suited to the Boy Scouts. (You can argue, of course, that we always get the superheroes we want or need, whether the Axis-battling Captain America, Spiderman and radiation in the '60s, or the Dark Knight of the late '80s. Hell, there's Jack Hinks, Newfoundland's fisherman superhero.)

I'm not going to spend time right now discussing Thanksgiving as a political entity, or any of the messy analogies between the settling of the Americas and genocides (hi, Lord Jeff, 150 years post-Pilgrim!). Instead, I'll leave it with this: The Handbook portrays the Pilgrims as the kind of superhero a Boy Scout really needs. Can you really blame them for it?

Houseflies

Public health requirement #2: Draw a diagram showing how the house-fly carries disease.

I knew the Natural History Museum had an exhibit on frogs, so I was hopeful that there may be a certain housefly component as well. (After all, it would be like having an exhibit on me without a section on the Snickers bar I just ate, or an exhibit on Charlie the cat without featuring kibble.) However, despite making for a swell excuse to visit the museum, I found the AMNH almost entirely fly-free.

(Should I have checked this before just arriving at the museum, which was already a pain in the neck because, hey, Brooklyn to upper west side = difficult, and Brooklyn to upper west side when the trains are delayed for some sort of smoke-in-the-station = nearly impossible? Sure. But let's move past these things, shall we?)

John and I spent some time exploring the Hall of Biodiversity, where I'd never been before, and which features some remarkable beetles, as well as a many-times-magnified bee arm (bee leg? I have no idea). There is also a large, bronze nematode head, the kind of thing that will haunt my nightmares forevermore.

Regardless.

Here goes: a Comic Lite version of the housefly-as-disease-vector. Enjoy it, kids.

Run! Run!

And! Consider the Army Physical Fitness test passed, circa 6:00 or so tonight. Thanks, YMCA!

I'm not slick enough to read on the treadmill (currently: The Phantom of the Opera, which is surprisingly good even for people like me who've never seen the musical), so instead running is all music. Lady Gaga and I crossed the (theoretical, treadmill-based) finish line with seconds to spare. Go team!

Anyone got some stretching tips, though? I seem to have pulled some muscles in my upper back during the push-up component of the test, and I'm not overly psyched about it. I've never been as good about stretching as I should, but I'm genuinely not sure what to do differently!

Contagion

So, like I've mentioned a lot lately, I'm exposed every day to a lot of ick. (Despite being over the flu, I haven't been back to the gym yet, by the way, so the final requirement for the athletics badge is still on hold 'til this week, I hope.) But spending time thinking about has led me to the natural next badge project: Public Health.

The first task: "Tell what should be done to a house which has been occupied by a person who has had a contagious disease." I can make that happen, because I spend time worrying about it after school every single day.

Unlike in 1911, quarantines and even the intense house-cleanups that used to go with them are pretty well out of fashion -- the CDC explains that, while they keep no records of voluntary quarantines, the mandatory type is extremely rare these days. The biggest concerns, they elaborate (largely via the H1N1 info pages) are twofold: the cleaning of doorknobs, books, and other common surfaces and the washing of hands. Now, the CDC recommends various antibacterial household cleaners for the surfaces and soap and water for hands, and a good bout of laundry-doing for all involved.

The laundry (and the CDC's H1N1 reference page) is reassuring: when I was a kid, no story broke my heart like "The Velveteen Rabbit." Specifically, the part about the rabbit being confiscated after the boy has scarlet fever. See, I think the rabbit becoming real is lovely, but as a child I was so attached to my stuffed animals that the notion of one of them being taken away if I got sick was omnipresent and sort of terrifying. (I was, for a notable time, actually a little nervous about having my favorite stuffed animals out if I had a cold or something, just in case.) I'd actually even been a little worried about looking into this particular requirement, on the off-chance I'd learn that, no, I actually should have burnt my favorite childhood toys.

Oh man. Just got a little overemotional there.

Hand-washing notes are forthcoming: oddly, my friend Wendy and I had a long discussion about how we each wash our own hands just this afternoon, and I'm trying out a slight modification to my handwashing routine. I'm a little more excited about this than maybe I should be.

Anyway. All's well that ends well and I'm going to bed.

I haven't forgotten you

I just still have the flu.

I can't shake this one, guys. Five days (maybe six, if you want to count last Friday when I started feeling crappy), and an ongoing low to moderate fever, headache, ew. John made me delicious lentil soup, so that helps.

I had to buy hermit crabs for school today, and I think that maybe I'm kind of a softie. See, I spent way more on the crabs than I can actually get reimbursed for. But! I feel really bad for creatures that live in cages. And I learned that hermit crabs are unable to breed in captivity, so every hermit crab you see in the pet store was caught in the wild somewhere. Think about that. Insane. (Yes, I know they have brains smaller than a sesame seed. But still.) So anyway. I bought the hermit crabs a ton of stuff. Lots of sand (I heard they like to burrow). Dechlorination drops for their water (the chlorine can build up on their gills). Sea sponges for their water dishes (otherwise, small crabs can get caught in the dishes and drown). The list goes on. Also, since I heard hermit crabs are social animals (in the wild, they live in colonies of hundreds or thousands), I bought up every crab in the store. (Sure, it's only three, but still: I'm going to go back in a week or two 'til I have eight or ten.)

Thing is, I don't even particularly like hermit crabs. I just feel bad for them. I feel a little like my grandmother though all this. When my mother was a teenager, she had a cat. Cat the cat. And my grandmother hated Cat. She had no interest in him whatsoever, except in keeping him out. She wanted him outside or n the basement, no two ways about it. But Gma didn't really like the idea of cat food -- it seemed so unappetizing. So, on a fairly regular basis, she would go to the butcher to get liver for Cat. And she would cook it for him. Not because she really wanted Cat in particular to have a tasty dinner, but because the idea of anyone having unpleasant food just seemed wrong.

I am the Gma of hermit crabs.

(Update: John just arrived home from work with a bouquet of tulips for me. This has 100% made my day. Aw.)

Flu!

I have the regular flu (not the swine one) -- fever, chills, light sensitivity (which I thought was a symptom of vampirism, but John assures me that no, just flu), the whole lot.

Clearly, there is only one appropriate response: I've spend the entire day playing Pandemic 2, all while muttering under my breath "if I have to be sick, everybody has to be sick." Sadly, only the part about the audible muttering is made up. (Also, I am totally moving to Madagascar, since I cannot infect it, try as I might. What the hell, Malagasy? Why do you always close your ports just when I start to up the symptom severity?)

Boogers

As I guess I've already mentioned, I have a new job teaching elementary school science (a job of such specificity that I didn't know it existed before I interviewed for it). It's a big change moving from middle to elementary school, but the biggest issue is a surprising one:

Nose picking.

Seriously. I cannot even handle it. The little kids hardly know better, of course, but still, it's ongoing and it's making me think a lot about the public health badge.

Also prompting some public health thoughts was my trip this weekend to the Chinatown flu clinic's swine flu vaccination event. Despite a long, long line, things were remarkably well-organized. We arrived by ten, signed in, and received a noon appointment, though we waited and got seen by 11. There were color-coded lines, tidily organized time charts, and I was, in general, totally, totally impressed by the efficiency of the whole shebang. (Heck, the clinic even had escorts to bring small groups of vaccinatees up the elevators.)

Incidentally, the vaccine I got was the nasal spray version, which had a back-of-throat numbing effect and a weirdly dental hygiene taste, but was so much better than the shot. Oh man. I want all my shots to be administered via nose from now on.

This was not my first use of one of the city's free clinics, either. This summer, when I was between insurances, I went to the Bed-Stuy Lung Center for a TB test. Once again, a long wait time, but this time it wasn't evened out by excellent service -- though, of course, given the cost of the appointment, I hardly have grounds for complaint. Really, though, I waited there for nearly three hours for a five-minute blood test. Since summer, for a teacher, isn't exactly the busy season, this wasn't a big deal. There aren't many free lung clinics in the city, and they're pretty high on demand and low on funds. If that means they can only employ so many doctors, can only have so much in the way of office staff, so be it. That's far from the fault of the fine people there. But let me tell you, using the free clinic there kind of sucked.

Please, please, please don't you dare take this as a statement that publicly funded health care is a bad thing. Not hardly Underfunded and overused health care is a less than ideal thing. The situation of uninsured folks who have to wait all day for a single appointment is a bad thing. I have the utmost gratitude to the city's health system. (Hey, free swine flu vaccine! Free TB test!) But there's such a gap between the health care haves and the health care haven'ts, and sitting in the Bed-Stuy clinic with lots and lots of poor kids . . . . There are few words.

There's more here to consider, and more I'd love to go into. But now may not be the time. Not in a blog post entitled "boogers."

Wind? Still no.

Despite restoring the box kite (this time with the Education section of the NY Times), the second flight attempt failed -- I think that flying a kite of this weight will require more wind than I'd planned on.

Updates on other discarded badges: I still need to run 2 miles to pass the Army Physical Fitness test and, therefore, to earn the Athletics badge. A blend of colder weather, personal laziness, and a soul-draining job have kept me exercise-free lately, but I joined the Park Slope YMCA this morning (making use of John's faculty discount!), and so I can promise (or nearly so) a solid badge-finishing effort this very week. Hooray!

This week was a long one, and not entirely in the best of ways. I knew going in that it was going to be my final week teaching at the public school of despair, but I'd thought my last day would be Friday. Until Tuesday night, when my principal asked me to shift my final day to Thursday instead. This was kind of great (hey, extra day off!), but also meant that I had to spring into action-Emily mode, finishing all kinds of project grading, summarizing of student progress, etc. a day ahead of time for the hand-off to the new science teacher. Things went a little bonkers then, and it's hard to feel like you're doing a good job when you're in a great huge rush all the time.

Somehow, all my students found out by Wednesday that I was on my way out (I didn't tell them, I swear), and they were apologetic and guilty about it, though my leaving actually had very, very little to do with them. I told them so, again and again, but reasoning with 13 year olds is tough, especially when you're trying to do it while remaining reticent about your actual motivations, and there were a lot of tears from the girls. (One, though, took me aside and, hilariously, asked "Why is it that people are nice to you when they think you're leaving or dying? I'm not going to change, though. I'm just a bad kid. It's who I am." I have to respect that self-awareness.)

In good news, I'm employed again -- I start on Monday at a private school, teaching elementary school science in Manhattan. Wish me luck! I feel a little social-justice weird about it (is the message I'm sending "yo former students, I'm going to go teach rich kids instead!"), but that's not the point, I promise. The school is gorgeous, and I'm going to have a lot of freedom to design the curriculum, so I'm feeling good about things.

Tonight: Halloween parade in Manhattan. John and I are both going as Philly aspiring celebrity blogger Arthur Kade. We've even got the hats.

Flying a kite: one thing missing

I realized recently that, since moving to New York in July, I've turned into the sort of person I hate -- the kind who never leaves the city. It's easy not to, of course, especially without a car, but still it's not exactly a desirable condition.

So, whatever problems I have, personally or otherwise, with my job (my last week starts tomorrow!), I've got to give them credit: they do the right thing by taking the students up to hike in Rockland County. We went on Friday, and while it wasn't the most rural undertaking (heck, you could pretty much see the Tappan Zee Bridge from the parking lot), it was still worthwhile. The leaves had just reached that yellowy-changed stage, and the quiet made some of the girls downright nervous. I taught a few of them how to make whistles out of acorn caps, which would pretty much be the worst idea ever if they had regular access to acorn caps in Brooklyn.

It was funny to see some of the students out in the woods -- while they're, in many ways, more equipped for life in the city than I am, they're at a total loss in a less-urban environment. Many of them worried that the earthworms we saw would bite them, and one girl in particular told me she was worried about getting eaten by a deer. (No amount of reassurance from me had any effect.) That said, they also appreciated a lot of woodsy things I forget. Every leaf was a source of excitement, and while they worried that pretty much everything might be poison ivy (or just plain poison), they also wanted to know what everything was. What's its name? How does it grow? How many are there? I know I didn't ask those questions when I was growing up, though we could dither about how much that was my regular exposure to things a little outdoorsier and how much was my being a total indoor kid.

Next up, today, was flying last week's box kite, which had been languising on the highest shelf in my house in order to avoid the advances of Charlie the cat. Keys in hand (this time), we got to Prospect Park only to realize we'd forgotten one critical thing.

Wind.

Despite our best efforts (and despite taking up a field that may well have been better used by the high school boys nearby who were totally trying to play football right on top of us, I would describe the kite flying as . . . spotty. Also, as you can see from the picture, I'm kind of a spazzy runner.

I'm pretty sure, honest, that the kite would have flown if there were even the tiniest bit of a breeze. On the few occasions there was the faintest rustling of leaves, I managed to get the kite to take off a little bit, but I think it would require what one might call a blustery sort of day to get in much really good flying. Besides, it's made of dowels and twine, neither of which are known for their lightness/gravity-defying properties, so it's possible that even a lighter kite would have had more success today.

In one last-ditch effort, we went up to our building's roof, where disaster struck. The kite finally remembered, hey, I'm made out of wood, string, and waxed paper, and I've spent the afternoon falling down to the ground. And, in one soul-stirring moment, the paper ripped and the kite was done for the day. (I've left out the photographic evidence of this very moment -- it's far, far too heartbreaking.)

I do think the kite will be flyable, with a few minor repairs. Right now, it's time to focus on replacing the waxed paper. Some kitemakers recommend newsprint or even garbage bags instead, but I'm not sure. Any experts? I'm hoping to make a final kite-flying expedition by Tuesday. (Dear Tuesday, Please, please, please be windy. Love, Emily.)

On being prepared

So, my kite may or may not fly (I still don't know), but it is definitely difficult to break into my apartment.

See, I got home from work raring to finish assembling and begin flying the box kite I started yesterday. Within ten or fifteen minutes (post-snack, of course), John was helping me add waxed paper to the dowel-and-twine armature. We used paper and tape rather than nylon or muslin or some other thin fabric, which may not have led to the most durable kite ever, but probably a reasonably effective one.

(It's worth noting that this is a major advantage of having given notice at my job: for the school year up 'til now, I've been getting home miserable and doing nothing but watching the entire series run of "The Hills" online. Seriously. It's the point where I have strong, strong opinions on Justin Bobby and Audrina's relationship. (Justin Bobby, the "we were never really together" line is beyond lame. I saw you two in Cabo! I saw all the Tammy Faye mascara tears!))

We never made it to the park -- immediately upon walking out the door (which locked behind us, of course) we each realized we'd left our keys inside. Oops.

This was followed by a panicky trip up to the roof (for both of us), down the fire escape to our window (for John), and back up again (John, still) with the news that it's really, really hard to get into our locked, fire-escape window. Ultimately, of course, this is good news, but for this particularly moment it was non-ideal.

Long story short, we made a bunch of phone calls to the super (to no avail), and decided it was time to call the locksmith. And so, instead of spending the evening flying the kite in the park, we spent the evening sitting on the porch waiting for the locksmith to arrive. This was roughly an hour or more, for what it's worth.

By the time things were resolved, we'd learned three things. 1) Our door is really, really hard to break into. So hard, in fact, that the locksmith had to drill out the lock, then replace it with a new one. 2) Calling a locksmith (or this locksmith in particular) would be a great way to break into an apartment, if necessary, because he asked for no ID whatsoever and accepted payment in cash. 3) I will never lock myself out again, because doing so is crazy expensive.

By the time things were resolved, it was also totally dark out. This was an evening-long pursuit. Seriously, dudes, streetlights were on and everything.

First, of course, this means no luck with flying the kite tonight, and I don't know if I'll be able to 'til Sunday, which is kind of a bummer. But second, there's a reason I've gone into all this.

I've kind of failed, a little, at the Boy Scout business tonight. Because, ultimately, I was not (even a little bit) prepared. This is just as much a living-in-the-world issue as a Handbook issue, yeah, but still. I'm not sure what the solution is. Utility belt? Bandolier? Checklist? Signs all over my house? I'm not sure. But there's got to be something.

Box kite frame is a go!

I went to the hardware store on the way home this afternoon to pick up some dowels. A little time spent lashing 'em together (and cheating with the occasional dab of hot glue) later, and I've made a kite frame. This is the handiest I've felt in weeks.

Charlie the cat has been mistaking it for his favorite household appliance, the drying rack, and trying the same things with it (namely, sitting on top of it) that usually bust the drying rack. You are not getting your little paws all over this, Charlie, I swear!

Also, please excuse the Photobooth pictures. John just got home and I don't have the heart to make him photograph my dowel-and-twine project right now. (What am I, five?)

Box kite

I find kite flying oddly stressful.

This says more about me, I think, than about the actual activity. But flying a kite has always felt kind of fraught with peril. Think about it! One minor mistake, and your kite is gone, you've somehow contributed to awful airborne pollution and you're going to wind up killing some albatross somewhere.

But, I've just purchased a little handsaw. And tomorrow, I'm going to build a box kite.

Handbook book club, #3

I begin with a life lesson: never, ever, ever get cranky at the world and decide to cut yourself bangs, vaguely based on those you've seen on one or two particularly hip girls on the train. It will not work out well. Tomorrow will be a day of bobby pins and of a hair-fixing appointment with, um, anyone who'll take me in. Geez.

This week's Book Club selection deals with the outfitting necessary for a scout. This is surprisingly intense, buddies.

So, the equipment. Man, the Boy Scouts were taking things seriously. This section reads more like a catalog than anything else, with the advice that "considerable difficulty has been experienced in the selection of the material used in making coats, breeches, and shirts," including sun tests, acid tests, and unspecified tests of colorfastness and durability. At the prices they're charging -- on the order of 75 cents per shirt -- you're not going to do much better. Would you, young sir, prefer to make your own Boy Scout uniform? No problem. You can procure branded Boy Scout logo buttons for only fifteen cents for a coat-sized set.

What's really interesting is just the focus the Handbook has on the importance of using only official Boy Scout items. I'd be unsurprised now, of course, but the notion that this concern was so prominent a hundred years ago is interesting to me. While earlier sections of the Handbook focus on the virtues of the ideal Scout, his sense of community above self, his total competence in even the most unpleasant situations, and his pride in good behavior, this section reminds us that the Boy Scouts were still a commercial enterprise, and they would sue you if you used the Boy Scout seal without authorization.

I guess we all like to think of times before right now as being somehow purer, or hell, maybe just realer. But today, Lord Baden-Powell and co. would like to remind you otherwise.

Update: Life lesson #2. Don't make an unfortunate hair decision, then post to your blog about it. You'll get an anxious call from your mother asking if you shouldn't have learned to avoid self-directed haircutting by age 12 or so. And she, of course, will be right. Love you, mom.

Radio silence

I haven't posted for a week, but there's a good reason.

I did what is, arguably, the dumbest thing a person can do, especially right now and especially in New York.

I quit my job.

I know, I know. All that stuff I said a few weeks ago, about how a rough beginning to a job does not mean you'll be unsuccessful, about how teachers build up a constantly-evolving skill set and so on and so forth. Clearly, it was kind of a lie.

I knew it would be a big change, moving from a suburban school to an urban one, and I knew that I would need to expect differences. I just wasn't prepared for how much. See, I'm a politeness kind of girl. Yes ma'am, no ma'am, please, thank you, all that. My students don't have that same background as I do. They're punch your face in, I'm not doing this shit kinds of girls. And that, at a very superficial level, is hard for me.

More profoundly, though, is another issue, one that I think isn't uncommon with teachers. I take it very, very personally. There's no better moment than when a kid struggles with a problem, really engages with it, and works and works and works until she finally gets it. That moment of triumph is what I'm there for. However, if you're going to take credit (in some small way) for a kid's successes, you also have to be there for the failures. You have to be right there alongside the kids who don't give a damn exactly as much as you're alongside the kids who want nothing more than to succeed. That's the difficulty of teaching, and it's a difficulty I didn't encounter much at my last school, where the assumption that everyone would graduate and go to college was not a difficult one to make.

Here, though, it's hard. The kids arrive at school with much more difficulty in their homelives than I can begin to address. It's a struggle to get to school each day, and while that means that, ideally, their classroom should be their oasis, it's hard to make that happen. Because, really, if you grow up in an environment in which punching someone else is an acceptable response to frustration, how do you know to leave that at the door when you get to school? And even if you do know, what incentive do you have to act on that knowledge? My students struggle with this, and with the need to balance going to school with taking care of siblings, cousins, parents.

I'm not Sidney Poitier. I'm not Michelle Pfeiffer. I'm not a savior. I'm just a science teacher (and, technically, only that for another two weeks). This is more than I can handle.

I've been meeting with my administration and with other teachers, trying to find a way to make changes in my classroom that really work for my students and for me, but things have just fallen flat. And it was time to get out. My staying wasn't good for my own sanity, nor was it helping my students -- my teaching and their learning just weren't jibing, and it was time to admit it and move along.

So what's next? I have no idea. I'm looking for work (not necessarily in teaching, though that may be nice). Any ideas?

And on your end, if you're a NY certified science teacher? Let me know. I think I've heard rumors of a job opening.

Oh dear oh dear oh dear.

Poor SassyCat! (or, "got a kiln?")

So the sculpting badge set off with great potential -- I had the help of my mother-in-law, Linda, who is not only a regular art teacher but also a deeply talented one. There was no way for this to fail, right?

The sculpture badge is one of the easiest, in theory. There are just two requirements: to sculpt (the medium is not specified) a replica of an object from the vast annals of art and to sculpt (and sketch) an object from nature. While I'd originally planned that my object-from-nature would be a leaf or something equally immobile, Linda had a great suggestion: try for a (somewhat artistically interpreted) Maisie the cat, who is immobile for hours at a time (or at least is asleep for hours at a time) and is also someone I know quite well. Plied with kibble, Maisie agreed to be thus immortalized, and with a few minutes to mix up some of the classic flour-salt-and-water clay, we were on our way.

Clay-Maisie started out pink and round, with big green eyes, an alert pose, and (in what I thought was a particularly good detail) a little white tail tip. Clay-Maisie (henceforth referred to as SassyCat because her little carved-in mouth gave a look full of, well, sass) is also heavy, maybe half a pound. (This is roughly 1/16 the size of Maisie.) While Linda did most of the actual art involved and I giggled and made wry remarks, I was feeling pretty good about it.

Then, tragedy.

We left SassyCat out to dry overnight, expecting to wake to a sturdy pink kitty. Instead we found nothing so much as a patty of cat. (If you reached this site via a Google search for "patty of cat," go away. You are not welcome here, you sick dude. Yeah, I'm talking to you.) SassyCat had shrunk to roughly half of her original height, but her diameter, well, you be the judge.

Clearly, SassyCat had collapsed under the weight of her own sass.

And do not get me started on the scupting from the art canon component of the badge, in which Chinese terracotta horse travelled from, well, yeah.

A timeline below will give you the idea.










Exactly.

SassyCat

Meet SassyCat, pre-drying.

And yet, I did not earn my sculpting badge.

You don't even want to know.

Disaster

So, I'll admit that most of my Hindenburg-related research has consisted of watching clips from the 1975 disaster movie on YouTube. You know. The one with George C. Scott, where a German rigger who died in the crash is the saboteur/bad guy, probably because he will never, ever be able to defend himself (what with being dead and all).

The real Hindenburg crash was far more complex, and so complex that I don't even know if I can really handle writing about it (which is a large part of why it's taken so long!).

The day the Hindenburg crashed, things were already going wrong -- there were thunderstorms in the area, the landing was delayed on several occasions, and the ship, too stern-heavy to land, made multiple sharp turns and dropped ballast in order to even out. After a sharp report (a pistol shot?) and a bright light (a flashbulb?), the passengers felt a small vibration and saw a fire begin on the upper fin. Within minutes, the ship was engulfed in flames. Within 30 seconds, the Hindenburg was destroyed.

Honestly, no one really knows why it crashed. The conspiracy theorists and movie fans like sabotage, because it's clearly the most exciting. That there is no proof means nothing -- after all, they argue, the Germans wouldn't admit it because it would be embarrassing to, well, admit to having sabotaged something, and the Americans wouldn't admit it because it would be embarrassing to have been the victims of sabotage. I suppose you can extend this argument to almost anything, though, and then need proof for nothing. (The heat in my apartment isn't working because of German sabotage, but no one will ever admit it. Damn them!)

If you have a good enough conspiracy, you don't need proof.

The view I like the most is sort of a mess of electricity and weather -- it's the idea that, since the Hindenburg flew through several thunderstorms, and since the outer coating was wet, and since the outer coating (or skin) was connected to the inner coating by nonconductive frames, an electrical charge could have build up, only to ignite when ropes, lowered for landing, grounded the whole shebang. Add to this the idea that the skin was coated in a highly flammable varnish, and we have a hell of a conflaguration.

There are some others, sure, suggesting that the ship was hit by lightning and lots of it, or that the sharp pre-landing turns punctured some of the hydrogen tanks, thereby releasing the flammable gas.

In all, there's no actual conclusion. I think I bit off more than I could chew with this one, dudes.

Hindenberg, first hand

Dirigibles really seemed like a good idea, right?

Balloons have a downside: there's not much of a steering mechanism. The development of the cucumber-shaped dirigible, though. Now there's something. We've got an aerodynamic design powered by (first) hand cranks and (ultimately) an internal combustion engine, allowing von
Zepplin's first flight in 1900 too achieve speeds of up to 18 mph. Not half bad.

Not only were dirigibles relatively fast, but they were also big and reliable. By 1910, cities in Germany were regularly visited by scheduled airship flights, making the dirigible (arguably) the first commercial airline.

Things all went bad.

First, like we can learn from Ken Burns' National Park series (on PBS now!), humans like to screw everything up, so in 1914 Germany's dirigibles were painted black and used in bombing raids on London. The world is a forgiving place, though, and after the war, dirigibles
were bigger than ever (and fast, too, with a cruising speed of 68 mph).

Now comes disaster.

Back in (some of) my grad school days, I once caused a not-well-controlled hydrogen explosion. Let me tell you, it is only through the grace of high-quality lab safety glass that I still have my eyebrows. It was rapid and terrifying, and there are a lot of reasons I am no longer a lab scientist, but this is definitely on the list.

Imagine, then, Lakehurst, NJ in 1937.

Or don't imagine -- my grandfather, the illustrious Silver Beaver referenced here, was there.

"I was a teenager when I saw the Hindenberg blow up at Lakehurst, N.J. Along with some friends, we piled into a pickup to watch the airship land. It was late afternoon and quite cloudy. We parked on the road alongside the airfield to watch this giant of the skies come in. As it very slowly approached to land, it dropped many lines and whoosh, the tail lit up and the airship settled tail first into the ground. The entire airship had burst into flame. It's hard to believe anyone could have survived that crash. We were parked about a mile away and as I recall, could feel the heat of that explosion. What caused this to happen, I could not even guess. It certainly, in my opinion, was not the weather. The whole event happened in less then a few minutes."

So why did the Hindenberg go down?

Tune in tomorrow, kids.

Track and field

Oddly, I've been putting this (near-final) Athletics badge requirement off, but with the help of John's poker night, I'm finishing up once and for all. It's time to post the rules for one track and one field event.

I think, strangely, the rough part for me has been choosing which events to write about. I don't have a ton of interest in this particular aspect of the Athletics badge, I'll admit, and its just been feeling more like homework than like entertainment. Of course, I'm in the minority in my general lack of sports-interest, I'm sure -- drive past any college campus in the fall and see thousands of sports fans out to prove me wrong (and to watch football, too, I'm sure, but I like to think they're just out there in a "so there, Emily!" kind of way).

So, given that I'm a less enthusiastic sports, um, enthusiast than most, I asked two of the card-players to pick track and field events for me to investigate. Matt chose the pole vault, and team Ro and Evan chose the 400 m hurdles (specific, but we'll go with it).

This one's for you, dudes.

I've pole vaulted once in my life, in middle school gym class. I believe I cleared the same jump level that at least one slightly taller kid stepped over, which gives you an idea both of my size in middle school (rather petite) and my jumping abilities. That said, I also have a very dear cousin who, I believe, was some class of pole vaulting champion when she was in high school, so I'm aware that some folks can be quite successful at this kind of activity. I just don't quite understand how.

In order to pole vault, you're going to need, um, a pole, usually fiberglass, and usually from 10 to 17 feet long. You'll also need a mat (3-5 feet thick), a crossbar, ad a 40-45 m long runway. In order to successfully vault, you must, first and foremost, clear the crossbar. It's acceptable to hit the crossbar so long as you don't knock it down, but since the crossbar falls quite readily, it's for the best to avoid it altogether.

There are other ways to mess up your jump, too. Touching the mat before jumping would count as a jump failure, as would taking more than two minutes to complete a jump attempt. Finally, remember that a single failed attempt isn't the end of the world -- generally, a competitor will receive a maximum of three attempts at any given height and will be eliminated after his third unsuccessful attempt.

Finally, there are a few very specific equipment rules: no gloves are allowed, nor is more than two layers of adhesive tape. Jumpers may use chalk or rosin, though.

For the 400 m hurdles, we'll get a little more complicated. Men's hurdles are 36 inches tall and women's are 30 inches tall, while the hurdles are evenly placed 35 meters apart, with the first and last hurdles each 40 m from the starting and ending points. (Is it a testament to international unity that we're mixing units of measurement here, or is it just poor coordination? Does it matter?)

It used to be that knocking down 3 hurdles led to instant disqualificiation; however we're either kinder or more effete now, and competitors are disqualified if they intentionally knock down hurdles, but not otherwise. (Also, competitors may not jump over another runner's hurdles, though I can't imagine why they might want to.)

General race rules apply, as well -- runners may not begin running before the race actually starts, may not shove other runners, and so forth, though these things seem obvious as well.

Kitty!

My kitten is sick.

Charlie the cat is on fluids and is spending the night in the vet's office, so forgive a little lack of focus today. (Poor kitten! If he were home, he would totally be sitting on the couch with me watching Project Runway right now.)

My main interest in the Aviation realm, lately, has been Samuel Langley, who spent serious time in the 1890s building steam-powered airplanes, and time before that testing the aerodynamics of taxidermied birds. (On a similar note, I'd like to refer you a fantastic John Hartford album, for what it's worth.)

In the 1880s, he was launching unpiloted, steam-driven planes via catapult, and they worked -- one in particular (his number 6 model) could fly something like a mile. Of course, this isn't the same kind of aviation our badge is talking about -- first, there's no pilot, and second, many of these planes were models, scaled down to something like 1/4 size.

However, the really interesting thing about Langley comes some years after his flight experiments. See, he donated one of his planes (the Aerodrome #5) to the Smithsonian where, after significant refurbishment (including a new engine), a Smithsonian refurbisher was able to make a few small, short flights in it. Clearly, since the Aerodrome #5 was in service prior to the Wright Bros. Kittyhawk flight, that would make it the first "man-carrying aeroplane in the history of the world capable of sustained free flight." Right?

The Wright Bros. were furious, and reasonably so, especially given that the Aerodrome #5 had, well, crashed, which is generally not a characteristic of a successful airplane. There's a lot of weirdness in this story, especially given the fact that Langley was the secretary of the Smithsonian and received much of his research funding due to his position there. (It's porbably important to clarify something here -- Langley, despite the whole mess surrounding his planes, was not invovled in the situation. He died in 1906, just 3 years after the Wrights' flight, and more than fifteen years before the disputes.)

Ultimately, Orville Wright (Wilbur was long-dead) sent the Wright Flyer to London, where the British might respect the venerable plane. And there it stayed, until a 1942 report by the Smithsonian ("The 1914 Tests of the Langley Aerodrome") essentialy recanted their story -- finaly, they admitted that, well, the Aerodrome #5 as originally built was unsuccessful.

And there we have it. In 1948 the Wright Flyer returned to the Smithsonian. It does not share a hall with the Aerodrome, which today occupies the "Early Flight" exhibit, with the Wright military flyer (a later model). The Wright Flyer itself, currently in its own special exhibit, is usually located in a place of honor in the center of the "Milestones of Flight" gallery.

So much for the Aerodrome.

Aviating

Big secret (okay, not very secret): I hate flying.

Upon reflection, though, much as I may think I hate flying today, I really, really, seriously would have hated flying in 1911.

Now, while a lot of people (myself included, secretly) are thinking back to junior high school history class and trying to remember if planes even existed when the Handbook was published (they did), we need to handle something more important here. Planes were indeed available. But they were much, much simpler and much, much scarier.

(This airplane is from 1912. Hence, when the Handbook was published, this was the future of aviation. The future of aviation involved buddying up to some other dude in a suit while dangling your feet off of an airplane.)

The airplanes our 1911 scouts were learning about were only a step ahead of the Wright brothers' plane, with canvas stretched over wood-framed, parallel wings, steered by a network of pulleys and wire cables by a pilot who sat on seat mounted to the bottom wing (or, in the case of many planes, on the wing itself).

The planes we're talking about here were also much, much less useful than the planes we think about today -- the maximum speed we could achieve was perhaps 40 miles per hour (and this was the record-breaking "Silver Dart," made out of a reassuring combination of "steel tube, bamboo, friction tape, wire, wood, and silk"). In general, speeds and ranges were lower still.

Hold on for discussion, tomorrow or Thursday, about a few more aspects of early planes -- I'm looking into some information about the early altitude record-holder, but work is getting in the way. Boo.

Additionally, I'm trying to decide how to go about model-building. The Aviation badge requires a flight of 25 yards, which is hardly much, but is exactly enough that I feel like I want to approach this as seriously as possible. While some folks are pretty intense R/C model builders (some of whom I'm hoping to speak to, as well), I do want my model to be at least a little bit 1911-accurate. Ideas?

Apples and honey

In honor of Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year, we had people over for a celebratory dinner last night. I made a noodle kugel, pasta with pesto, tomatoes, and zucchini, and Anzac cookies, which were experimental but kind of delicious. (These were partially a tribute to my mother's cherished belief that, when having folks over for dinner, one must always provide two dessert types: a fruit and a chocolate. My friend Wendy brought a chocolate cake, so the fruit spot was left unfilled, hence coconut/honey/oatmeal cookies. Yum.)

How does this relate to the Handbook? Simple. Honey.

Traditionally, on Rosh Hashanah, the meal (or the holiday itself) is capped with apples and honey. There are all sorts of explanations for each -- the apples as representative of the tree of knowledge, as references to the Song of Songs and so forth, and the honey as a nod to the "land of milk and honey." I've always liked the old standard the best, though. It's simply that apples and honey are both damn sweet and delicious and represent a wish for a sweet new year.

Our honey this year was the Tremblay Apiraries honey I'd sampled at Union Square a month or so ago, and let me tell you, while not the hit of the party, it was a delicious and seasonally-appropriate addition.

PS: I took a picture of apples, honey, challah, and the Anzac cookies last night in hopes of posting today, but ew. I am not a sophisticated enough photo editor to make a photograph of such delicious food look anything but disgusting. Instead, as a special bonus, my kugel recipe!

Now, many people think they do not like kugel. These people are incorrect. They do not like other people's kugel. Other people's kugel is dry and bland (sorry, other people). Mine is spectacular. Remember, this is a special occasion kind of dish, and fat = flavor.

You'll need:
1 pound of egg noodles
1/2 stick of butter
1 quart of buttermilk
4 eggs
1/2 cup of sugar
1/4 tsp of salt
1/2 cup (or more) of raisins

For the topping, you'll need:
1/2 cup of brown sugar
1/2 cup of crushed cornflakes (though I've made it with Kashi Golean, as well as with granola.)
2 Tbs of melted butter
1/4 tsp of cinnamon (though I use a lot more, often.)

To make the kugel, first preheat the oven to 375 F. Cook the noodles however you prefer to cook 'em. Drain them, then add the butter and stir the whole shebang around until the butter melts.

Add the buttermilk, eggs, sugar, salt, and raisins to the buttery noodles and mix them all around. Put the whole mess into a 9 x 13 baking pan, put some tin foil on top, and bake for about a half hour.

While your kugel starts to bake, get to work on the topping! Mix up the four ingredients. (This does not take the entire 30 minutes the kugel is baking unless you crush each flake of cereal individually. Don't do this.)

Sprinkle the topping over the partly-baked kugel, replace the foil, and continue to bake the kugel for another 30-45 minutes. It's done when the whole thing is semi-solid, with no buttermilk sloshing around.

Eat it. Seriously. You will not want to stop.

Thursday run

I know I promised you guys a run on Tuesday, and, straight up, that promise was the only reason I did it at all today. It's been a stressful few days at work, and the very, very beginning of fall is just starting to show up in the air. When I left, around 5, I could feel just the tiniest bit of a chill in the very tips of my fingers. (I'm cold all the time, dudes. Really.)

I headed out towards the library, untimed because of the last traces of Elmo-titis. I was slow tonight, I think, but in general, it was straight up glorious. There are certain early-evening moments where the quality of light and the buildings are working together just right, and even the guy jumping rope in the middle of the sidewalk didn't slow me down.

On the way home, though, I got distracted, and just went to the library instead of past it. I'd just returned two (Collette's Cheri and The Last of Cheri, which was absolutely heartbreaking, and Shelby Foote's The Civil War, which was intermittently excellent and way more than I could handle), and I was sort of in the market for something different.

Today's haul: Sinclair Lewis' It Can't Happen Here, which has been on my list forever, Clare Boylan's Emma Brown, cobbled together from an unfinished Charlotte Bronte manuscript (hard to say how this one is going to go), and Vincent Louis Carrella's Serpent Box, which I saw on the shelf and grabbed, without any prior knowledge whatsoever. We'll see how it goes, right?

At this point, I'm going to sign off with a plea for help: oddly, finding private plane airports/folks who are interested in recreational aviation is proving more difficult in the city than I think it would have been anywhere else I've lived, ever. Does anyone have a hot tip? I've got some feelers out, but I think there's a very strong suspicion of weird, airport-related requests that I hadn't entirely anticipated.

Traning to run

The Athletics badge asks the applicant to explain, in 500 words or so, how to train for an athletic event. Now, I'll admit, I'm not much of a competitive athlete, so instead, I'm going to address how I went about practicing for the 2 mile run I've been working on (for the Army Physical Fitness Test), and how many, many things I've done wrong. (After a weeklong cold, I'm shooting for another run on Thursday, since I'm hideously busy Wednesday nights.)

Hey, after all, Goofus was always much more interesting than Gallant, right?

To begin with, I started running after something like a 2-year period of nonrunning, as well as a 2-month period of exerciselessness. In general, this is a bad way to start. Honestly, though, these 2 months have been the longest period of time I haven't exercised since I was something like 16 or 17 and going to the gym with my parents after school. Even through college and grad school (especially grad school), I was religious about exercise. Since moving to Brooklyn, though, things have really fallen by the wayside. And for an incredibly stupid reason: there's no available gym that's easy to walk to. Somehow, taking the train to the gym seems like it defeats the entire purpose of going to the gym. (On this front, I feel similarly to the way I used to regard people at my tiny New England college who would drive to the athletic center, which, on a residential campus maybe a mile square, seemed absurd. Does this make me a snob? Maybe.) There are regular promises to open a second branch of the YMCA, and my stubbornness is compelling me to hold out for this new, easier-to-reach branch. I will not take the train to exercise, though it's only punishing my own self.

Regardless of all that, I used a modified version of the couch-to-5k running program, which had served me well in the past (well, moderately well, in that it got me up to being able to run for some distance without stopping, but wasn't all that useful for the building up of speed). Rumor has it that if I legitimately want to become fast, I'll have to train for it -- doing things like the hilariously-named fartleks (Swedish for "speed play," or "running real fast for a couple minutes until your brains fall out, going back to regular pace, and repeating ad infinitum). There are legitimate explanations for fartlek, including all kinds of ideas about how fartlek can increase aerobic capacity, can simulate actual athletic events (sprinting to catch an opponent, for example), and theories about how doing this will allow you to actually run fewer total miles in training. Frankly, I've ignored nearly all of this with the explanation (to myself) that I don't need to get that much faster.

In terms of equipment, my dear shoe-selling uncle would recommend that a new runner might see some class of expert who could recommend shoes with appropriate arch support, correction for pronation, and so forth. I did this, too, once, and it was pretty great (I wound up with a pair of Asics I still have). The truth? Um, remember how I said I still have those Asics? Yeah. I'm running in them, three years later. I've swapped out the insoles for a pair of prescription orthotics (hey, I'm a teacher and on my feet all day, and these orthotics were my last gasp of health care benefits before a multi-month gap in coverage). I was actually extremely interested in an article in the NY Times last week suggesting that shoes, in general, aren't actually all that necessary. However, I've seen what people do on the street, and I refuse to haul around my neighborhood with my poor toes a'hanging out. Hell, I've seen what the soles of my feet look like on a day around the city while wearing flip flops. It's not pretty.

So, to sum up: minimal training, no emphasis on speed, old shoes.

Up next: Running Thursday, then on to beginning the next badge. Aviation?

Handbook book club, #2

You may not have known this, but I have a degenerative disease. And it is called Elmo-titis.

Yesterday evening, I was a little hoarse. (Groucho Marx joke here.) By this morning? No voice at all, except something high, squeaky, rumbly, and quiet. Kind of like Elmo. And, like Elmo, I'm pretty chipper, all things considered. But I fear the next step.

Anyway, as a result of the Elmo-titis, I didn't manage to get out today and work on the Athletics badge like I'd hoped to. That means . . . it's time for another round of Handbook book club!

When last we discussed this stuff, we talked a lot about the scout virtues -- cleanliness, honesty, that kind of thing. And while those are important, today we get into something that could be brutally dull but isn't: the structure of a troop.

We go through the scout concil officers fairly quickly, the president, vice president, etc., the scout commissioner, all that. The thing that interests me is the scout master. He's required to be at least twenty-one, be of good moral fiber, the basics. What's interseting is that he is specifically not required to be particularly good at the myriad tasks the Handbook assigns any good boy scout. The exact wording: "He need not be an expert at scoutcraft; a good scout master will discover experts for the various activities."

This is startlingly ahead of its time.

As some of you (those of you who've read my bio on the sidebar, at least) know, I teach school. Specifically, I teach science. Now, I have a decent amount of science-y background, but when I left grad school to start teaching, I realized something: what you know has almost no impact on how good a teacher you are. Seriously. This is hard for me to admit, because I've always been a strong believer in school. I worked hard in high school. I went to a good college and worked hard there. And I went to two separate good grad schools and worked hard at those, too. So I started out extremely good at the science I teach, and extremely hesitant to downplay the importance of learning. I walked into my classroom the first day ever, thinking that my spectacular science-ness was just going to pour all over these kids and bring them to their knees in awe.

By the end of that first day, I was crying in the parking lot.

It got better, of course, and I'm actually a little bummed now to know that my old students started class last week and Iw asn't there to see them. In the past few days, I've gotten emails from several of them, and it unquestionably makes my day. I started out terrified of them, and terrified I woudln't be able to get through to them, but over time, day by day, we managed to build a relationship that I'm really proud of.

In my planner, I have a note from one of my last year's students: "Thank you for being a fantastic science teacher. I already enjoyed science but you made the class so much fun and made learning enjoyable. You becamse my favorite class and teacher and I looked forward to it every day." First, girl spelled "every day" as two words, thank goodness, which shows you how smart she is. And second, this may be the nicest thing anyone has ever said to me.

So, as I was implying, I guess, over time you build up comfort with your students and with your job. There is a set of skills you need in order to maintain any regularity in the classroom, in order to write and organize lesson plans, is as different from knowing actual content as is knowing how to cook and knowing how to eat, and while each is different, each is also learnable. So I'm delighted that the scoutmaster simply needs to have an interest in the material rather than being an expert -- the Handbook is recognizing, years before much educational philosophy did, that there's a difference between knowing and teaching.

This is also extraordinarily relevant to my life right now. I've just switched from teaching in a rich, suburban district to teaching in the heart of Brooklyn. Once again, my first day was a rough one. Once again, I entered the classroom convinced that I knew how teaching science worked and that the kids and I would be best friends in a heartbeat. And, once again, I was unimaginably, insurmountably incorrect. It's more of the same, really -- what applies in one situation, whether it's basic science knowledge or how to keep classroom order in a central Jersey classroom in which, frankly, keeping order is not that much of a challenge, is almost irrelevant when it comes to reaching out to a specific group of individuals in a specific location at a specific time. What worked for me at my last job doesn't work here, and that's okay.

Tomorrow starts my second week at my new school. I'm ready. Just like the Handbook recommends, a desire to learn and a desire to teach will pull you a hell of a lot farther than all the knowledge you've got.

(Also, watching MTV's VMAs, I've just seen Taylor Swift singing and dancing on my regular train. I am totally blaming her for long wait times for the train this week, and now I hate a girl I've never met. Thanks, MTV. Thanks.)