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?)