Sarcasm training

I've been helping out in Veronica's class once a week for the past few weeks, helping with math games. The kids seem to enjoy it, and while I don't love teaching and really wouldn't have the patience to do it full-time, I'm happy to help the teacher and get to know Veronica's classmates and see how she interacts. (Plus, as the youngest, I feel she's had the least amount of my time in school, so I owe her.)

This week, we were doing rudimentary multiplication, rolling a six-sided die to determine which two numbers we would work with. Two girls ended up with 3 and 1, and I said, "Oh, wow, what a tough problem." They both looked at me with completely blank faces, clearly wondering what was wrong with me ... and then the light dawned, and they laughed, and spent the rest of the session trying to decide what the toughest problem in the history of the world was (they settled on 0 + 0). I've had teachers remark to me that they like having my kids in class because they "get" sarcasm ... hopefully I've helped these two young ladies along that road as well!

Things Found in Books

I've been reading Moby Dick, a copy that previously belonged to my grandparents, and in it I found an article from the Cleveland Plain Dealer from the early 1960s on polar bears, and why they are the "nastiest" creatures in the zoo. For the life of me, I can't imagine why anyone in my family would have cut it out (from two different pages), much less tucked it safely away in a book.

Topics

I started this blog without any too clear a picture of what I intended to use it for, thus demonstrating the truth of the old adage, never start a blog on a whim. (If it's not an adage, it ought to be!) And now I find that topics come to me when I'm nowhere near the computer, but when I sit down to write a blog post, topics are nowhere to be found. Perhaps what I need to do is carry around a notebook for blog ideas. I swore I would not degenerate into complaints about the weather, the way my last blog did, so clearly I need to find a way to generate ideas without having to look out the window for them!

Sleep Schedules

I struggle with sleep. Always have, to varying degrees. Part of the issue is that of being a night person in a morning person's world, and I have tried several different ways to manage that issue. (Largely I end up just ignoring my body's actual needs and requirements in the arena of sleep time in favor of going to bed at a time that feels natural and satisfying and allowing the harsh jangle of my really obnoxious alarm clock to jolt me out of bed.)

However, in the past several months I've given a lot of thought to sleep rhythms, wondering if I went to bed later, would the alarm clock catch me in a phase of sleep more conducive to waking up, or if I tried sleeping in two chunks instead of one, would that allow my body to rest rather than simply sleep. The experiment seems more fraught with disastrous possibilities than going on the way I've started typically does, but some one of these days I think I'm going to try something new. )Such as getting up at 3 am if that's when I happen to be awake and alert, which does sometimes happen.)

100 Words at a Time

That's how I write. For a while now, I've had enough stories or pieces of stories going at once that in order to keep them all moving, I've gone to writing each of them 100 words at a time. I'm very lucky that I can fragment my attention that way, jumping from story-world to story-world and picking up where I left off fairly seamlessly. I keep thinking I should fix that habit and start writing in larger chunks, but the thing is that the short bites works - the stories get written, and each one makes fairly regular progress. And as long as that remains true, there's very little incentive - or  reason, really - to change the process.

Thought for the Day

Organization is the key to success.

(I really believe that. Sadly, I have a hard time implementing the principle in my daily life.)

Counting Down to the End of January

I've never been all that fond of January, or winter, for that matter. But this year it seems more like an  endurance test than usual (mostly due to still owning the other house, which makes every snowstorm feel a bit more complicated than it would otherwise be). The temperatures,  the snowstorms ... really I just feel like hibernating, and instead I'm trying to force myself out of the house and back into the stream of coffees and playdates and kids' activities. Meanwhile, my writing mojo is recovering, but very slowly.