A Surprise Night at the Theater

Mr. BTEG got a phone call from the owner of the Dancer's dance studio on Saturday. Seems an adult who takes a private lesson on Saturdays came in with four tickets to that evening's showing of the play Newsies, at Cleveland's Playhouse Square. The studio owner wanted to double check that we could use the tickets. We were happy to accept, especially since the Dancer's tap recital dance back in June was to "King of New York," from Newsies.

After some calling around, it ended up being Mr. BTEG and I, the Dancer, and one of the Dancer's best friends, who is interested in theater, who attended. Said friend was actually at the high school theater painting scenery for the next high school theater production when we got hold of her, and she had to rush home and take a shower.

It was definitely the kind of evening we won't be reproducing anytime soon. In addition to the four tickets, we also got a pass to park free in the Playhouse Square parking garage, with a covered walkway to Playhouse Square's group of theaters. And when we picked up the tickets at the Dancer's studio, we discovered that they were loge tickets. We sat in our own little row of four seats, with some small tables, and waitresses came and took food and drink orders and brought the items directly to our seats. That was a new experience for this family.

I suppose it sounds silly to say that it made me feel ridiculously rich to have the tickets and the parking and everything, but it did. The Evil Genius family is very blessed, but there isn't room in the budget for these kind of events, especially in the luxury seats we had. It was a very pleasant and welcome surprise.

Picture of the Day

I thought this picture would be an appropriate one for the day, although it was taken in December of 1989.

Moving On, Moving Out

Another life change has happened here at Casa de Evil Genius: the Musician has moved out. It's been an adjustment, having only one daughter at home. I miss having the Musician around, but it's also freeing. Most of our homes have been on the crowded side, and it's nice just having the space. And the Musician was very happy and eager to be more on her own (she's rooming with a friend.) Honestly, it's nice having more time to focus on myself! I've enjoyed being a stay-at-home mom, and I look back very fondly on that time. But it's also nice to be able to work more on my own dreams and ambitions.

Back to the Beginning

After an honest try, I'm back to my original medicine. The other ones we tried just weren't working for me. I'll just have to see my GP and see what she thinks about drugs to help lower my cholesterol. I would appreciate prayers still, as I am still a little wobbly mentally.

A couple of things emerge out of all of this. One is how blessed I am to have a psychiatrist who understands what I am going through. She's very good at reading body cues, and she's also been my psychiatrist long enough that she can read me personally, and gauge where I'm at in relation to previous visits.

Secondly, I'm thankful that we have good medications for stabilizing mood out there. It's amazing how much the medication helps my brain to function properly.

For My Friend Scottius Maximus

Ruh-roh. Do you think this will affect the Cardinals playoff chances?

Update on Common Core Stuff

The Dancer has told me that one of her recent Spanish assignments was to pretend that she was a girl from Costa Rica, and write a letter to one of the other girls in class, who was pretending she was a girl from Colombia. They were to learn some facts about the country and then write a letter describing some of what their country was like. Mind you, my daughter is in Honors Spanish III. Both the Musician and I agreed that an assignment like that is pretty Spanish I type of stuff. Does anyone have any input on this? Obviously, it depends to an certain extent on the complexity of the writing required, but this doesn't seem to have been a very complicated letter. I know the Dancer thought it was kind of a silly assignment. She has been keeping me up on things, now that she has seen my previous post on Common Core. By Honors Spanish III, one is generally getting into the more difficult parts of grammar, and learning more advanced vocabulary. This assignment doesn't seem to have fit that bill.

I heard from the one mom I know well enough to contact about this. She said she didn't know what we could do about it. Hmmm. I have heard that there is an Ohio House Bill under discussion which would repeal Common Core for the whole state. I already called my State Representative and told him that I support it, even though it's still just being talked about. That may sound silly, I suppose. I wanted to let my rep know it was already being talked about by the larger community, and that there are people that support it. Ironically, I heard about this bill when I put up a Tweet with a link to my previous Common Core post. I also heard about Ohioans Against Common Core this way. The Evil Genius in me wants to buy an anti-Common Core shirt and wear it to home football games.

At least my daughter's AP US History class seems to be going the same way it was when the Musician took the course, BCC (Before Common Core.) They are using the same textbook, which I think was older already when the Musician used it. I am keeping an eye on anything they might be using outside of the textbook. Also, Mr. BTEG was a chemistry lab assistant in high school, and minored in math in college, so he is knowledgeable enough on both of those subjects to make sure the Dancer is getting a solid foundation in those courses. I wish every student was so blessed.

Still Looking Ahead

My medication difficulties continue. Being off of the one med was helping me as far as general mood and energy, but I did have a couple of mixed episodes fairly quickly. If you are not familiar with bipolar, a mixed episode involves manic and depressive symptoms together. You are agitated, angry, depressed, apt to act out. So long term, I do need some kind of medication beyond the two I am still currently taking. My doctor prescribed me something newer, which is not supposed to have the side effect of raising cholesterol. However, I'm starting to exhibit sleep deprivation symptoms. Melatonin does not seem to help, and I can't stand any kind of tea. In the meantime, I'm keeping on as best I can, on the road to a healthier me. I'm thankful that we have two cars, and that the Musician is home a good bit of the time, when she's not at work, and can drive and help out. I'm also extremely thankful that I don't have an outside job. Mr. BTEG is a great support, in every way.

Common Core Is Rotten

I'm sure you've already heard a bunch of other people express frustration with how poor the Common Core curriculum is at actually teaching kids. I knew Common Core was not a good educational system, but was hoping that since my daughter was a sophomore in high school this year, she wouldn't be affected much by the issues. Fortunately, it doesn't seem to be showing up in her math, science or AP US History classes. She is having to read some worthless non-fiction books for English. Their reading assignment over the summer was The Talent Code. Is that truly useful for the majority of 15-year-olds? What made this book stand out among the sea of self-help books out there, that an English teacher picked it out for my child? Now she has to go through a list of other books of this type, and pick out another one that she would be interested in reading. Fortunately, they are also reading the traditional fictional literature that has been used in English courses. I'm still displeased with what I feel is a waste of my daughter's learning time.

She also informed me tonight that her Spanish class is being changed by this stupid system also. They're not actually concentrating on learning vocabulary or grammar in class anymore, the Dancer says. They're supposed to be magically learning that at home, then spending class time applying it. What? My daughter is luckier than most, in that I studied Spanish for seven years, and my eldest daughter took three years of Spanish as well. We can help her if she runs into difficulties because she's not getting what she needs in class. But I want my daughter to be studying grammar and vocabulary in class! I shouldn't feel like I have to help her, or supplement her education, at home.

At certain blogs, in this era where educational standards are falling victim to political meddling, I've read that not homeschooling your child amounts to child abuse. I resent that bitterly, because I know my daughter better than anyone else. Homeschooling would not be best for her at this time, because of personal reasons that are none of anyone else's business. I'm going to start by talking to some of the other mothers that I know, and see if anyone else is unhappy with the way this school year is starting out. Depending on whether I get a positive or negative response, Mr. BTEG and I will have to think about things from there.

Should I have tried to fight Common Core when our school district first talked about implementing it? Perhaps. To be honest, I don't have any friends that are fellow moms here in my town. I thought about joining the local PTA long ago, but decided not to when I started getting spammed with email from the national PTA, telling me to vote for things I would never have any intention of supporting. Even the PTA is all politics, all the time, and that disgusted me and put me off the entire PTA idea. So I definitely didn't feel like trying to lead what seemed to me at the time a single-handed crusade against our school board and superintendent, who described Common Core in gushing terms. If I can find some parents that are unhappy about how this is working out in practice, instead of theory, maybe we can band together to get something done. Or as I said above, Mr. BTEG and I will have to take a serious look at the rest of the Dancer's high school years.

I've Finally Seen This in a Version That Lutherans Can Relate To

Quick Note

Emotionally, I'm doing fairly well being off of one of my meds. However, I've been suffering from a lack of sleep, which is not uncommon when stopping this medication. My skin has also gone ballistic, which is not common, but not an emergency situation. I will be seeing my doctor soon, in any case. It has been very difficult to want to blog, though, when I barely have enough energy to sit up straight. Today promises to be better, but I do have a lot of catching up on normal life to do. We'll see where my health and my energy levels take me for a bit.

City Policies and Their Results

As someone who has lived near the city of Cleveland most of her life, I found myself in agreement with a recent article by Kevin D. Williamson at National Review Online entitled, Who Lost the Cities? As Jesse Jackson talks about "a national crisis of urban abandonment and repression," Williamson asks the question, who is responsible for this crisis in cities such as Newark, Chicago, Detroit and Cleveland? Williamson's conclusion? "The more progressive the city, the worse a place it is to be poor and/or black." While this might be provable by a simple look at political offices and economic statistics, I'm sure that diehard progressives will deny to their last breath that there is any causality between a city's politics and the living conditions of its poor. But isn't that just a ringing endorsement for Williamson's counter-argument, that individuals, families and private businesses should be free to act outside of regulated government influences? If, for example, the public school district in your system is failing not only to teach children, but to provide even a safe environment for them to learn, and this has been going on for decades, why think electing a new superintendent will magically solve the problem? Especially when that superintendent will be paid a couple of hundred thousand dollars or so a year in salary, and can easily move on elsewhere in a few years, while residents are stuck with the same schools? If you are a parent, who do you think you can best trust to make sure your child receives at least an adequate education, you, or some bureaucrats who are consistently not held accountable? Politicians have offered many fixes for urban woes, and I'm going to write about some of Cleveland's proposed solutions. I will simply state here that while downtown Cleveland and its neighbor, University Circle, may have some very lovely areas, the overall environment of the city of Cleveland has not changed... yet. You may want to give the government a chance. You may want to search for direct solutions for your family and yourself to improve your personal situation as much as possible on your own. It's not like politicians' promises have never failed before.

Update: this post was edited to better clarify my points, and to change when I will next post about this.

Of Writing Many Blog Posts, There Is No End

This little paraphrase of King Solomon's words came to me as I was pondering the huge amount of verbiage that spills out of the internet every day. I don't want to become just another "mommy blogger," but I also don't think my niche is simply supplying news links, with a little of my own commentary. There are already a lot of sites out there that do that, some of them very well. I used to enjoy talking about homeschooling, but those days are long gone now. Still, I do get ideas for blog posts, but mostly around 11PM when I'm trying to go to sleep. And even if I write the ideas down, the spark is often gone by the next day. Still, I've always enjoyed writing, and I'd hate to stop doing it. Right now, blogging is the best way for me to work on writing. Plus, it helps me try to organize my thoughts in a coherent fashion. Mr. BTEG or my daughters could tell you how often I spit out some stream of consciousness from my brain that makes little sense to anyone but me. At least when I write, I can go back and correct something that I didn't clarify enough for a reader to understand. Too often I write only a portion of what my brain is processing, so there is no needed context to what I write.

One thing that will be interesting to observe in the future is that, in an agreement between my psychiatrist and myself, I have been completely weaned from one of my bipolar medications. This was largely out of concern for my physical health: a side effect of this drug can be high cholesterol. While I have already found that I'm having negative and self-accusing thoughts again concerning the past, I'm also hoping to combat those using some of the positive thinking I've gained over several years of mental stability. The interesting part is that my brain is not as numb, for lack of a better word, than it was on the medication. Not that I was a zombie before, but I was kind of floating in a sea of calm, thinking very little. I'm wondering if this new medicinal change will help my creativity, while hoping I can retain mental health. We'll see how it goes.

On Loving Cleveland

So the 2016 GOP convention will be held in Cleveland, and I'm trying to make myself care. Maybe if I could sit down with a few Republican Congressmen and ask them why they're being so stoooopit. That would be fun. But I don't get the disdain for Cleveland. I could point out everything I like about living here, but in the long run, it wouldn't matter to anyone, I don't think. But there is one important thing about Cleveland where many other cities are lacking: we have only one of nine Capezio stores in the country!

Happy Fourth of July!

Just about to run out and go see fireworks. The girls are out with their friends at the local Bay Days fair. Hope you fellow Americans all have a happy and safe holiday! I'm putting up a new header featuring my girls with their cousins, from a Fourth many years ago.

Ready to Enjoy the Summer

The Musician's graduation party and the Dancer's dance recital have come to a successful conclusion. In a way, it was almost too much to have it on one weekend, but it was also nice to get it all over with at once.

The park where we held the graduation party had a catch-and-release pond. My niece caught her first fish, and my in-laws and some of the kids spent hours by the pond. The bubbles were also a hit with the big kids.

I think I was more melancholy about this being the Dancer's next-to-last recital than I was about the Musician graduating high school. I love watching both of my daughters perform, but I have seen the Musician in a lot more performances in marching band and concert band, than I have seen the Dancer in recitals.

The Dancer is very flexible.

Really, really flexible

The Dancer's cousin was excited that the Dancer's tap class used a song from Newsies. It's apparently one of her cousin's favorite movies.

I'm especially proud of the Dancer's progress in pointe. She's so incredibly strong, and she's put in a lot of work to become so.

Remember the foam pointe bodices I blogged about having to alter about a month ago? Yeah, it was these.

So now I'm going to settle in to blogging more, sewing more, and keeping up with the housework and what seems like perpetual sorting and tidying! What are your summer plans?

Wordless

What's In a Name?

At Ace of Spades, I saw a link showing data whereby you can supposedly tell how old a person is by his or her name. Ha!, I thought to myself. Since my mother was (for the times) much older than the norm when she had her children, I bet the average age of someone with my name is actually about 10 years older than my age. Interestingly enough, both of my sisters' names as well as my own are among the top 25 most common names of those alive as of Jan 1, 2014. And while the median age of those sharing the name Barbara is about 20 years past where I am now, the bottom of the range is indeed about 10 years past my own age. My sisters' median and bottom of range numbers are even lower, and they are both younger than I am. Does this make sense to you? It does to me simply because my parents were in general more old-fashioned than the parents of my friends, so it would make sense that the names that they found attractive would be a bit behind the fashion as well.

There's some interesting data there, if you want to check it out. For example, half of all living Brittanys are between ages 19 and 25. But a certain singer's first album only came out 15 years ago, so I don't see that being the link. Say you were 14 back in 1999, you'd only be 29 now. And I just now wondered if the name information took spelling discrepancies into account. Is Jason/Jaysun/Jayson/J-son the same name? In any case, I'm younger than my name. :)

The End of Something

Today was the Musician's last final. Her high school days are over. And you know what? I don't feel too bittersweet about it. High school had too many difficult spells for her, for me to feel sorry that it is over. Looking at it with adult wisdom, I think high school is difficult for everyone, perhaps largely because these are difficult years in general. Teenagers are very often overemotional and immature, leading to a lot of what my youngest calls "teen angst" and creating those who the Musician calls "drama llamas." And high school is their world. If a co-worker was catty, for example, I generally wouldn't have to see her in any context outside of work. High school kids are stuck with each other during the day, for after-school activities, at parties, often even times at their entry-level jobs. Teens have to work out their own growing issues while everyone else around them struggle with theirs, and often clash. Even though my daughter was more popular, made more friends and was involved in more than Mr. BTEG or I did in our time, there's always those that don't like you, and teens can be all too nasty about letting you know.

Of course, having a daughter who's graduating high school can be a reminder to me that I am growing older! I try not to feel too badly about it, because I wouldn't want to be stuck in my 30's with two little girls forever, either. But it's a little bit difficult seeing my mother get depressed as she gets deeper into her twilight years (she will be 80 this year.) I feel concern for her, but I also hope this is not a glimpse into my own future. One of my big fears is outliving my body, so that I'm stuck in a nursing home for years, or even outliving my mind. And even as a Christian, I think death gives us all a pang at times. Even so, my mother can still live on her own, even if she doesn't have as much energy as she used to do, and her mind is intact. There are blessings there.

For the present, I'm going to celebrate my daughter's achievement!

Where the Rubber Meets the Road

I'm pretty sure I've talked previously on this very blog about how college isn't all it's cracked up to be, at this time. You don't really get a true liberal arts education anymore, and it seems silly, with college so expensive, to take a bunch of classes unrelated to your career aspirations. In other words, say you want to be a teacher. You can get all of the education classes you need (and I'd argue whether all of those are needed) in about two years or so. Why put in more time and money (and we can be talking big money), when you could be out earning your living instead?

So, we've come to the point where the Musician is finally graduating from high school. And guess what? She... doesn't want to go to college. She's not sure what she wants to do with her life, and she's not really up for more classroom work at the moment. And it's a little bit difficult for me. I know that she is making the right decision for her. I'm proud that, in her current part-time job, she is showing that she is willing to work to earn money, and she can handle showing up on time, etc. But. Just about every other one of her classmates is going to college. She and I won't have shared experiences of dorm life, crazy professors, faking your way through long term papers, bad cafeteria food. In the end, though, she's an adult. It's her life now. She's extraordinarily stubborn (she shares THAT with her mother!) and tenacious. If she ever decides she needs a college degree, she'll find a way to get it. I hope she's happy wherever life takes her.

Trying Again

I have to admit, it's been crazy around here. I've had so much more energy and drive since the surgery, but too often I can wear myself out so much that I am exhausted for the next day or so. I'm hoping to improve my stamina and tackle things I never felt up to before.

Right now, the household is kind of on a countdown to June. The Musician will be graduating from high school. She's working and trying to figure out what she wants to do with the rest of her life, while she looks forward to her graduation. The Dancer is having a dance recital in June. She is in six dances, which required six costumes, a few of which needed sewing work. Costumes never come completely finished, I suppose to fit the size vagaries of hundreds of kids. Also, the studio owner and teacher asked me for more of my sewing help than I've given her in the past. Out of seven pointe costumes, for example, six needed alterations, including the Dancer's. The bodices are largely made out of a foam with stretch velvet over, and they've been weird to work on. But besides a lot of people being impressed by my skills (which is always nice) we're getting a tuition break this month against the hours that I've put in.

On top of all this, I've been getting more involved in the doll collecting world, which has led to me putting more time and effort into my collection. It's nice to have a fun and relaxing hobby, and I've met a lot of great people recently on the internet, but I've also missed this blog. I've missed the people that I know from here. Which means that I'm going to have to make an effort to write here again. I hope to see some familiar faces around, and maybe meet some new ones!