Light and Momentary

Communion

Over the summer I told my son I thought he shouldn't receive communion.

What's Cooking?

Hey, are you serving Christmas dinner tomorrow? What's on the menu at your house?

We are having ham, and some kind of calorically extravagant potato casserole, and probably Massacre in a Snowstorm for dessert (meringues and whipped cream with pomegranate seeds, as long as the pomegranates aren't too desiccated). I am trying to decide whether to make the plain Nigella Lawson clementine cake that I know and love, or the chocolate version from Feast. Decisions, decisions.

I have a post in the works on It's a Wonderful Life, and another on how my oldest son decided that God does exist after all, but today I have a house to clean and clementines to boil. Have a merry Christmas, everyone.

Borderline Grinchiness from Gladlyville

I went to Target this morning to pick up a few things and it was surprisingly un-crazy. But I heard two women having a conversation that tempted me to burst in uninvited. One said to the other, "How's he fixed for aftershave? Doesn't he need some?" I wanted to say, "Nooooooooo! No one needs aftershave!" I am not being earnest and grim here, not saying that the only true needs are food and shelter so go give your money to Food for the Poor instead of Target. (But do think about Food for the Poor if you are looking for a good charity. They do great work and keep their costs low too.) You could tell me you needed a cell phone or hair gel and I wouldn't bat an eye. But aftershave is not, will never be, a need. I know I am biased here: I haven't worn perfume since high school and I am married to a man who would no sooner wear aftershave than a crinoline. But that is the most vexing aspect of the retailers' Christmas madness, in my view -- the "need" to find something, anything, that someone on your list might "need," in the loosest possible sense of the word. I should stay away from Target on the 21st of December. It brings out my inner Ebenezer.

My other grinchy thought is about the public schools and their multicultural approach to "the winter holidays." Earlier this week one of my friends described her son's holiday concert: two Hanukkah songs, two Kwanzaa songs, two solstice songs, two Christmas songs. My own kids' teachers seem to be taking a similar "equal time" approach, if the worksheets they're bringing home on the days of Kwanzaa are an accurate indicator. This is somewhat mysterious to me. I think it's a great idea to teach kids about other cultures, other celebrations. But I would be surprised if 1% of the families in this town celebrated Kwanzaa or solstice. We do, however, have a large South Asian community -- I've heard it's almost 3% of the population. This means we can get scrumptious idli and dosa here in a town where Italian food means Olive Garden. More importantly, this must also mean that kids in the schools were celebrating Eid al-Adha yesterday...but I have seen no Eid al-Adha worksheets. Families must have been celebrating Diwali last month, but the Pilgrim hats and Mayflower models came home unaccompanied by stories about the Festival of Light.

And that's not all. I understand, of course, that the public schools are not going to teach my kids about Christian belief. But it vexes me that the "some families celebrate a day called Christmas" materials are exclusively about Santa and flying reindeer. Because, news flash: some families celebrate a day called Christmas with no flying reindeer anywhere in the picture. Some families celebrate a day called Christmas because on that day love enfleshed entered the world to be its redemption, and some families find (okay, this member of this family finds) the Christmas = Santa equation to be intensely annoying. Gah, I guess I should just send the kids to Catholic school next year. But I don't see how "some families celebrate the birth of a baby" is so terribly inflammatory in a discussion of culture and belief.

It seems to me, in sum, that the schools are looking for a way to justify a week of indulgence. (Wednesday: indoor field day. Thursday: class parties. Today: morning in the gym, doing the dances they've been learning in PE; afternoon of movies.) They talk about a seemingly random assortment of holidays along with the secular version of Christmas, while they say nothing about what many real families are celebrating in their actual homes. And that makes me say a hearty "Bah, humbug."

Name That Carol

Pete sings: "Deeka bez! Deeka bez! Deeka aaahhh way!" Can you translate?

I am up baking for tomorrow's cookie exchange. My mission, when I chose to accept it, was to bake 9 dozen cookies for tomorrow. Nine dozen! That's a whole lotta cookies. Two women have since dropped out, leaving me only 7 dozen to bake, but that exceeds my cookie output for, oh, probably all of 2007. (Elwood P. bakes lots more cookies than I do. Isn't that domestic of him?)

Ergo: bar cookies. (I hate the scooping up and splodging on the baking sheet routine.) These are called toffee tops. Preheat oven to 350 and prepare an 8x8 pan. (Prepare = line with foil long enough to hang over the edges so you can lift the cookies out of there. You'll be gouging out your eyes if you try to scoop them out of the pan.) Combine one and a quarter cups flour, a quarter teaspoon of salt, 2 T. brown sugar (packed), a stick of cold butter (cubed), a quarter-cup of slivered almonds, and a quarter teaspoon of almond extract, and blitz in the food processor. After everything is combined I add a tablespoon of cold water to cut down on the crumbly factor, but this is not in the recipe. Press into your pan, making a little bit of a rim at the edges so you do not glue the bars to your pan in the next step. Bake for 12 minutes. You want the crust to be slightly firm.

Combine 1/2 c. brown sugar (packed), 1/3 c. butter, and a tablespoon of water in a saucepan. Bring to a boil and then let it boil for a minute, stirring intermittently. If you can, time it so that your toffee layer is done boiling just as your timer beeps for the crust. Pour the toffee over the crust and pop it back into the oven for 10 more minutes.

When the ten minutes are up (you want the toffee bubbling vigorously in the oven), pull out the pan. Let it set up for a minute, just so you have a bit of a crust. Sprinkle over 3/4 c. of chocolate chips. Cover the pan for a few minutes so the chips soften up, and spread with a knife to make a smooth coating. Sprinkle slivered almonds over the chocolate, pressing them in gently so they stick to the cookies when the chocolate firms up. Cut them fairly small -- they're pretty rich.

In addition to the 8x8 batch, I doubled the recipe and put it in a 9x13, and made a recipe-and-a-quarter in a 9x9 pan. I am hoping that my 9x13 batch will be all right in the morning, because its toffee layer is a little wobbly tonight. I had an expat Southerner moment while smoothing chocolate over toffee lava, when I said to myself, "Oh, no, it's not settin' up right." Midwesterners do not talk about things "settin' up right." What do they say, though? I've lived in the Midwest for...hm, I think it's 17 of the last 20 years, and I'm not quite sure what a Midwesterner says when she gets molten toffee lava instead of partly solidified toffee aa or toffee pahoehoe (that one's for you, Arwen).

Me Wuffs Mama

Pete and I play a game where I say, "Who loves you?" and he thinks for a minute. "Daddy!" he says. "Grandma! Grandpa!" He runs through his brothers' names, maybe throws in Sarah the babysitter or Miss Maria from preschool. As he runs down the list he fights back a grin, because he knows I am waiting for the answer he is not giving me. "Who else?" I ask. "Hmm," he says. "Hmm." Sometimes he answers "Mama!" Sometimes, like this morning, I say it myself in mock exasperation: "Mama loves you, goofy."

He snuggled in next to me, my little guy who said so little for so long, and said, "Me wuffs mama." Music to my ears.

Can't live with 'em, can't blow 'em up.

"Cars" is the antecedent there -- I hate car trouble.

Last week our van started having intermittent electrical problems. I took it in last Friday morning and though they tried and tried, it would not repeat the clicking flashing stuttering refusal to start that prompted me to take it in. "We can't fix it if we can't see it," they said. They hypothesized that the starter was failing, and that intermittently the faulty spot in the solenoid was giving me trouble.

Doesn't a solenoid sound like something vaguely science-fiction-y? Like something to which you could say, "Solenoid?" and it would reply in a mechanical but mellifluous voice, "Yes?" and then you could tell it to fetch you a coffee with cream and just a leetle spike of brandy because it is a cold dang day to spend 40 minutes in a parking lot watching a recalcitrant van click and flash and stutter and refuse to turn over? Alas, the solenoid is apparently the cause of the clicking and flashing and not the remedy.

Although -- that might not be right. Something is wrong in the electrical system itself, not just in the starter. I will not bore you with the details but there seems to be a short somewhere, causing me intermittent headaches.

It's only me having problems, for some odd reason. My husband has not had a glimmer of trouble with it. Last night I picked him up from work and he could see it blinking at me for the first time. But when he dropped me off at home with the younger guys, it started right up and behaved impeccably for the rest of the night.

When my oldest son was little, I used to worry that I was a bad mother because he saved his worst behavior for me. I wondered if I needed to be sterner so he would know better, because why would he be more of a pill with me than anyone else?  I think now that he knew it was safe to let his unhappiness leak out with me -- that he knew I would be there for him even when he wasn't being very lovable. (Because this is the internet, I have no doubt that someone sometime will read this and think, "No, she just needed to be a better disciplinarian." Please send all such comments to [email protected], where they will receive the consideration they deserve.)

I keep thinking about that when our van blinks and sputters at me. I called my husband from the parking lot to see if he thought we should have it towed or just try again later (I hate the idea of paying for a tow and then having it start right up in the repair shop, problem resolved until the next freezing day when I am driving alone). I thought about holding the phone up to the dashboard so my husband could speak sharply to the van: "You know I expect you to obey your mother when she tells you it's time to start!"

Oh, my, you'd have to know my husband to appreciate how much that makes me laugh. He would no sooner talk to the van than order a drink from a solenoid. Anyway, I left the van there and caught the bus back to my neighborhood. My husband is going to try to work his magic after work. Anybody have any good tricks for nailing down intermittent electrical problems? I'm all ears.

Let's Just Get It Over With Already

I have a take-home final due Friday and I have been feeling distinctly grumbly about it. Because misery loves company, I am going to indulge in a little liveblogging here. Instead of stretching it out until Friday I am BY GOLLY going to turn it in tonight. As of this minute, one of the four parts is pretty much finished and three are halfheartedly begun. On my mark! Getting set! Go!

Pow!

That, my friends, is the sound of me kicking my to-do list into small pulpy pieces. Like Batman, if Batman had been pursuing a PhD in speech pathology with the same assiduity he directed at the evildoers of Gotham City. Pow! Bam!

(I am a little punchy. Can you tell?)

Today I turned in my final project for my final stats class (unless I decide to take multivariate stats for fun and edification), gave my advisor the final revisions on the paper she asked me to co-author, and ran the merge for the mailing I will send out in January to collect data for my early research project after months of saying, "I'm almost ready to collect data now..."

My stats project ended up being a lot of fun even though I spent an insane number of hours on it. The class focused on regression analysis, which is all about using variables to predict or explain other variables. Height, for instance, can predict weight. If I know you are 5'9", I also know you're unlikely to weigh 90 pounds. That's simple regression, where you have one predictor variable and one outcome variable. For something like height and weight, you're going to have a big range of possible values. Our 5'9" person might weigh 120 pounds or she might weigh 220.

Enter multiple regression. Multiple regression lets you throw other predictor variables into the mix. If you can put variables related to diet, exercise, and build into your model, you'll probably come closer to predicting weight than if you're only going from height. To build a regression model, you collect data on a bunch of people and plug their heights and weights and diets and builds and exercise habits into a stats program. It will give you back a regression equation that lets you predict weights for people outside your sample. If, for instance, Poison Ivy is 5'6", loves tofu, and does six hours a week of backflips to prepare for her attempt at escaping the Dynamic Duo, we can guess that she'll weigh less than a 5'10" french-fry-loving curl-up-in-a-sunny-spot-and-snooze Catwoman. Of course we could guess that without a regression equation, but a regression equation lets us quantify our guessing.

For my project, I pitted man against machine. Woman against machine, actually: I took some new data from my advisor's lab and played with it. We transcribe kids telling stories and score their stories using a standardized measure. Some of the questions require a ton of perceptual judgment and can't be answered by a computer at all -- one of them, for instance, is "does this story make sense?" I also ran a bunch of computerized analyses on the transcripts. I hypothesized that the single best predictor would be those subjective questions, but also that the computerized analyses would, in the aggregate, be able to explain about as much of the variation in kids' scores as the questions that required human judgment.

The judgment-heavy questions were the best single predictor, but the computer results surprised me. A computer working with limited information actually predicts final scores better than a person working with limited information: the four variables in my computer analysis model captured more than half of the variance.

Hm. Now I am afraid this is dreadfully boring. If you are bored, just be glad I am too tired to tell you more. :-)

Messy

I am working away on my final statistics project and I am feeling discouraged.

Except! Wait! I was typing that sentence when I had a Brainwave, capital B, and I stopped typing to fit a new regression model which TADA! makes me much much happier. Much much much much happier.

Now this post is going to be less interesting (and shorter) but huzzah! I am in a much better frame of mind. I have been envisioning myself as a sort of Data Nanny, swiping grumpily at my little charges' cowlicks and chocolate smears. I have just discovered the cyber-equivalent of a tube of extra-extra-firm-hold hair gel, and they are looking much more well groomed. They are sitting nicely on the couch and smiling for their Christmas picture without even holding up bunny ears over each other's heads.

Maybe I need a little break from school if I'm anthropomorphizing my results like that, you think? Maybe the moral of this story is that blogging is the solution to being stuck (...or maybe not).

Tra la, I'm off to write the stupid section of my paper that has been plaguing me for days.

P.S. High five! I was worried that my new model was going to be doomed by collinearity but I figured out, finally, how to tell R to read the supplementary package I downloaded and my VIFs are teeny. Woo hoo!

Evens

Git yer Tuesday morning cuteness right here, folks: Pete asked for a chair so he could inspect the higher bookshelves and pick out his initial. "There again!" he is saying. He is talking so much now, and I am eating it up. A year ago he had approximately five spoken words (augmented with signs and sound effects), but he has had a massive language explosion this fall. He has abandoned all his signs; the last to go were the signs for his brothers' names. These days he uses spoken words like the big guys. "Edit! Anna!" he will call as he goes looking for them.

Back in the summer Marty, who loves dragons, was fascinated with the dragon scarf he kept spotting over my shoulder (maybe it was when I was learning to make socks and had the knitty.com page open?); he kept asking me if I could make it for him. I had a Scottish attack looking at the price, though: that much money? for a kit? into which I would put how many hours? for a scarf? for a kid?! But he kept telling me how cool he thought it was.

Marty is the hardest to please of my four sons. He is the most somber, the one who sees most plainly that life is hard. He's tough to buy gifts for, and here he was telling me about something he'd love to have. Feeling extravagant, I bought the kit and late at night I knitted up a dragon. I gave it to him for his name day, and he was absolutely, uncharacteristically, delighted. "You made this? You did? It must have taken you hours! Wow!" Later in the day he said, "I think this scarf is lucky." Why's that? "It just makes me feel good to hold it." Worth every dime, every late-night minute.

(Product review: I didn't love the kit. The yarn had a nice feel but an uneven texture. Twice it frayed and broke as I was knitting. It was a beautiful color but it was dyed unevenly, with some naked spots. The pattern was mostly easy to follow, but needed some editing at the end. And even though I swatched, the finished scarf was much shorter than the pattern indicated it would be. But I would not have figured out how to make the scales on my own (note to the more adventurous: three-needle bind-off), and I am thrilled with my son's reaction.)

This post's title comes from a family nickname: boys #2 and #4 are collectively called the Evens. If we're planning something with just #1 and #3, we say, "I'll take the Odds." Often #2 and #3 do things together; they're the Middle Guys. I know a mom of four who calls #1 and #4 her "outside children," but here #1 and #4 have a nickname based on a similarity between their names. (If, for instance, I had named them Buoy and Zest, they might be the Soap Boys. Or Hemp and Sisal might be the Rope Boys. You get the idea.)