Fun With Everyday Math Games

As part of their studies, Rascal and Zipper learn math based on the Everyday Math curriculum. A major part of the teaching style of this curriculum are the math games. They do them at school, in both paper and computer versions, but they are also available online.

Which means that every single time that I've turned on the computer in the last couple weeks, I've had a small boy standing next to me, asking:

"Mommy, can I play math games?"

I swear. I had to put my foot down just so I could put up a post or two here. It's great that they like the games so much, but it's starting to drive me nuts. After 2 or 3 games, it's really boring for an adult to watch.

But school wants them to do it, and I guess it must be helping them somehow, so I guess it's game time!

A Short Treatise on Tae Kwon Do, Part 2

Ok, so you want to know what happened at last year's tournament then?

I brought the family with, and we arrived about 30 min. before the adults were supposed to kick off. The kids ran long (which I guess shouldn't have been surprising) so the adults started about an hour late.

There was only one other woman in my division in the forms competition. We were both newly minted blue stripes, and after a quick discussion, we came to the agreement that we would both do the new form. Well, I lost, but no big deal, it was a good try.

But then... we go up to the awards tables, and they say that I got first place, not the other woman. Well, neither of us was overly concerned, but they were nice enough to just give us both a gold medal.

So after this I'm feeling pretty cocky, and decide that my board break is going to be a spinning backfist (which I had done already at Health Kick, but not since). This was a big mistake. I had done *no* particular tournament training (they just didn't do it for the adults at least at Amherst), so I was playing things by ear. The other competitors did fair axe kicks, but I just had to be different, didn't I?

I lined up my break badly and came across the upper edge of the board solid on the middle of the back of my hand, splitting it open a bit (not bad), but the hand hurt terribly. I did break the board quite nicely with that badly botched attempt though, so I have that to console me. After the competition I went and got bandaged up and got an ice pack at the head judge's request. I wasn't going to - not showing weakness and crap like that - but it was good that I did, because there was still sparring to go.

At that point I didn't really suspect that the hand was broken - I came to the conclusion on my own several weeks later based on how much it still hurt and the funny give of a bone in my hand when I pressed gently on it. I never had it looked at officially, but considering that it was almost 3 months before it was fully recovered, and I can still feel an indentation in the bone there, and if I strike the back of my hand with even a moderate force the pain is extreme...well, I'm pretty confident in my layman's diagnosis.

But back to sparring. Now, I'm not much of a sparrer. I freely admit it. Come on, compared to most of the competitors, I'm fat, slow, and old. But I had attended some sparring classes for a while (alas no more, when Amherst changed it from Fri. to Thurs. that was it for me), and I thought it was fun, so why not?

Because of all the earlier delays, my court (the same one I had been on all evening btw) kicked off last for the sparring competition. And guess who was slated in the last division of the night on that court? Yeah. So my husband and kids were of course tired and antsy and bored. I wouldn't put them through that again.

So the evening's winding down, and there's two courts still active. The other court has a black belt final with one of my classmates in it. The two instructors from Amherst (Master Chong and Miss Perkins) still here are at that match. And over on my court, I'm facing one of the two Cortland college students in the division. Which means that the whole Cortland team is right there to cheer her on. Well, my family is still there, the good troopers that they are, but no Amherst students to cheer me on, and no coach in my corner.

The match begins, and I don't remember, I think it was two rounds of two minutes (doesn't matter). I was doing ok, not great, down one point at the end of the first round. About halfway through the second round I clobbered my opponent in the jaw with a closing kick and she literally scrambled crawling off the court. I had not put a lot behind the kick, but it was enough.

Now I'm standing in the middle of the court, not knowing what to do, with no coach in my corner to guide me, and I'm terrified that I hurt this girl. She's examined and comforted and cheered on by her 40 or 50 Cortland companions, while the one judge from Amherst finally catches my eye and motions me to my chair to await the result of the blow. I sit down, so very, very alone.

My opponent returns to the court perhaps 3 minutes later. Thankfully she seems unhurt. But now she's angry and motivated and has a whole crowd of supporters behind her, and I'm just mentally shattered. I honestly can't tell you how the rest of the match played out, except that I was very tentative. Hell, I don't even know if I scored a point or lost a penalty point from the head kick. Anyway, she wonthe match, and lost the final to the other Cortland student - gee, match up two mid-30's SAHMs of no particular athletic talent against two college kids and figure out who's going to come out better in the end.

I was unreasonably upset. Not at losing the match, which I had expected anyway, but because I had failed myself psychologically, and because I felt abandoned. Now, to the credit of the Cortland kids, a couple of them had some positive words for me. Master P (who was the head judge at the court) even consoled me, which was both appreciated and a cause for embarassment to me (since I shouldn't need bucking up like a 10-year-old kid). He said that the match was close. He might have just been saying that, but I really don't know.

Thankfully I did manage to mostly protect the injured hand during the match - I think I took one blow on it that made it smart, but no big deal, and she didn't go out of her way to attack the hand.

But I was so angry. I marched out of there with barely a glance at my instructors as I passed by, and I was not entirely able to control my vitriol in front of my children (who were of course very tired and cranky by now, since it's past their bedtime). It reflects badly on me as a person, I know, but if nothing else I am brutally honest with myself. If that means admitting to a lapse of maturity, then so be it.

I'm glad to have told the story, because I kept most of it under wraps. Nobody seemed to want to hear about it at school, and I was certainly reluctant to expound upon my own failings there. And I had put my husband through enough hell with my ranting over a 24-hour period that I didn't want to burden anyone else with it.

A Short Treatise on Those Damned Messes

I should just give up on the cleaning, I really should. Every time I walk into another room it's a disaster zone. Nothing I do actually matters. Uh, housework-wise, that is. Blasted kids.

A Short Treatise on Tae Kwon Do

I'm not in the tournament this Saturday. Two and a half reasons:

1) I just don't have the money. Plain and simple. And $60 for 3 minutes of competition (although the medals are really, really nice and everyone gets one) is an awful lot.

2) There was that bad, bad experience at the tourney last year. Maybe I should expand on it - let me know if you want to hear the tale. I might have blogged about it before; I don't know. But that experience alone wasn't the deciding factor in not participating - it's the combination of factors here.

2.5) I tripped the other day and smashed my oft-injured right hand into a doorknob, taking the brunt of the damage over where the hand was broken last year (*ahem* see reason 2). The back of my hand is still a little swollen, and I expect it will hurt for at least another week. But no worries, mate.

But I still plan on going to the tournament to watch for a couple hours if my schedule allows. I missed the demo team competition last year, so I really want to see if Amherst can retain the title. Go Amherst!

A Short Treatise on Business Travel

Why is Ironwolf so damned lucky? He got to go to Vegas without me a few weeks ago (something I've already blogged about) and this week he is in beautiful (although apparently not sunny) Orlando, FL to visit Disney. The Disney folks even gave Ironwolf and his coworkers Magic Kingdom tickets for yesterday. Lucky bastard.

But then again, he does have to actually work on these trips - there's really not much time for fun and games. But I could never understand why Ironwolf dislikes the business travel so much. I mean, look at it - free nights away from home, nice restaurant meals, get to see different places, in the winter get away from the crappy Buffalo weather. The only drawback is not getting to see the family (and oh yeah friends too) for a couple days or weeks, which IMHO is not exactly a drawback - I would kill (ok, just maim) for a couple days away all alone *sigh*. And maybe the actual travel part itself *shrug*.

A Short Treatise on Ironing

'Cause that's what I'm doing right now. Ok, not right right now, when I'm blogging. That would be dangerous.

I hate ironing! If you wanted to torture me, all you would have to do is put me in a room with a couple thousand shirts and tell me that I couldn't leave until I had ironed all of them.

I don't just hate ironing, I'm really bad at it too. I'm far better at pressing wrinkles into shirt sleeves than removing them. Let's just say it's one of my special talents.

I'm probably so bad at it because no one ever taught me the right way to do it. Good grief, I'm 34 years old and I can't properly press a shirt! (Or put on eyeliner either, but that's for another day). Maybe if I look on the Internet I can find an Ironing for Stupid Idiots site.

A Short Treatise on Stupidity

Someone will read this one, anyway!

Several days ago I'm driving up Eggert Rd. near home in the TOT. It's a smaller sort of major road, and the speed limit is 30 mph there. I'm in the left lane doing my usual 33-34 mph, and a guy in the right lane nearby who is probably topping 40. A town cop comes up behind me, and goes around me on the right. All three of us end up stopped at a traffic light - me in the left lane, the other guy in the right lane, and the police car behind him.

The light goes green and that guy in the right hand lane takes off like a shot. About 3 seconds later, police lights flashing. Ha ha you dunderhead, didn't you see him right behind you? The cop even gave you a second chance to redeem yourself because he could have pulled you over a minute before!

Oh, that just made my day!

An Array of Short Subjects

I really, really need to get back into the swing of things. So today I have decided to leave the computer on and put up posts throughout the day (in between loads of laundry and the like), each focusing on a particular topic so y'all won't get too bored and so you can skip the ones you don't want to read.

It's like one of those blogathon things, except there's no charity involved, just my own overinflated ego that makes me think that you want to read this stuff.

Where's ShadowAngel?

I am here to assure you, dear readers, that I was not struck down by a falling tree limb (which sadly did happen to an area gentleman post-storm), nor was I huddling in a dark, cold house for 3 weeks. In fact, the power came back on at hour 170, that is, 7 days 2 hours after the lights went out.

So (once again) I feel I owe an apology for my reticence, lack of communication, whatever. About half my readers are local friends, so they haven't needed to worry, but I fear that some of the rest of you may have been worrying about me and my family. (Or maybe you didn't worry, that's ok too.)

I figure you could use an explanation of why I haven't been blogging (for that matter, I haven't even turned on the computer - you should see the number of backed-up emails ugh!). So, without further ado...(drum roll) Jen's Excuses!

1. You know, once the power came back on, I didn't feel the desperate need to communicate with someone anymore. In fact, all I wanted to do was to be cuddled up under a (preferably electric) blanket and bask in the warm glow of artificial light. Even so, I owed you at least a quick message letting you know that things were ok.

2. Much of last week was consumed preparing for my annual Halloween party. I put way too much time and effort into it. Also you should hear about the parties, etc. that I took my kids to in the last week. More in an upcoming Halloween post.

3. It's been terribly difficult to get back into the swing of things. I suppose it probably wasn't so bad for all those folks that had to trudge off to work every day, because their routines reached a semblance of normality pretty quickly, but I was home with the kids for seven school days, and Ironwolf was out of town for several of those. I still don't quite have the sense of reality back, and it's been three weeks since the storm.

4. I'm just plain ol' depressed again. Oh, it's not that bad, really, I'm a lot better at coping than I used to be. It also helps, btw, that I can't really isolate myself like I used to do back in the day - after all, the dh and kiddos still need me! So brush that aside, but if you see a lot of "Everything in the World Sucks" posts in the next couple weeks, that's just my diseased mind talking.

5. My husband is horrified by this - I've started several craft projects at once. Why the horror? Because all too often I leave projects unfinished, and I definitely leave my crafting crap all over the place when I'm working on these projects. Yes, I have a place for all my stuff, but it's in the basement, where it's cold and dank and not much fun. Most of the projects are XMas gift-related because I'm trying to keep costs down a bit this year. Somehow I suspect that I'm going to fail in that.

6. I've been too drunk every night to see straight. No, no, no just kidding! :-) But I will admit that the three bottles of creme liquors now sitting open in my fridge (from the Halloween party) do pose quite a temptation in the evenings.

I'll try to pull a few posts together (in nice digestible bites) over the next couple days about what's been going on here. Thanks for your concern for me.

Hour 168

Exactly 7 days 0 hours since the lights went out - approx. 54,000 customers still without power in the Buffalo area. Including yours truly - but there are now street lights on literally 1 1/2 blocks away. I'm optimtistic that this will be the last night without electricity.

Let's rewind the clock back a bit to Wed. night. Ironwolf got off on his trip to Detroit just fine, albeit a little late due to weather issues in Detroit. We managed just fine here without him.

But at 3 AM that night, I woke up feeling really ill. After taking a minute to clear the grogginess from my head, I realized what kind of ill it was - I was nauseous. So here I'm thinking, oh great, food poisoning, or the flu, this is not what I need now... I stumble off to the bathroom in the pitch black and sit on the edge of the bathtub for a bit. I come to the realization that I am not in immediate danger of throwing up, so I visit the kids for a few minutes and wander downstairs, eventually falling asleep semi-upright on the couch. Around 4:15 I awaken to Drake's cries and dash upstairs, again in the pitch black. He had a bad bloody nose. With that rectified, and my stomach settled (who knows why I felt so sick before) it was back to bed for everyone.

Now yesterday early in the morning came a pickup truck carrying about 10 people, some armed with chainsaws. I figured out pretty quick that they were from the town (or contracted by the town). They moved all the tree branches and the like off the curbs and onto one side of the street, then loaded everything up into a truck to haul it away. Yay!

But then comes the strange part. About an hour later, a bucket truck pulls up in front of my house from a company I'd never heard of - and there's a guy up one of my trees in the back yard cutting off limbs. He proceeds to go through the other yards on the street doing the same thing. So I'm assuming he was also contracted by the town to help with the problem of cracked and split limbs still in the trees. I'm grateful, of course, since it was going to be a terribly expensive prospect if we had to take care of the problem ourselves (as would normally be the case, and even with the assistance we may have to call someone in later). But now my yard is littered with tree limbs all over again, and worse, I had to pluck large logs lodged in the branches of the trees and wedged onto the chain-link fence in the back of the yard.

Now, wouldn't it have made more sense to send that guy through first and then a day or two later send the workers to clean up the debris?

We've got a little bit of gutter damage, but insurance should cover that. No big deal. Hell, there's some people with holes in their houses, and others (including a friend of mine) had basement flooding so bad that they will have to replace their furnace and hot water tank.

We went over to my SIL's today to do some laundry because I couldn't get our dryer started again without overloading the generator. I don't know, we managed it before, but just couldn't get it to work this time.

The kids have been bothering me literally every two minutes writing this, so I'll go tend to their needs now. More pics tomorrow.

Hour 160

There are utility crews just a couple blocks away! Oooh, maybe power by nightfall!

Got lots to tell but I'm off to the SIL's right now.

Hour 123

Yesterday I took the kids to the playground, taking photos of mangled trees around the school. These are just a few examples. There's an estimated 30,000 trees in my town alone that suffered damage from the storm. It's really quite sad - there were a lot of beautiful old trees in the area. Some of them will be gone entirely, and many of them won't return to their former glory for a decade or two.

As of this morning there was still 150,000 customers without power. (I think it's closer to 100,000 tonight). School is cancelled through tomorrow, but chances are it's going to be the whole week, as we are still slated for Sunday for power restoration. It looks like at least six school districts are going to be out of snow days, and so they are negotiating with the state to see if they can get their mandatory school year length reduced. After all, winter hasn't even started yet. It's more likely though that the state will force the districts to use vacation days instead, so there goes spring break. Well, we shall see.

Ironwolf is away now. He'll be back tomorrow night. Too bad the poor baby had to miss the Sabres game. 9-1 over the Flyers! Holy hand grenades, Batman! Ah, life is good...

But Ironwolf's grandmother (also without power) had a nasty fall down the stairs and broke her shoulder joint. She's doing as well as can be expected, and she is staying with one of Ironwolf's aunts (one *with* power, of course). The poor dear has already had a major shoulder injury a few years ago - I'm rather hoping that this is the same shoulder, or she is going to have terrible difficulties.

Let's see, what else...

Random had us over for dinner last night. It was wonderful! I didn't realize how badly I needed to get away from the house and out with other people. I'd had some other invitations before from people, but I wasn't really ready to leave the house yet. And the pasta dinner was perfect - let me tell you, it is tough to make pasta with my limited cooking options. Thank you!

On Sunday I headed off to my cold, dark church. Nobody said that church was cancelled, and I had promised the choir director that I was going to be there this week (before the storm) because lots of choir members were scheduled to be away. Amazingly, about 40 people still showed up! We set up chairs in the narthex where we could get some sunshine, Pastor Kay put the kettles on the gas stove so there was hot drinks, the folks providing treats for the coffee hour showed up, we pulled out the port-a-altar and the battery pack for the portable keyboard, and there ya go! Good service - glad they decided to abandon the scheduled Job sermon for something a little lighter.

Today I trekked out to the grocery stores with the kids. It was very busy, but not the ridiculous busy that it had been in earlier days. I'm still being very cautious about the perishables that I buy because I'm only running the fridge a couple hours a day. Plus there's still the issue of being able to cook the food that I bought. So, for the first time in a couple years, Chef Boyardee is gracing my household. But since I noticed that Ying's (the combination Chinese/pizza/every other cuisine you can think of all under one roof joint) is open maybe I'll buy dinner for the kids there tomorrow. They are close, and they are just inside the town line, so I know their water is safe without boiling. Come to think of it, I don't know if the water advisories are still in effect.

I know I've babbled on for quite a bit, so I'd better go - don't want to waste more gasoline that I have to. I'm probably not going to do much blog reading while the power's still down. And maybe someday I'll actually be able to get to all those posts that I said that I was going to do before the storm hit! Ok, more likely they'll all fall by the wayside...

Hour 89

For those of you getting this through RSS, my apologies. It seems that I am incapable of doing simple addition in my head. I'm an idiot, but what else is new?

89 hours without power other than that provided by the generator. Counting my blessings. Hell, I'm even able to do laundry - I'm just limited to running one major appliance at a time. Still can't cook though because it draws too much power. So cooking is done on the grill or over my fondue pot's alcohol burner.

Some people still don't have hot water, or clean water. I think that because my town is one of the few places outside the city that has a reliable source of clean water that this is the reason that we are slated to be among the last communities for power restoration - now estimated for Sunday.

Half the neighborhood's abandoned. We cleaned up our own tree limbs and helped out a bit with the next-door neighbor's, plus Ironwolf has been hauling the generator to relatives' houses so they can get their homes a little warmer and get their basements pumped out.

Ironwolf had to work today (despite the fact that Amherst still has a driving ban), leaving us alone for the first time, but we are doing fine. Unfortunately, it looks like he will have to fly off to Michigan tomorrow evening, but it should just be for about a day. I'll just have to know how to get the generator running plus the specifics of the funky wiring job we've got going to support this.

So still doing ok, but it's going to be a long time before things get back to normal. I'll try to have some pics up tomorrow.

After the Storm

Most of you probably already know what has happened here in the Buffalo area. The locals are obviously living it, and the rest of you have probably seen it on the national news.

There is quite a lot of damage out here. Trees and power lines down everywhere, with over 300,000 customers without power. We are also without power, but we have a generator going now which provides enough to keep us warm, the basement dry, to try to save the contents of our freezer, and to whip off a quick message to everyone out there (oh, and to watch the hockey game - Go Sabres!).

It may be as much as a week before we have power again, so don't expect to hear much from me. But do not worry about us - unlike many, many people out here, we are warm, relatively dry, have water, and have enough food and gasoline to get us through the next couple days.

Here are a couple pics for your "enjoyment"



The view into my next-door neighbor's back yard




An oblique view down the street early Fri. morning




Down the street (late morning) - note neighbor's car with branch atop