http://www.otoh.org OTOH: All Bloggers en This wiki is licensed under a <html:a href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/">Creative Commons 2.0</html:a> license Elizabeth Zwicky Elizabeth Zwicky http://www.otoh.org http://http://www.otoh.org/xwiki/bin/download/OTOH/Skin/pepe.gif http://www.otoh.org/xwiki/bin/view/Blog/Plants?language=en Sep 12, 2011<p/> Yesterday I was watering plants and Opal was hanging out. I asked what she was doing. "Just eating oregano" she said, accurately.<p/> Tonight, I asked her to go pick me some oregano. After a surprisingly long time, she returned, with spearmint in one hand and chocolate mint in the other. "You didn’t say which kind!" she explained. "But these are mint! I sent you for oregano!" She regarded me unsympathetically. "I don’t know which one is the oregano. It doesn’t have its name on it." (Neither does anything else in the garden.) Opal 2012-05-17T09:42:35+00:00 Elizabeth Zwicky XWikiGuest http://www.otoh.org/xwiki/bin/view/Blog/VestibularStimulation?language=en July 31, 2011<p/> Opal and I had a quiet day yesterday, at her request, but it was really a bit too quiet and she was pretty hyper last night and bad-tempered this morning. So today we took a picnic to the park, and spent nearly four hours. She is now well worn out, and I am sorely missing ibuprofen (to which I turn out to be nastily allergic). We had contemplated adventure, but instead went to a local park just a little farther away than usual which has a tire swing. Opal went on the tire swing until somebody else stopped the swinging something like 6 times, and until she actually called a halt once. Somebody else’s father pushed for a while, but I spent at least 30 minutes pushing 3 kids at a time higher! and faster! I also spent several minutes pushing the one little girl who did not want to swing high and fast, whose father wandered over, startled to find his daughter swinging alone with a line of little girls waiting. It was a good break for me. (I understand why pushing is not popular; it’s a lot of work, particularly if you’re trying to make 150 pounds of kids get high enough to make the chains go slack, and the likelihood that you are accidentally going to touch somebody else’s kid’s butt is high, which has got to be nerveracking if you’re male.)<p/> Oddly, the park was dominated by girls at all times, and the boys that were there were almost all under 5 (with the exception of a lanky kid in his late teens who was combining loosely watching smaller kids with practicing his parkour, flipping off the fence; a father who knew him asked him to demonstrate proper front rolls, on your shoulder instead of your head, and, unable to resist the call of showing off, he said nonchalantly "You’re really supposed to use your hands but I’m too lazy" and did a forward roll from a stand up to a stand again with his hands in his pockets). Opal 2011-08-09T03:12:35+00:00 Elizabeth Zwicky Elizabeth Zwicky http://www.otoh.org/xwiki/bin/view/Blog/Treehouse%2Cpart2?language=en July 30, 2011<p/> The treehouse is rather variable. It turns out it has a swimming pool, with tropical fish in it, in the basement. You get down to it by sliding in a tube, and there is an elevator to take you up. The swimming pool is square, and 3.5 times the largest dimension of our house (the largest dimension of our house is smaller than an olympic-sized swimming pool, but the 3.5 multiplier results in something probably more accurately described as a smallish lake). There are fish in the pool; they are multiple colors, blending smoothly from one color to the next.<p/> But one consistent feature is a table in the entry way, which is a magic table, and contains food that looks delicious but is poisonous, and will kill you slowly, and a drink that looks disgusting but tastes delicious and is good for you. Last night it tasted like lemonade and looked like meat juice. (The table is part of the protections on the treehouse, which include, but are not limited to, a hidden door, some traps, and of course a full menagerie of meat-eating mythical animals who will fight you off if you try to interfere with their favorite amusement, which is of course napping cuddled up with Opal.)<p/> Last night she went for a before-breakfast swim, a mid-breakfast swim, and an after-breakfast swim. Breakfast was eggs, bacon, and popcorn. With tea. Then she went to her art room, where she and her friends were making props for their opera about racism. Opal 2011-08-09T03:13:23+00:00 Elizabeth Zwicky Elizabeth Zwicky http://www.otoh.org/xwiki/bin/view/Blog/Treehouse?language=en July 27, 2011<p/> When Opal has trouble falling asleep, particularly when she’s feeling nervous, we talk about her treehouse. It’s her imaginary safe place; it changes a lot but the decorating themes are constant (rainbows and purple) and she lives in it with a lot of pets of various kinds. There is a secret door (at one point she went shopping. To the hardware store to buy supplies for her secret doorstep.)<p/> The way she likes to do it, I ask her questions, and she tells me about her treehouse. The other day, she was on the porch having a snack. All of her pets have their own bowls, except the birds who share, and their species is painted on the bowl, so the gryphon’s says "Gryphon" and the dragon’s says "Dragon", and they were all eating meat, except the mouse, who had a cookie, and the kitten and the dog, who prefer catfood and dogfood respectively. She had a cookie and a scone and a cinnamon roll and garlic bread and caesar salad and pita bread with humus and she was drinking pink lemonade (all the animals had water, except the magical ones, who had lemonade). Then she went inside to have a nap in her bedroom, where the sheets are dark purple and the cover is light purple and her nightgown is dark purple with light purple penguins and a red bow and short sleeves with ruffles. I asked if there were pictures. (I have in general left out the Q&A, but it’s important for this bit.) Yes, there were pictures, a picture of each of her animals, and the books have purple covers with silver letters on them, and the insides are printed in purple letters with gold and silver pictures. "There are books in your bedroom?" "Of course. 2 bookshelves full." Opal 2011-08-09T03:12:04+00:00 Elizabeth Zwicky Elizabeth Zwicky http://www.otoh.org/xwiki/bin/view/Blog/Stars?language=en July 9, 2011<p/> Opal and I have been collecting check marks and stars recently. (She has noticed that there is an unfair part of our system; she gets to pick a prize when she gets 100 stars, but I have no defined prizes). We collect these in Chore Pad HD (which is the best star tracking app I found, but has some issues -- in particular, it hates me and frequently crashes when I try to look at my chart).<p/> We have slightly different sets of things we can get stars for, but we can each get a star a day for writing in our diaries, which in my case I choose to interpret as blogging. Today I have fully earned my star, by starting up two new blogs, <span class="wikiexternallink"><a href="http://naminghard.blogspot.com">Naming Cats is Easy, Naming Blogs is Hard</a></span> which is where I will put computer stuff, and <span class="wikiexternallink"><a href="http://naminghard.wordpress.com">Naming Cats is Easy, Naming Art is Hard</a></span> which is where I will put art stuff. (It is probably a good idea to separate out topics. It is probably a bad idea to run three blogs on three separate blogging platforms. But I wanted to see how I felt about them.) News 2011-08-09T03:13:49+00:00 Elizabeth Zwicky Elizabeth Zwicky http://www.otoh.org/xwiki/bin/view/Blog/UnexpectedInsights?language=en The other day, I was listening to Radiolab, in particular to <span class="wikiexternallink"><a href="http://www.radiolab.org/2011/jan/25/you-are-here/">You Are Here</a></span> and had one of those moments of sudden epiphany. The world changed a bit.<p/> You see, I always thought that those moments, the moments when you are are in some familiar environment, you stop paying attention for some reason, and then you have no idea where you are? I thought they were kind of like the moments when you get up to go get something, get to the correct room, and realize you have no idea what you got up for. That happens to everybody, right? Well, apparently these things are not the same. Apparently some people go their entire lives without ever losing track of where they are, not knowing which way to turn to get home, being lost in a familiar place. Who knew?<p/> Clearly, I don’t get lost that way as often as the woman in the radio show. It’s rare that I get completely unmoored and have to keep going in the direction I was headed in until either things look familiar or I reason out which way I need to go. It is, I have to admit, memorably distressing when it happens when I am not headed in a particular direction; walking out of the back door of University Hall at Ohio State one day I lost my place, and it is not a revealing place to be. I had to walk around the building until I got to the front before I had any idea where I was in any useful sense. (Around is safer than through; buildings are almost always more confusing on the inside.)<p/> Normality is such an elusive concept. News 2012-05-17T08:31:38+00:00 Elizabeth Zwicky XWikiGuest http://www.otoh.org/xwiki/bin/view/Blog/FairyMagic?language=en May 4, 2011<p/> Opal’s at camp, but I have a recipe from her. I’m not responsible for any results, particularly because she doesn’t specify what it might do, but here is her recipe for "Fairy Magic":<p/> ingredints: <p/> <ul class="star"> <li>pencil shavings</li> <li>grass and sompthing to hold it with</li> <li>a few flowers and a grader</li> <li>cilender and a pot of water</li> </ul> grade the flowers then boil the water when it colls put everything in the pot put it in the cilinder put half in 1 contener the other gets the other half<p/> <h1 id="Hdone212121"><span>done!!!</span></h1> Opal 2011-07-03T03:46:00+00:00 Elizabeth Zwicky Paul Armstrong http://www.otoh.org/xwiki/bin/view/Blog/FightingLanguageChange?language=en Look, I know there’s no point in fighting language change, particularly if you’re arguing for specialist uses of terms that have escaped into the wild.<p/> But sometimes, you just have to do it anyway.<p/> Not every bad thing that can happen is "phishing". If you gave away your password and account name to evil people thinking they were legitimate people, congratulations! You were phished. Be less trusting.<p/> If you gave your password and account name to well-intentioned but stupid people who gave it away by accident, welcome to the crowd! You were not phished. Use different passwords different places.<p/> If you clicked a link that did bad things to you, but you didn’t give it your password on purpose, my head spins at the idea of listing all the things that could be -- and not one of them is phishing. (Most of them are also neither viruses or trojans.)<p/> If, and this is what sent me over the edge today, you receive mail from an account that you believe to be totally fictional, with no real person behind it? Nobody in this scenario was phished. And I am not at all certain what you think "phished" means, when you believe it can happen to somebody who doesn’t even exist.<p/> Rants and Raves 2011-07-03T03:46:30+00:00 Elizabeth Zwicky Paul Armstrong http://www.otoh.org/xwiki/bin/view/Blog/Astrelia?language=en Mar 23, 2011<p/> It rained the other day, and Opal’s class had free time inside, so they raided the scrap paper box. Opal found a piece of lined notebook paper with the top cut off, and decided to write a report. First, she felt that the two holes left in the paper were unsatisfactorily asymmetric, so she drew two more to even things out, and colored them in. Then she wrote the following report. It is untitled, but the top does say "(chiled) Opal + Paul (DaD)"<p/> My dad comes from Astrelia. I know the names of some animal’s Kangaroo, Walaby, dingo, wombat. there are two deserts in Astrelia.<p/> I know some astrelian deserts lamingtons (I know helthey food too like vegamite)<p/> I know places in Astrelia adlade, Perth, darwin, brisbane, Sidney, meborne.<p/> Report by: Opal elanor armstrong zwiky initals oeaz<p/> She has initialed it (in cursive; it is otherwise printed) and checked it off.<p/> Remember, this is what she did for recess, entirely unprompted and obviously uncorrected. Then she and two older girls wrote a book (the first in the magic chipmunk series). More about that later.<p/> Opal says: "It was pretty fun, and I just thought it would be good to do it. So I thought why not about Australia, and then maybe I could do it about Africa and India and stuff. I thought, we could do that, I don’t see why not, but I kind of like Australia&#8230; I just can’t explain it." Opal 2011-05-23T11:03:17+00:00 Elizabeth Zwicky Paul Armstrong http://www.otoh.org/xwiki/bin/view/Blog/SpringLambing?language=en Mar 19, 2011<p/> <img src="/xwiki/bin/download/Blog/SpringLambing/P1020826b.jpg" alt="P1020826b.jpg" title="P1020826b.jpg"/><p/> It’s spring, and the lambs are out on the hillside with the rest of the flock. Isn’t that cute? Wait, let me show you the wider view of their rural surroundings.<p/> <img src="/xwiki/bin/download/Blog/SpringLambing/P1020825a.jpg" alt="P1020825a.jpg" title="P1020825a.jpg"/><p/> That’s right, the sheep are browsing on the reclaimed garbage dump next to Yahoo’s parking lot in Sunnyvale. It’s totally surprising to see sheep there, too. Usually it’s goats. News 2011-05-31T07:26:52+00:00 Elizabeth Zwicky Paul Armstrong http://www.otoh.org/xwiki/bin/view/Blog/AllIWantForChristmas?language=en Mar 13, 2011<p/> It is important to note that she lost the second one last week, the day after she turned 7, and that she can’t imagine why one would be worried about it. It’s the strange adult world that thinks of "All I want for Christmas is my two front teeth" when they see her. The balloon guy shook his head over how big she is now when she got her balloon.<p/> <img src="/xwiki/bin/download/Blog/AllIWantForChristmas/P1020822b.jpg" alt="P1020822b.jpg" title="P1020822b.jpg"/> Opal 2012-05-16T09:59:20+00:00 Elizabeth Zwicky XWikiGuest http://www.otoh.org/xwiki/bin/view/Blog/OurSMARTGoals?language=en Mar 10, 2011<p/> Opal and I have discovered a trick that works for her at school; SMART goals. These are a lot like the SMART goals that every management book recommends and hardly anybody ever implements successfully, with one important difference. They are Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant&#8230; and Tiny.<p/> It turns out that Opal does not want a goal she can reach with effort. Given a goal that she can reach with effort, she eyes it suspiciously. She might refuse to undertake it at all, or go at it listlessly, sure she will fail. She might reach it, but then consider THAT to be failure because she didn’t meet the goal clearly enough. I realize that it would be better if this were not true. Perhaps at some point it will not be. We are all works in progress, and she is 7; she does not need to have everything figured out yet. But at the moment, if you give her a stretch goal, or even a reasonable goal, you get back a sad, resisting, anxious child.<p/> Give her a goal that she can stomp on like Godzilla crushing buildings to hear the fun noise, and she’s all over that. <p/> So, for instance, our current goal is for her to do two jobs a day at school. This is absurd. She did three on parent visiting day, when there was only a half day of school and she spent half of that fighting with me. She can do two before school officially starts if she picks carefully. If she actually had a two-job day her teachers would probably call to complain. The day before we set this goal, she had a three-job day and was in tears over her failure. Since then? Never a day with less than 5, one with 11, and a sudden raft of notes from her teachers about how optimistic, how focused, how successful she is. <p/> One of her official goals for school is "Do more math" (I note in passing that this could be measurable, but they haven’t set themselves up to measure it; between that and the lack of specificity, it will be hard to prove whether or not it has been met, which means Opal will assume it was not and her teachers will assume it was). Our goal? Do math twice a week. Again, this is about half the reasonable lower bound, even below what she’s doing now when she feels she’s not doing enough. And what happened on day one? She bounced off to school, pointing out that she’d already done one math, so she only needed to do one more the whole week. Then she did two that day. Which was Tuesday, by the way. Opal 2011-05-07T09:34:00+00:00 Elizabeth Zwicky Elizabeth Zwicky http://www.otoh.org/xwiki/bin/view/Blog/Bouncing?language=en Feb 28, 2011<p/> This is Opal at a friend’s birthday party, bouncing on the trampolines. This is exactly what I thought she’d be like when she was in the womb. (Well, possibly I hadn’t predicted the headscarf.) Although we weren’t certain she’d have a name by now. <img src="/xwiki/bin/download/Blog/Bouncing/bounce%2Db.jpg" alt="bounce-b.jpg" title="bounce-b.jpg"/> <img src="/xwiki/bin/download/Blog/Bouncing/high%2Db.jpg" alt="high-b.jpg" title="high-b.jpg"/> Opal 2012-05-11T08:51:32+00:00 Elizabeth Zwicky XWikiGuest http://www.otoh.org/xwiki/bin/view/Blog/AnotherOneDown?language=en Feb 27, 2011<p/> Gosh, no, I have no idea why people think this child is hapa. And look, she’s lost her third tooth! One of the top ones, this time. Just under the wire to lose three teeth while she’s six.<p/> <img src="/xwiki/bin/download/Blog/AnotherOneDown/lost%2Dtoothb.jpg" alt="lost-toothb.jpg" title="lost-toothb.jpg"/> News 2011-05-31T07:24:28+00:00 Elizabeth Zwicky Paul Armstrong http://www.otoh.org/xwiki/bin/view/Blog/SpringFlowers?language=en Feb 20, 2011<p/> Somewhat less rained on. This is the old camera, repaired. Works a treat but I’d forgotten how much I hate the factory default settings on the D90 (Beep on? Really?)<p/> <img src="/xwiki/bin/download/Blog/SpringFlowers/DSC0039b.jpg" alt="DSC0039b.jpg" title="DSC0039b.jpg"/><p/> <img src="/xwiki/bin/download/Blog/SpringFlowers/DSC0074b.jpg" alt="DSC0074b.jpg" title="DSC0074b.jpg"/><p/> <img src="/xwiki/bin/download/Blog/SpringFlowers/DSC0133b.jpg" alt="DSC0133b.jpg" title="DSC0133b.jpg"/> Arts and Crafts 2011-05-15T02:52:58+00:00 Elizabeth Zwicky Elizabeth Zwicky http://www.otoh.org/xwiki/bin/view/Blog/RainandStuff?language=en Feb 19, 2011<p/> Two pictures of flowers in the rain, plus an entry from my latest series, arrows.<p/> <img src="/xwiki/bin/download/Blog/RainandStuff/P1020713b.jpg" alt="P1020713b.jpg" title="P1020713b.jpg"/><p/> <img src="/xwiki/bin/download/Blog/RainandStuff/P1020758b.jpg" alt="P1020758b.jpg" title="P1020758b.jpg"/><p/> <img src="/xwiki/bin/download/Blog/RainandStuff/P1020674b.jpg" alt="P1020674b.jpg" title="P1020674b.jpg"/><p/> Arts and Crafts 2011-05-07T09:39:04+00:00 Elizabeth Zwicky Elizabeth Zwicky http://www.otoh.org/xwiki/bin/view/Blog/GotaLovely?language=en Feb 14, 2011<p/> Opal and Arnold and I went out for dinner (not the only table with an odd number of diners, but the only table with an odd number greater than 2, or any number greater than 2 for that matter). Somehow, I drifted off into song lyrics, and said, must have been apropos of something "Mrs. Brown, you’ve got a lovely daughter". To which my father replied "I’ve got a lovely pair of coconuts". Opal fixed him with a basilisk stare, and said "You have got a lovely DAUGHTER." Which seemed such a sweet defense of me, until she added "AND a lovely granddaughter, don’t you forget it. Because <strong>I</strong> am your granddaughter." Opal 2011-05-15T01:59:41+00:00 Elizabeth Zwicky Elizabeth Zwicky http://www.otoh.org/xwiki/bin/view/Blog/SeasonallyAppropriate?language=en Feb 10, 2011<p/> We have not done any valentine’s for school; I foresee difficulties this weekend. But isn’t this sweet? <img src="/xwiki/bin/download/Blog/SeasonallyAppropriate/roseheartb.jpg" alt="roseheartb.jpg" title="roseheartb.jpg"/> Arts and Crafts 2012-05-16T01:51:54+00:00 Elizabeth Zwicky XWikiGuest http://www.otoh.org/xwiki/bin/view/Blog/SeagullsAlsoEvil?language=en Feb 6, 2011<p/> I have a new camera. I haven’t yet mastered it, but at just under 1,000 pictures in 24 hours, I’m getting there. From those, first an explanation of why other birds don’t like seagulls, and then pure prettiness.<p/> <img src="/xwiki/bin/download/Blog/SeagullsAlsoEvil/DSC0675b.jpg" alt="DSC0675b.jpg" title="DSC0675b.jpg"/> <img src="/xwiki/bin/download/Blog/SeagullsAlsoEvil/DSC0677b.jpg" alt="DSC0677b.jpg" title="DSC0677b.jpg"/> <img src="/xwiki/bin/download/Blog/SeagullsAlsoEvil/DSC0503b.jpg" alt="DSC0503b.jpg" title="DSC0503b.jpg"/> News 2011-02-20T04:21:19+00:00 Elizabeth Zwicky Elizabeth Zwicky http://www.otoh.org/xwiki/bin/view/Blog/EvilCalifornians?language=en Feb 5, 2011<p/> Yes, it’s true. I do this just to make those of you who live other places -- places where it is still winter -- jealous. Or possibly because you know what, this is really pretty:<p/> <img src="/xwiki/bin/download/Blog/EvilCalifornians/DSC0257b.jpg" alt="DSC0257b.jpg" title="DSC0257b.jpg"/><p/> You know how, when you take pictures, people sometimes check it out, to see whether they’re missing something? One of the people who did that sighed in ecstasy. (Often, people come to the conclusion that I am crazy. But the first magnolias are indubitably beautiful.) News 2012-05-16T07:17:00+00:00 Elizabeth Zwicky XWikiGuest