Visit the kelpforest....

On the last of school before Winter Break, Angus's core special ed class will be sharing family traditions and having a "Cultural Feast," for which each child is encouraged to bring some type of food, whether from a family tradition or cultural background. Huh. About the only traditional thing I make every year is clam chowder on Xmas Eve - which I actually changed from my mom making oyster stew (I like the flavor of oysters but not necessarily the texture). Last year when we went up to my brother's in his new place in LA, it morphed again into clam dip; he'd made something else, and had us make something my grandparents used to traditionally put out at family gatherings (that and celery sticks with Lawry's Seasoned Salt). I'm not sure how a bunch of seventh graders, some with allergies, and probably others with texture/sensory issues, are going to feel about clams, much less soup that might get kind of messy. Angus suggested calimari - ha! Even better! I can just see some kid's reaction to tentacles.

As far cultural background...um, haggis? Irish whiskey (runsamuck's suggestion)? Can't see those going over real well either. ;p

He did also bring up Hoppin' John, more of a New Year's thing. We've made it a few times, but I wouldn't quite say it's a tradition (and no one in either of our families is even Southern) - we could always make it one though.

Sackboy watches Evil Bob the Alien (Gareth) and his minion, the Black Dragon, kidnap the Princess.

Last Day of School Festivities
Huntington Beach CA
Canon EOS 1000D
17 June 2010

( +3 )

Wow. This is a fantastic set of blog posts I've been reading in stages over the past week or so. Today, the author was kind enough to make a post with links to all the connected pieces in one place (oh yeah, that's called a Table Of Contents, right). My brother had asked me for stuff to read to help him understand Angus a bit better, and while I've been meaning to sit down and make up a list, I think this is a great place to start. I would encourage reading even if you don't think you know anyone autistic, because chances are, you do, and you (or even they) don't know it.

http://momnos.blogspot.com/2010/03/toast-to-inclusion-autism-education-in.html
(Series of posts linked to in this post is what you want to read)

Angus is not exactly like Bud; he's a couple of years older and fairly good at talking - although he does use some scripts and echolalia, he's not dependent on them. He's in a regular classroom for subjects he's good at (so far, science, social studies and computer lab), and in core classroom for subjects he's not so good at (language arts and math). He's now in middle school where classes in different periods are arranged like this anyway, so he's actually had a headstart on getting used to that. He's had an aide for four hours a day to keep him on track, but his latest IEP plans for aide time to be faded to about half that. He's not on any medication. However, there are quite a few similarities - he gets anxious and frustrated easily, gets very anxious when he realizes an adult he knows is not in view, does not deal easily with sudden changes -i.e. family changing their minds on what movie they're going to watch. He hums a lot (so do I). Loud environments stress him, although he's getting better at that. He definitely needs the movement breaks; we call it gallumphing and he's done it almost since he started walking; the spinny thing is fun, too (hell, I used to do that when I was a kid). His shoes wear out in front first, because he still tends to walk more on his toes. We have never made a big deal out of his issues, which are fairly mild compared to some; he's just Angus to us and quite frankly we had to have them pointed out to us to realize he had them. However, with people who get impatient with him, maybe this will help. I wish I had been creative enough to come up with something like this. I also wish everyone could have the kinds of teachers Bud's seem to be.

Gods (insert your pantheon here), it's November already. My Inuyasha calendar at the office has Naraku leveling a malignant smirk at me; boy, I would've thought he would have been more appropriate for October, evil demon that he is. I'm not sure I really want him looking this direction all month. So if Billy Joe Armstrong and Peter Gabriel wear guyliner and manscara (thanks a_hollow_year, I did not know those were the correct terms), what do you call eyeshadow on males? I'd say guyshadow but that's a bit repetitive. What did Spock call it? 'Cause dammit, he wore a ton of it. Yes, Lord Naraku, the purple looks good on you, meant no disrespect...

Anyways...

I've been reminded that I haven't really made a proper post in awhile. ;) So, what's the haps?

• School - the kids started 3rd, 5th, and 6th grade. Strangely enough, while Angus isn't real fond of school, he seemed to kind of be looking forward to middle school. One, it's back in a familiar neighborhood, next door to his old elementary school, and two, there are old friends there, his friend Connor from 1st thru 3rd grade for one. He's having to get used to doing homework every night, though, which his 4th-5th grade teacher didn't seem to require, and that's a little tough for him, and us. Changing for PE also required some getting used to, as well as the requirement that he needs to start wearing deodorant every day. Gareth somehow got placed in a GATE class - he hasn't taken that test, but apparently, if there are spaces, they will put kids in if they think they can do the work. He's there for everything but math, which he has with a teacher who weirdly enough was my brother's 5th grade teacher (my brothers turned 45 in August). I'm not sure, but I think she's the only one still there from our years at that school. Avalon is starting 3rd grade, despite her 2nd grade teacher's trepidation, and it turns out she got a 100% on her first math test (adding triple digit numbers) and despite low test scores in reading last year, she is reading chapter books on her own at home. Her teacher agrees with us that it's more a matter of finding the right motivation for her, which seems to be easier said than done.



• Health - at the beginning of October, I was getting ready to head to the docks at 5 am one morning, when John sat up in bed and told me his chest hurt, as if someone were trying to shove their fist through it somewhere between his sternum and his clavicle. He aslo felt extremely anxious, like if I left something horrible was going to happen, and clammy all over (not uncommon - he sweats like crazy in his sleep). I thought about Beth, who narrowly averted her brother's heart attack by calling 911 when he thought he was fine, and my grandpa - who complained of just feeling mucky and heartburny all afternoon and passed away on the couch watching TV with my grandma. I looked up symptoms and he had several on the list - in addition, he's gained quite a bit of weight recently and was recently prescribed high blood pressure medication - so I insisted we go to the emergency room. They checked him out and gave him an EKG and a few other emergency room tests - then said everything appeared normal, but they couldn't rule it out completely on the basis of emergency room tests. So they admitted him overnight. They gave him blood thinners among other meds, which left huge black bruises on his stomach, then a stress test the following morning - turned out his heart is fine, but they had to call the respiratory therapist because he started wheezing so bad.
  
  They'd put him in a room with two other people - one was a younger guy suffering from what we normally wind up there for - asthma. He'd tried to walk to the pharmacy to refill his inhaler and wound up collapsing on the street. He'd recovered and left the same afternoon. The other guy was older, but not so old as we originnally thought. He was quite clearly delerious; kept trying to get out of bed when he wasn't supposed to, talking and moaning, and kicking the covers off. Social workers and doctors kept trying to talk to him, but couldn't get much sense out of him -I did hear once "And how long have you been doing the heavy drinking?" Made it a little difficult for John to sleep, hospitals not being the easiest places to sleep in any case. The nurses only tried once to wake him up by shaking his shoulder - he has a rather violent way of waking up, especially in an unfamiliar place - and from then on woke him from three feet away, calling "Mr. Walton..."
  
  Anyway, he finally got in to see his own doctor, who did a bunch of bloodwork and gave him some Nexxium for his near constant heartburn (caused by other meds). We haven't heard back about any results yet - I need to get on him about that because he WILL NOT do it himself. It also made him angry that the blood thinners he was given caused the Red Cross to defer him donating blood for a year.



• Work - not hugely busy since the Management Team finished the SAFE document, and another Council meeting behind us. This time it took place at a hotel in Costa Mesa, the next town over from me, so I didn't really have to travel. I was especially grateful for this as it turned out to be over Halloween/Gareth's birthday. I guess the Council hasn't gotten the message CalCOFI did, when so many people complained that it was scheduled over Halloween, they finally stopped and moved it to the first week of December. Another issue coming up, that of Annual Catch Limits, promises to wind up being way more complicated than it should be, especially since the US only catches a fraction of HMS species in the Pacific and management is actually handled by international agencies. Eh, I still have problems getting my head around it, sometimes.
  
  I need to get the desk cleaned up -I tend to let things pile up when I'm working on a particular project. Also need to get started on mackerel otoliths for the year. The fishery's been pretty slow for them, partly because of a lowered Harvest Guideline, but also because the larger fish that are mostly in demand are just not coming close enough to shore, or shallow enough, that the boats can target them. There's only a about 2 dozen samples for the entire year, divided between the three of us who read mackerel, so that's not too big of a burden. I kind of enjoy it anyway.



• Home - ech. Must get areas cleaned up - my dad called and ordered FIOS installation, and I've put off the appointment a couple of times already, because I wasn't ready. Need to get back on the FlyLady track (I haven't found anything else quite comparable, and I have to have an outside kick in the butt apparently) - but it's also frustrating when the other person doing housework has his own method and refuses to listen to anyone else's. Also that the third adult does absolutely nothing. I would excuse him for being 84, but he didn't help much long before that.
  
  Avalon is out of the bedroom with the boys now - we set up my old twin bed for her in a corner of the living room. We're not quite done making a "room" for her - involving moving some of the larger furniture around so she has "walls" - a disadvantage of six people in a 3-bedroom house, but that's the goal in the next couple of weeks. John's looked into getting something like cubicle dividers, but they're just too expensive, but we do have a tall hutch and an upright grand piano to be moved around.



• Other - I've been hauling my camera around religiously although I haven't been keeping up quite with the mylife_onceaday thing. I have been wanting to do something creative other than photography, but just totally lacking in the inspiration department. Somebody give me an idea for a holiday card and you get a free one. Well, you would, anyway. Just send me your address. What, do I have to smack you upside the head with a hint? ;p

So there's a nutshell. Long stretches of fairly boring punctuated by a few moments of high anxiety. Rather like real life, I suppose.

Time to plug in the pod and get something done...

Walking through the school parking lot on the way to pick up my oldest from the previously-posted middle school. This is a school-district maintenance vehicle. I love it. Better than my own desk at work. I think that's Bruce from Finding Nemo (next to Goofy) eating Kenny from South Park.

School truck dashboard, passenger side
Huntington Beach CA
Kyocera Switchback phone camera
17 September 2009

( driver's side... )

My old middle school, which is now also my oldest's middle school (boy, that feels weird, he's even in the same room I was in, in sixth grade), got some new murals painted on it during the summer. Sort of in the style of when the school was first built. When I went there, it was unpainted concrete and looked like a prison, and still had the original windows; it's been upgraded considerably since then. This school has the distinction of being rebuilt from having all of its floors collapse during the 1933 Long Beach earthquake; luckily that was at 5:54 pm so no one was there at the time.

Middle school
Huntington Beach CA
Canon EOS 1000D
15 September 2009

( murals... )

So, midsummertime. Angus's last day of summer school was yesterday, to his great relief. "Who invented summer school, to torture kids!" he said the day after regular school got out, and shook his first. The days of taking summer school for fun things is gone forever, I guess. His report card came back as everything "progressing towards goals." I think he's excited to go to Dwyer this fall; certainly he was disappointed that summer school didn't take place there.

I don't think we're going to be able to go camping this summer like we did last year; gas isn't so expensive, but with more than a month's salary gone...I don't think we'd better. John's been looking for something, but he just met yesterday morning with one of his old bosses, who told him Ralph's/Food 4 Less will be going through another round of layoffs, so not very likely there. He would love to go back to cooking, but we don't think his health could stand it, since his asthma seems to keep getting progressively worse. We are probably going to have to take out a loan to get tutoring for Avalon and cover a few bills we are short on.

Outside my office window, tiger swallowtails chase each other through the sycamores surrounding the building. They seem to be pretty aggressive for butterflies. I've been wondering why they seem to be attracted to these trees when I had thought that swallowtail caterpillars liked dill and fennel. Well, I should've searched earlier - it's Black Swallowtails that like those plants. These are Western Tigers (maybe explains the aggression, too, heh), and they do prefer trees.

Buses at my kid's school
Huntington Beach CA
Canon EOS 1000D
9 June 2009

My daughter's second grade put on a musical version of Goldilocks and the Three Bears; she'd been practicing singing along with a CD of the music for several weeks. She's right in the spot where the sun coming through the window is whiting everything out. I had taken a sick day and still felt pretty awful, so we sat in the very back row and I tried not to breathe on anyone.

2nd grade play
Huntington Beach CA
Motorola phone camera
13 May 2009

( She is... )

Someone at my local sushi place is very concerned about the improper use of sauces.

*Don't put too much Soy Sauce on Sushi and Don't put too much Sauce on any food! Too much sauce is unhealthy!

*When eating Nigiri Sushi, Dip The Sushi Fish First into the Soy Sauce and not the Rice!

Sushi Signage
Huntington Beach CA
Kyocera Switchback phone camera
1 April 2009

( guest photos )