D is for Darling Husband
His first name actually begins with D so this isn’t a faker. With two As, a C and D, I think we got the family photos out of the way.
Miracles of miracles, I have nothing on my needles right now. I cast off my olympic knitting in time for the party on Sunday, which was superb. I met some really fascinating people, won some Socks That Rocks yarn and scored some really great stash yarn from the swap. Thanks Cara, I had a great time.
Now, I’ve got lots of sock yarn sitting on the top of my knitting box but not enough mojo to take any of it seriously, even though I love the handmade socks I do have.
signed,
stumped
SockoRama
I’m thinking about my sock pal, and she sounds a bit more fussy than me.
I don’t think I am identifying her in any way when I frame her request like this:
| girly = bad | bold pink = good |
| teal = bad | blue = good |
| pastel = bad | green = good |
So given that – what do I choose?
Would you throw out a pair of handmade socks that had some bold pink but a couple of pastels too?
What about a pair of hand painted socks that were primarily green but had a hint of teal?
Would you go with something totally not girly and mix up some Koigu in autum colors or with a Twinkletoes in shades of deep red?
What would you do?
In other, knitting related news, I actually finished my Interlacements shrug and am in love. The shrug may become my Jaywaker (ala Cara). I will debut it on Sunday at the Boston Olympic Closing Ceremonies event.
Speaking of Olympics, I’m on goal for the move your bottom challenge, but gave up on muffy the ear warmer as totally impractical. Instead, I reverted back to the February Finish it or Forget About it challenge from last year and am cleaning out my WIP basket – ripping or finishing and am looking for gold as I finish the cast of of a mini-pie alpaca brown shawl.
You get to decide
Ripped off from Bitch,Ph.D.
Fill in the Blank
Everybody should read ____________.
(Feel free to pass on your interesting links in the comment threads. Discuss.)
___
I’m heading off to VT for the last leg of my middle trimester, I think I have three weekends left after this one. Then its own to my final project for the spring semester. Life is busy, knitting isn’t the priority it once was, neither is yarn shopping. I was at Webs in Northamption on Tuesday and couldn’t talk myself into buying a thing – not one thing! I did however pick up some fancy sock yarn (Schaeffer, Anne in a green colorway) for my sockaolooza sock swapper from Northampton Wools where everything was a bit more tempting, even before they told me there was a 20% sale on everything in the store.
I’m off to move my bottom – try to get in 5.5 miles before the rain starts. I’ll be listening to
Accordian Crimes and hope to get caught up with my book club.
Have a great weekend ya’ll.
Shouting at my car radio
This is a reply I posted over at radioopensource.org – a follow up to a podcast I caught last week on Feminism, and the “opt out” revolution. If you aren’t listen to podcasts yet, this is a great place to start.
One of the great things about podcasting is I can catch up on shows I missed; one of the bad things is that I yell at my radio with no hope of calling in. If Larry Summers even floated half the ideas of your guest, Linda Hirshman, he would be lynched in Harvard Square. That I somehow need to pass a reproduction litmus test to further my education is stunningly arrogant and antiquated. The larger issue isn’t gender roles, but the nature of work and Ms. Hirshman’s perception of a post-cold war economy where one stayed in ones job for their life time is no longer realistic.
Yes, work can be fulfilling – even if that work is raising your own child. [Once you start paying other people to do it, you can no longer deny that it is actually work, no matter how much Ms. Hirshman disparages it]. The modern worker needs to be flexible – not just for after school pick ups, but because of the nature of the new economy – which means that a lawyer can work part time and meet both their needs and the law firm’s, a professor can pick up a class or two, a radiologist can work at home reading x-rays over their computer four days a week; that gender is beginning to play a smaller role in this is blatantly ignored by Ms. Hirshman.
My husband and I are taking turns staying home to raise our children, and the only sacrifice is monetary – we are opting out of the consumer culture – which seems far more damaging to our national consciousness than pledging allegiance to a dying corporate model.
Snow Poems
Mode For Caleb has some wonderful [public domain] poems up on his blog. Wonderful choices for a day like today.
C is for Cate
C is for Cate:
My beautiful baby girl, named after both great grandmothers (my dad’s mother, her dad’s dad’s mother) one off the boat from Ireland and the other off the boat from Italy. Cate is sitting on a giant tree that fell down during a rain/wind storm a few weeks ago. It was very exciting, we had backhoes on our yard, and chainsaws, it was like having our own episode of Bob The Builder running for a week straight.
And from ChicKnits:
Ten Top Trivia Tips about Amy!
- There are roughly 10,000 man-made objects the size of Amy orbiting the Earth.
- The International Space Station weighs about 500 tons and is the same size as Amy.
- A Amyometer is used to measure Amy!
- If you cut Amy in half and count the number of seeds inside, you will know how many children you are going to have.
- Koalas sleep for 22 hours a day, two hours more than Amy.
- It can take Amy several days to move just through one tree.
- Amy is incapable of sleep.
- If you chew gum while peeling Amy then it will stop you from crying.
- You share your birthday with Amy.
- Amyolatry is the mindless worship of Amy!
Knitting Olympic updates will start soon.
working out some ideas …
“Standardized tests and governmental standards are a reality, and they have value – very little of it having to do with education”
In our online discussion, Cindy, a fellow student, called me out on this, specifically “very little of it having to do with education.” I had thought about elaborating on this in the thread itself, but didn’t to wander too far away from focusing on learning objectives. I am happy to have the chance to expand on it a bit more on my blog.
I meant value as currency, as leading indicators, as allowing for correlation or comparison. And, that if we look at the arms and legs of the tests, we can see that they reach quite far.
I couldn’t tell you what was on the MCAS (Massachusetts’ standardized test for public schools), or how much they actually gauge what a student knows, but I could tell you approximately where a town stood in the rankings based on the market value of their homes. Well, I thought I could until I went looking for some numbers to back up my claim. I found a few surprises.
Of the schools that had 100% of their students pass the 2005 MCAS, 7/18 or 40% were charter schools in some of the poorest districts in Massachusetts, the other 60% were the wealthiest. The biggest surprise for me wasn’t that there were school districts like Dover-Sherborn on the top of the list (average home prices is $1,388,715.66 – would you pay $1.5m for a home with a crappy school system?) but that Boston Collegiate Charter and Codman Academy Charter were at the top of the list as well. Now, those two charter schools serve roughly the same neighborhood. While the average home price is $390,230.88, the number is deceiving, because about 60% of the population rent, and they take up about 1/3 of the space that a $400k house would go for, so for comparison sake we can say the actual home value is about $135,000.
Take away the charter schools though, and the list becomes predictable, with scores decreasing at about the same rate as the average home price. The public school serving the same neighborhoods as the charter schools are at the bottom of the list.
I’m not an economist or an education policy expert, but it would seem to me that town wealth isn’t exclusively tied to performance, and that it may be possible to design an economic development program aimed at revitalizing a community around a charter school’s success. You don’t have to spend $1.5 million to get your kid into a good school, you can look at real estate you wouldn’t normally consider.
There are thousands of other tangents we would could take with these numbers, we could look at MCAS scores as tied to school district budgets and principal bonuses vs. schools that need to be taken into receivership. But the point is that if we start to look at the ways the numbers matter in relation to other aspects of the community, then working to bring them up wouldn’t seem like such a hardship and rather than fighting the status quo, you could work effectively to improve it.