An Exhausting Weekend

Jordan's b-day party went off without a hitch on Saturday, and as an extra bonus the kids all spent the night on Saturday night. I thus was in charge of four children between the ages of 5-9. They were pretty good the whole time, and on Sunday it was warm enough to go swimming so we found a variety of things to do. The sleeping thing didn't go quite as well, however. By 10 o'clock, I had threatened to put the kids all in different rooms - including having Maya in the bathroom - if they didn't quiet down and get to sleep. They did, but then at 5AM I heard noises from the bedroom and, while I told them to be quiet and stay in bed until 7, I eventually gave in. Some of you function fine on 6 hours of sleep, but I need at least 8 to be friendly and fun.

Another day, another annoyance

We woke up this morning to no power in our house. This wasn't because of the fires, which are mostly contained, but because of a power line that fell over the freeway. Jordan was excited because she thought she might get to have a day off of school on her birthday (happy birthday Jordan!) but unfortunately, the lights came back on 45 minutes later and so she went to school. My school was closed, though, so I came home and decorated the house for her birthday. Fun times.

Jordan's California Blues

Last night, Jordan was taking a shower when she stubbed her toe on her shampoo bottle. While some crying and moaning was expected, she could not be consoled and so I sat down on the side of the tub and had a mom-to-Jordan talk. At first, she just kept whining about her toe, but then when the cat started adding her own whining (she's been particularly annoying since we moved here and meows all the time), Jordan kicked her - literally - out of the bathroom. I told her that kicking the cat is not an appropriate response, and she started crying even more. I finally got her to admit that all the crying was not about the stubbed toe and the whining cat (really?) and we had a pretty good talk about things that have been bothering her.
The biggest problem she has is that her birthday is tomorrow and we had planned to have a birthday party (with a Halloween theme, of course) with Eric and the kids. Because the fires have closed freeways and made travel between cities almost impossible, it is possible they won't be able to come. She has been all about the birthday party for the last month. She called Eric in September to make sure they were available to come up for this Saturday. We got a Halloween cookbook and have been planning meals. The house is decorated with cobwebs, skeletons, and bats. I told her they would be able to come sometime, even if not on Saturday, but she's not good with changes in her schedule so she's been praying several times a day that the fires will stop so that her cousins can come for her party.
The second thing she's worrying over is being the new kid in school. I assumed this would be a problem, but she never mentioned it before. Yesterday, however, she was upset that "all" the kids in her class had been at this school before and so they would share stories about what happened last year and talk about events that Jordan isn't familiar with and so she feels left out. I'm not sure our discussion made things better, but at least I know what she's worrying about now so we can keep working on getting past them.
*sigh* a mother's work is never done :)

Focusing on the Important Things

Every day, GoogleReader brings me a sampling of the news of the day so that I can get a general idea of what is going on in the world - problems in the Congo, presidential candidates gaffes, the Myanmar protests, Britney Spears' custody battle, Dumbledore's sexual identity... This article brings an important part of the Southern California fires to light, so I thought I'd share it with you. I'm so glad we know now where the real problem lies.

All's Well

Well, we're into our fourth day of fires all around. Thankfully we haven't had any come too close. The closest fires to us are Lake Arrowhead and Temecula and those are fairly distant. When I look north I can see brown skies and when I look south there's a kind of pillar of white clouds. The air smells like burning and there is ash that floats down occasionally. Today I heard on the news that when cleaning ash we need to not let it touch us as it might have cancer-causing chemicals... great, just what we need. Jordan's school is not letting any of the kids outside for recess. They watched Mulan yesterday, which I'm pretty sure she was okay with. She's getting antsy, though, because I won't let her go outside at home, either. She had a bad cough and runny nose before this all started, and it's not going away, so we're definitely not going to make it worse by breathing in cancer-causing ash!
I'm so glad that I decided to move to California this year - the year of the worst forest fires and highest evacuation rates in California history. It's good to be a part of history, right? Now all we need is a gigantic earthquake next year, and I'm set...
Okay, enough whining about the out of doors. We still are in our home and are far from the fires, and Eric and his family are still safe - still no school or work for them, but they haven't had to be evacuated yet. So, I'll be thankful.

We're not Shaking but we are Baking

The gulf states get hurricanes, the midwest gets tornados, the northeast gets blizzards, the northwest gets flooding. When I considered the natural disasters of a move to SoCal, I thought of earthquakes only. I've been through some mild earthquakes before and they didn't seem to be too big a deal.
This week I was reminded of the second, and more pervasive, natural disaster from SoCal - the wildfire. Yesterday morning on our way to church, the air was more smoggy and dirty than usual. It felt bad to breathe in and made me want to stay inside. It was warm enough to go swimming, but I didn't let Jordan go because I didn't want her breathing it in. The fires have not gotten close enough to us to effect us. Eric's kids have no school and are preparing in case they need to evacuate, but it hasn't gotten to that point up here yet. They are getting closer, though, and the air isn't looking any prettier today. I could go for a nice clean blizzard right about now...

Volleyball vs. Cheerleading

Last night, Jordan got her homework done in a record 43 minutes so we went out to see CBU women's volleyball against Concordia. We won all 3 sets/games/whatever it's called (I did go see my friends play volleyball occasionally in high school, but that was a LOOOOOOOOOOOOOOng time ago.) Jordan and I decided to sit near our cheerleaders. Two of my students cheer and so we sat near them. I waved at them as we came in and sat down and then told Jordan which students were mine. She kept looking on them and asking me to go say hi to them. I told her that I already had and when she kept bugging me, I told her that she could go say hi if she wanted. This led to her spending most of the rest of the evening wheedling her way into their midst. She first sneaked some pom poms from one of them and stood behind them in their three rows. The next time I looked over, she was next to the cheerleaders in the back row. A few minutes later she was in the middle row and finally got herself to the front of all of them, cheering for all she was worth. Now, no offense to my cheerleading friends, but cheerleading is not where I expected my daughter to be interested. She's pretty laid back as I mentioned in my previous post, she hangs out with boys more than girls, she'd rather wear her camouflage shirt and shorts than a dress. Apparently, however, she still wants to be a cheerleader. sigh.

Victoria Avenue

Last week I discovered a new way to work and it makes me so happy that I had to share it. Usually, I have to fight traffic to get on and off highway 91 - my average wait time through the four stop lights leading to the onramp/offramp is about 5 minutes. This wait time is full of people cutting me off, weaving in and out of traffic, pushing the clutch in and out over and over, shoulders tensing, teeth gritting, stress levels rising... to top it off, the two radio stations I prefer to listen to (NPR and AIR 1) don't work at these intersections for some reason, so I don't even have that to distract me. So I arrive at work all tense and upset about traffic/drivers and I decided that it was ridiculous. I went onto Google Maps (love it!) and looked over the roads leading from my house to the school and found a road that went the same length of town as the highway did so I decided to try it on my way home from work.

The street is Victoria Avenue and it was made in the early 1900's as a way to get oranges from the groves to the railway. The designers placed all kinds of ornamental trees along the way, with palm trees, eucalyptus trees, roses, etc. There are orange farms along the side of the road. There's a path on which people walk their dogs, jog, and walk with their kids. The trees block the smog and just show the beautiful blue sky up ahead. The road isn't very crowded, either. It is one lane on either side of a median with palm tress and other plants. There are very few stoplights, but stop signs throughout the drive (I pass by 8 of them). The drive just makes me happy. Nobody cuts me off, I never have to wait any time to get past the stop signs, and the view is gorgeous. So now I get to work with a smile!

An Unexpected Weekend

Last Thursday, Jordan and I went to "Downtown Thursday Night" and enjoyed the family night they had there. Some students from UC Riverside brought a climbing wall and Jordan took advantage of the free climbs - she must have climbed it 10-15 times and was not very happy with me when I told her she was done. There was also a family-friendly band (not kid songs but songs that didn't have racy lyrics) and some kid activities. While I was watching Jordan climb the wall, a lady came up to me and said that she had gotten tickets to an event on Saturday and since it was for girls she wasn't going to use them but asked if we were interested. It turns out they were tickets to the Revolve Tour, a weekend event for pre-teen and teenage girls with music and speakers dealing with girl issues (boys, body image, self-acceptance, etc.). Some of it was beyond Jordan's knowledge/experience/whatever, but it was pretty good. The event was all day in Anaheim and the highlight of the event for most of the girls there (judging by the screaming and squealing) was the concert by Hawk Nelson - kind of a Christian version of Green Day. What I found most amusing at this concert was Jordan. She is a very low-key kind of a girl. Looking around, everyone in the stadium (moms as well as daughters) were standing up, bouncing, waving their cell phones (instead of lighters) to the music, and basically screaming as loud as they could whenever they could. My adorable daughter, on the other hand was sitting back, covered in her blanket (it was really cold), feet up on the seat in front of her, eating nachos. She could have cared less that HAWK NELSON!!!! were there singing. It gives me some hope that in the future I won't be dragged to annoying teen band concerts and asked to endure the pre-teen shrieks on a regular basis!

Southern California in the Fall...

...is just not as exciting as the Northeast in the fall. It's hard to remember that it's October and some places in the country have striking colors filling the hillsides when the hillsides here are all brown and full of scrub grass. I just got back from a conference in Wisconsin, though, and was able to enjoy the beauty of fall once again. There was a tree by our house in Pennsylvania which was the most beautiful thing I've ever seen. It had all the colors of fall in one tree - bright red, dusky orange, mustard yellow, and usually a bit of bright leafy green left over from summer. It was a pleasure to pass by that tree every day and get a bit of beauty in the midst of autumn. I will miss Pennsylvania in the fall. Oregon in the fall wasn't that great - it was when the rain began and was a reminder that sunshine wouldn't return until the following summer. The trees changed colors but the mountains were mostly filled with evergreen trees so there wasn't that amazing variety of fall colors.
Another reason I loved PA in the fall was the change in the weather. In PA, it tends to rain continuously during the summer. The fall brought less rain and a crispness to the air rather than that heavy, horrible humidity from the summer. Unfortunately, my trip to Wisconsin didn't have that lovely crispness. I brought my wool suit thinking this would be the one time I would be able to wear it this year, but it was warm and humid with thunderstorms both nights I was there. Actually, it was cooler in San Diego when I landed than it was in Minneapolis when I left. This morning I feel some of that fall crispness in the air. I'm not sure if living in the desert, rather than near the ocean, will make it cooler here than elsewhere in So. Cal. but I'm looking forward to finding out!

Why we Love Wikipedia

Requiring students to do research in my class can be a big pain in the neck. One of the reasons for this is that they are so uncritical about the sources they use. When they use non-internet sources, they are generally biased, but mostly they rely on the internet to give them the "facts" about the issue they speak about. They often use Wikipedia as a source without even questioning the information that is found there. This article provides an example of reasons Wikipedia is a less than accurate source of information.
Today in class we talked about picking a topic for speeches. Since I work at a Christian university, I figured that I needed to deal with abortion as a speech topic in case someone wanted to choose it to talk about. Thankfully I did because at least half of the class wanted to make that the problem they were solving in their speeches. I explained to them that, first, abortion is a bad speech topic for their class because it's one of the polarizing topics. You're either REALLY against it or REALLY for it. There is rarely an in-between. Second, it's a bad topic because most of the arguments you hear on either side of the issue aren't really dealing with the arguments on the other side of the issue. Third, it's a bad topic, because if abortion is outlawed, you're stuck with millions of babies born to (primarily) unwed teenagers and that leads to a whole heap of new problems. Thankfully, they understood my argument and so now, instead of 10 speeches on abortion, I'm going to get speeches on teenage pregnancy, poverty, birth control, etc. Trust me, it's much better this way!