Zatera Ul

Sallie has a good link about the extent that companies will go to, to gather information on their customers. In this case, it is Target trying to figure out as early as they can which customers are expecting babies, based on items purchased; the birth of a child disrupts parents’ spending patterns, and so it is a prime time for marketers to try to influence the creation of new patterns. Their data collection and analysis, though, is on the creepy side of legal. The best defense is to vote with your wallet, and preferably in cash.

One of my top reasons for switching to cloth diapers* was, indeed, “to keep my husband out of Target.” Considering the money we have saved on gas, and impulse purchases, and new-found “needs”, it has been a very profitable decision.

My midwives haven’t sold our information to marketing lists, so we’ve been spared most of the advertising bombardments that expecting parents usually get.

*Edited to add: This is probably why Target doesn’t sell diaper pins. The one time I was there looking for diaper pins, they had a huge picture of pretty pastel diaper pins in the diaper aisle, but absolutely no diaper pins at all. I almost filled out a comment card for that one. I would have loved to buy colored pins like the ones in the picture, but probably they never even existed outside of Photoshop.

We found a new place; it was probably the easiest housing search I’ve ever had. No beige, thank God. Now for the hard part: getting our stuff there. So far I’ve just been purging; we’ve been living the frugal life hard the past few years, to cope with various major expenses, and a lot of our things are just plain worn out. I am now feeling like we can rise slightly above a college student standard of living, and also that we need to scale down somewhat to be comfortable in the new place. We took about two hundred books to the thrift store. I estimate that we still will have at least fifty boxes of books to move.

Next week I begin the cleaning, too. The packing I am mostly going to save for the following week, and then do one room per day. MFH’s job in all this is simply to cope with his home office: for the last three moves, I’ve had to just shovel his things into boxes for him as the clock ran down. Having him do more of that himself this time will hopefully make my life a little easier.

Meanwhile, the whole family has had a couple rounds of vomiting and other assorted illnesses. All the dust we’re stirring up is giving me allergy trouble, too.

We’re still not sure where we’re moving, but God did put one house in our path to see, if not to live in–a truly homely house tucked away in an unlikely place. It was good for my soul to see that such houses still exist; I am finding that nearly all of the rental housing market has been beiged over. (Beige must be the color of the realtors’ and property managers’ home planet.)

In any case, God has revealed to us that we will need to downsize much more radically than we had previously anticipated. So we are working hard at this. I see it as further crystallization, or maybe distillation would be a better word.

And now at least four of us have a stomach bug. MFH also has yet another round of computer woes at precisely the wrong time.

We’ve been thinking for a while now about moving to a new place–and kind of living paycheck-to-paycheck in terms of certainty about the future–but now circumstances have conspired to pick the date for us: by the end of February, we will be out of this particular beige shoebox-shaped living space. God only knows where we’re going. So we have a fun month ahead of us. I’ve done a lot of purging and finishing up little projects already these past few months.

I told MFH the other night that it seemed like things were starting to crystallize a little; a couple of little things suddenly came clear for me. Well, once crystallization starts, it can take off very rapidly.

One of those little seed crystals was that I made a more substantial writing journal–MFH long ago settled on one particular style of notebook that he always carries around, but I used random frugally-acquired notebooks, or loose paper. But somehow the cover from an old altered book I had started a long time ago, and old paper left over from my grandmother’s teaching days, came together in some quick-and-dirty bookbinding, and now I have a book-shaped journal, with lots of pages, and room to paste things in. And I think that it is a style that I will stick with.

TLG is now officially Done With Diapers. We don’t have much of a potty training system. Mostly we just wait until they are ready, and wildly applaud any successes.

My big book order arrived, and I have been reading, reading, reading. We’re all sick now, too.

Our car needed multiple repairs this month, and we’ve been very thankful that we live close to MFH’s work, so that he can get rides home and to the mechanic.

StrongBaby has been learning to walk, but also he has been growing fast. Last night he was able to chase his big brother across the kitchen. And so it begins.

“…is do my happy little taxes in peace.” –I may have discovered another sentence that has never before been uttered in English. Digging deep into the numbers has been one of my few joys lately; we are nearing another milestone for MFH’s amplifier kit sales, and so the forces of darkness have been pelting us with dung again.

For all the different social circles that we traverse around here, we know of only one other homeschooling family. So everyone assumes that OLC either is going, or will soon be going, to school, and this leads to occasional awkwardness.

I was thinking back on my own schooling; I went to public school and my parents were thoroughly uninvolved in my academic education. I did very well, and I’ve been able to hold my own academically ever since. But I do have a point of comparison for a could-have-been….

In my junior and senior years of high school, two homeschooled sisters joined my graduating class, so they could receive regular diplomas. Somehow the school rules must have been set up to keep them from taking the highest spots in the class ranking, because they both got straight A’s yet didn’t place. They were clear-thinking and highly articulate, and thoroughly poised and confident. It was glaringly obvious to all that they had had an education far superior to ours. The older sister was a brainy, outspoken type and would have done well even without homeschooling, but the younger one seemed to have blossomed, intellectually and personally, far beyond what she could ever have done within our class.

So, as good as my own schooling was, it wasn’t half what it could have been. And as good as our highly-ranked suburban school is, I’m certain that our children will learn just as much, or more, from home.

…I was thinking about these words from a Waterdeep song a lot (though I don’t actually know the song title or which album it is on):

Jesus, I’m a sucker
I wish I’d believed less of the lies
Did anything I thought I knew
Turn out to be true?
‘Cause baby boys and little toys are all that
I see anymore
And will somebody close the door
It’s cold outside
It’s cold outside

In physics, there is the Three Body Problem–trying to determine the motion of three objects that are exerting gravitational effects on each other. The “Two Body Problem” is the problem of finding jobs for both members of a physicist couple in the same geographical area. The Two Artists Problem is the problem of two creative people in a busy household trying to create at the same time.

It has been particularly exasperating this weekend. MFH has several projects that he would like to be working on all day long and half the night. I have been throwing off new ideas like sparks off a grindstone, and also wanting to dive very deeply into a couple of new subjects. Not being able to get very far with either, I end up in a very prickly mood.

I have been working on another book, though I was stuck for a while. When I am working on a project (any project, not just writing) I keep serendipitously finding all sorts of useful little tidbits for it. For book writing, I scribble them on scraps of paper, and then gradually assemble them into an outline in Freemind. But this one had a dry spell, which was finally broken by finding a little “bread crumb” of an idea in a diving magazine, of all places, over Thanksgiving. This morning I received a whole pile of bread crumbs, so I have a bunch of notes to sort through tomorrow.

I also have a long list of books that I want to read RIGHT NOW. One is the third book of Madeleine L’Engle’s Crosswicks Journals, The Irrational Season. Then I just learned that there is a fourth book in that series, Two-Part Invention.

The holiday busyness made me defer all my projects that I had been thinking about. So I have been working on a lot of things, the past couple of weeks.

First, I redid the lampshade for my floor lamp, which was starting to fall apart. I took off the trim and fabric, retaped the translucent plastic body to the wire frame, and then cut leaf shapes out of white woven fabric to glue onto it. For glue I used fabric stiffener, which seems to be about the same stuff as white glue or Mod Podge. I also sponged a light coat of this over the whole outside after I was done, and finished with a quick coat of spray acrylic. Then I glued on some new trim; dealing with the conical shape of the shade turned out to be the hardest part. It still looks a little rough; there was some glue left over from the original fabric that I couldn’t get off. The fabric leaves do have a nice texture that shows when the light is on.

I also made a leaf stencil from a plastic lid, and experimented with bleach stenciling my couch cover, which is a dyed canvas dropcloth. It was a partial success; the dye on the cover is so light that the bleached parts are barely visible. I am thinking of doing some spray paint stenciling on top of it later.

I also decided that the bathroom really, really needed a painting of a seashore in it. I found a beach picture in one of our books to use as a reference, a piece of scrap canvas from some rummage sale, and scrap plywood to stretch it on with a staple gun. I found some kind of a sling chair in the garbage, which supplied wood for the frame. I have a few basic acrylic paint colors from the art store. Then I spent most of my spare moments in the week painting, with cotton swabs, toothpicks, and the foam insert to some box. For a first attempt, it’s not too bad. I think I very much overworked it, but this also gives it some subtleties that I really like. As Alexandra Stoddard said, when you change one thing in a room, you more or less end up having to change everything…putting the painting in the bathroom meant that I had to screw two more bulbs into the light fixture to make the colors show up.

After all those things, the rest of the home wasn’t looking very well kept, so then I spent most of a day just scrubbing and purging and putting things away. And making good things to eat.

Today I installed MFH’s new keyed doorknob–finally solving the problem of keeping little children out of his office without making holes in anything. Also, I got out to a nearby consignment store that I had never been to before, and gave my eyes a feast.