Banned Books

S has banned books from the bathroom. I was more than half way through The Omnivore's Dilemma, which was a really good book. And I finished The Ghost Map too, which I'm going to blog about on some other blog.

But more importantly, if I don't read those books on the toilet, where can I read them? And (between you and me) I tend to find that if I don't have a book to read, I tend to get bored leave the, errrmmm, area too soon, and then have to go back to finish off what I should have finished the first time.

Christmassy Video

Here's a video of boys opening presents.

Christmassy Pictures

Here's some pictures from our Christmas Day adventures.

First, to Mother's Beach, in Marina del Rey. It's not a desperately pleasant beach, but it's got a playground which the boys like. (As in they like a playground, wherever it is, and they particularly like this playground.)

The beach is at the end of the marina, and so tends to be rather muddy, and the water doesn't look desperately pleasant there.

Then Alex and I went for a walk, to try to find a mountain to climb, while S and Daniel went to Beverly Hills to potter about. We didn't find a mountain, but we did find Will Rogers State Park (we were trying to find somewhere else, which I'd forgotten both the name and location of, so it's not surprising we didn't find it).

As we sat there (eating clementines, on a picnic table, if you want a complete reconstruction of the scene) a deer wandered by. After some encouragement, Alex wondered if it was Santa's deer.




The second time we saw it, the setting was less rusty.









There were also some impressive views. (Click on the picture, and then click on it again, and you can zoom it up quite a long way. Then you can see the festive oil tankers.)

True Meaning of Christmas

We were driving through Santa Monica on Christmas day, and passed some life size Nativity Scenes (and thanks to the power of the internet, you too can see them here, here, or here).

The boys asked what they were. I said they were Nativity Scenes.
"What's a Navitivy scene, Daddy?"
"Well, they're scenes of when Jesus was born. Do you know who Jesus was?"
"No."
"Well, Christmas happens because it was at this time of year that people say that Jesus was born, and some people say he was the son of God. Do you know who God is?"*
"No, Daddy".
"Well ...." but luckily their goldfish like attention spans had moved on, and I didn't have to explain that one. At least in England, where they don't have this separation of church and state business, they tell them this stuff at school.



*Of course he wasn't born at this time of year. What were shepherds doing watching their flocks in December?

Moments of Genius

All parents have anecdotes where they provide evidence of the giftedness of their child(ren). We're no different, so here are two of ours.

Daniel (I think, but it could have been Alex) was trying to express a negative number (he was trying to explain something like how sad he was, I forget). He doesn't know about negative numbers though. So he said that he was "G9". In the elevators here (and in our previous apartment) the floors are numbered 1, 2, 3, as you go up. The garages are below, and so go G1, G2, G3 ...

S was driving through Santa Monica the other day, and passed Google's offices (which, incidentally, are a whole lot less impressive than Yahoo's Santa Monica offices, but I digress). When they saw the Google logo on the side of the building, they said "Look, it's the word on the computer!"

(Aaron, a friend from work, suggested it was the colors not the letters that they responded to. But in my urge to only seek positive information about the giftedness of our children, I ignored him.)

Sledding in Big Bear

The purpose of the trip to Big Bear was to play with a sled. (It's called a sled, not a sledge. A sledge is a really big hammer, and when you go into a shop, and ask for a sledge for them [pointing at your 5 year old twins, who smile back sweetly] they think something's wrong.

It's quite hard to find a good place for sledding. If it's really good, then someone's made it into a ski slope, and if it's not, it tends to have trees, buildings, rocks, roads, cliffs, or something else inconvenient in the way.

The first day we found a place in the woods, without too many of those impediments.

For the second day, we asked around a bit more, and found a closed road. I tested it first, and found it to be sufficiently uneventful.

Then we put Daniel on the sledge, at the top of short, not especially steep bit that ended with a flat bit. He went down the hill, went over the flat bit, and kept going. We ran after him, shouting things like "Shit" and "Oh shit" and "Daniel jump off", while onlookers leapt out of the way and looked surprised. The problem with this road is that there is something of a steep drop on the right hand side. Where we were there was a ridge which gave some protection (you can see it on the video earlier). But later on it was much reduced, and he went over this, and about 10 feet down the much steeper hill, which fortunately had fresh snow and therefore wasn't conducive to speedy sledging. I stopped by crashing into a snowboarder and knocking him over (he was possibly feeling pleased that he'd managed to avoid Daniel; but he took it well) and we helped Daniel to get back up.

A friend of the snowboarder (who had a sled) said "I've been trying to do that all day".

Dan seemed rather unfazed by it all. He claimed not to have been worried, but he didn't go on the sled on his own for a while. After that, we found a better slope, with a longer stop before the barrier, and we took turns being 'in goal'.

Update: A commenter asked where this was.

The first video was taken in the woods. On the map, here, we parked on the 18, and went into the woods. We looked for places that other people were parked with sleds. Parking was a little tricky - there was a bit of a layby, and we walked through the wood for a while to find a good spot.

The second day was somewhere around the center of this map. It was on a gated road, that led up the side of the mountain. When we got home and looked at the map, I think we were looking for here.

Mallard Bay Resort

We stayed in a cabin, which was part of Mallard Bay Resort - that sounds more elaborate than it is. It was actually a collection of 9 (?) cabins.


That's ours, with the open door.

Having stairs was a novelty, which never wore off.




It had a swimming pool too, but they'd drained the water out. And what they hadn't drained out was frozen.


The cabin was very pleasant, but also very, very cold. It had a gas heater, and a gas fire. The gas fire looked nice, but had no effect on the temperature of the cabin (as far as I could tell). The heater didn't look nice, and had a small effect on the temperature of the cabin, but was fighting single glazed drafty windows, and -9 C outside. There were lots of warnings about being charged extra if you ran the heating at night, so I put it to 50 F (the lowest temperature the thermostat could cope with), the heater then ran all night anyway, because it coudn't warm the room to 50.

That's slightly unfair though, as it was open plan, and the heat tended to go straight upstairs, warming the bedrooms slightly, before sailing out through the windows.

Big Bear

We went to Big Bear Lake which is a town, which is near to, but separate from Big Bear City. It's also right next to the lake, which is also called Big Bear Lake, but it's a lake, not a town. It's all very confusing, but if you call it Big Bear, everyone seems to know what you're talking about.

We went there, so that Alex and Dan could play in some snow. And so that they would understand the true meaning of 'cold', and not say 'I'm freezing' because the temperature has dropped below 15 centigrade (that's about 60 in old money).

Anyway, rather than write one really long post, I'm going to write more than one (how many? We'll have to see) shorter posts, partly because I suspect that you don't have the attention span to read them, but mostly because I don't have the attention span to write them.

The main winter attraction of Big Bear is snow for skiing, and the like, but it's also reasonably attractive. The picture below shows the lake, and the solar observatory. (For reasons I forget, but I'm sure you could find out with 5 minutes worth of Googling, Big Bear Lake is a particularly fine place to put a solar observatory).

Having been in Los Angeles for a year, all the boys winter stuff is a) ineffective and b) too small. I went to a shopping to buy some winter boots for them - they wouldn't come, so I had to take a too small boot for comparison), and found some in a supermarket. (I also had to buy some for me - I took some boots, but somehow managed to take two left boots.**) The boots were something like $25 a pair, for thickly padded snow boots. At the cash register, the person serving was shocked by the price - "Are you sure you want to pay that much?" she said. I said "Hahahaha, you mad woman, I'm paying 12 pounds and 50 pence for a pair of boots, and you think it's too much." Actually, I didn't, I said "Is there an option?" and laughed.

When I left, I found out there was an option, because there was a K-Mart just down the road, where I imagine they would have been much cheaper. (I was in Vons, think Sainsbury's 20 years ago; for K-Mart, think a really grotty old, really big, Asda, then take all the friendly people out, make sure all the trolleys don't work, and make the aisles just a little too small).


**If you wondered, a few years ago, Vegetarian Shoes announced that they would stop selling Doc Marten's Boots, and as I'd worn nothing but, for the past few years, this was potentially traumatic, so (much to Susanne's annoyance) I bought all they had in stock, in my size. So I have something like 4 pairs of identical boots, hence the two left boots mistake is easy to make. (They almost immediately started selling a substitute, which is almost exactly the same).

Daniel's First Sentence

Daniel made a computer, from a cardboard box (not a real computer, obviously). He wrote what I believe to be his first spontaneous (written) sentence on it - that is, without someone telling him what to write, or him asking how to spell something. Here's the picture:



It says "Daniels and not Alexs".

Morning

The boys took some photos of what happens in the mornings.

First, they get up (at 6:30) and they lie on the sofa.

Watching Blue's Clues.
Sometimes they write stuff. This is a letter than Dan made for his teacher, Ms LeBouf.

We walk to school. We've just left the entrance to our apartment complex, and that's the school across the road. It's not far, but it still makes their legs hurt and knees hurt, and we have to stop and rest, several times.

They meet some pals on the way. This is Ryan, who lives near us.

We wait in the playground.

Their are some benches that are next to the tables, which the children eat lunch on. Parents tend to sit on them, unless they're wet from dew, and then only I sit on them.
There's a play structure, to amuse the kiddywinks.

Here's Alex's teacher, Mrs Stamp, getting ready for the day.
And here's Daniel's teacher, Ms Lebouf.

Thanksgiving Pictures

This is the two kindergarten classes. Alex is at the front, on the right, wearing a turkey hat. Daniel is on the right, about half way up.

This is a slightly better view - you can see Alex on the front left.This is the children having their thanksgiving feast. Alex is the second from the front, on the right, wearing a pilgrim hat. Dan is at the other end, on the right, with a Turkey hat on.

Here's the pictures of thanksgiving that I promised earlier.

Alex explains ...

... about pilgrims, the Mayflower and stuff like that. Or at least the propaganda they learn.

Thanksgiving

Another year, another thanksgiving.

I still don't really 'get' thanksgiving. But the boys learned a lot about it at school. They brought home a montage of pictures they'd made, and I asked them to explain it to me. They said I should read it, and it would tell me everything I needed to know.

It said "Mayflower. Pilgrims. Native Americans. Turkey." Which was all I needed to know. Apparently. (There's a number of funny things about the way the boys identify races. They don't know, for example, what Indians are. There's native Americans. And they are blissfully unaware of race. There's a reasonable mixture of white, black, Hispanic and Chinese/Japanese [who are called Asian here, which is as logical as the UK census form giving the race categories Asian and Chinese, but anyway ...]. If you ask them to describe one of their friends, they never, ever use race. They don't seem to be aware of it. )

They had a thanksgiving feast at school. They had made tunics (from paper carrier bags - I wasn't sure of the significance of that), pilgrim hats, and Turkey hats. All the children in the two classes wore their tunics and pilgrim hats and climbed onto the steps of the climbing frame. Then a big piece of painted cardboard which had 'Mayflower' written on it, was placed in front of them, and parents dutifully took photos with their cellphones (I left mine at work, which is why they're not here yet).

That was on Wednesday. Yesterday we had our thanksgiving meal. We had Tofurky, actually we had two, which made S cross (she said we only needed one), sweet potato, veggies, and a pumpkin pie that was left over after the school feast so we stole saved it from going to waste. The Tofurky included giblet gravy (it had bits of mushroom floating in it, for extra realism) and cranberry dumplings, which were a bit weird until you get used to them.

Today is Black Friday, as the day after thanksgiving is known, although no one seems to know why, but it's the day that everyone goes shopping - the shops have sales, and people start their christmas shopping. JC Penney (think Debenhams) opened its doors at 4am. Because everyone goes shopping, me and the boys thought it would be a good day to go at Adventure City. Adventure city is a teeny weeny theme park, aimed at kiddies, in Anaheim.

Anaheim is a mysterious place. It's got Disneyland, the world's most famous theme park. It's got Knott's Berry Farm, which isn't a farm, doesn't have berries, but is a pretty big theme park, and it's got Adventure City. Of all the places you could build a theme park, why there?

My theory was that everyone else would be shopping, and so there would be no lines. I don't know if my theory was correct, but there were no lines. Quite a few rides, the kiddies just stayed on, including the airport bus, where they sat in the same seats without moving for seven turns.

The toilets were particularly child friendly. I wondered what was next. His'n'hers?

One the fire engine ride, there was an option to dress as a firefighter. They didn't seem to have the full range of sizes though.

There was a petting zoo, where you could buy sheep and goat feed for a dollar, but the animals were just as prepared to eat leaves from the ground, and were too lazy to pick them up themselves. (Daniel took this film. He's getting better.)

Writer's Strike

The WGA writer's strike is a fairly big deal around here. Here's a video which explains what it's all about.

Geeky Charitable Presents

For quite a while there's been a group who've been trying to develop a laptop computer that would cost $100 (or less), that would be built for children, and that could be used in developing countries. They're called the One Laptop Per Child group. And they've almost succeeded, except that the laptop costs $188, but that's still pretty cheap.

Anyway, for a limited time only, you can buy one of these laptops. Actually, you can't buy one of these laptops. You can buy two, of which you get one, and a child in a developing country gets the other, for $400. So it's fairly charitable, but $400 isn't bad for a laptop.



And they are very kiddy friendly - they don't have a hard disk, just quite a lot of RAM - that's because hard disks break when you drop them and use a lot of power, which isn't any use if you don't have a reliable power supply. They have a clever screen that you can still see in full sunlight, handy if you don't have a classroom. They have wireless internet, and if there's another in range, they automatically detect each other so that kiddies can chat and browse the web together and stuff like that.

But they're fairly geek friendly too. They run a version of Fedora Linux, and have some software that comes with them (including versions of things like FireFox and Opera), games, chat and stuff like that. And for when your little geeklet gets more advanced, it's got a Flash programming language, Python, and stuff like that.

It's so exciting, I want to buy one for me. So that's what the boys are getting for Christmas. Don't tell them though.

Here's a video of one of the laptops controlling a Roomba, over the web.

Halloween

Here's a video of some halloween stuff.

Citizen of the Month

This morning, Alex was given a prize at school assembly, because he was "Citizen of the Month". He got a certificate, a token for a free pizza at Shakey's, a free hamburger or cheeseburger from In'n'Out Burger (oh well), a pencil (which says "Good Citizen" on it) and a bumper sticker for the car, which says "My wonderful child was citizen of the month at Paseo del Rey School".

Fires

There have been some fires around here. You might have seen them on the news, for example The Guardian, The Los Angeles Times, the BBC. We're a long way from any of them - there's a nice map from the LA Times here - we're right next to LAX airport, on the left. It's harder to get further from any fire that's currently burning, or anywhere that even could burn (Pasadena's a long way from any fires too, but there's plenty around Pasadena to catch fire).

However, we're still being told to stay indoors - yesterday outdoors activities at school were cancelled, and at least one child had trouble with their asthma. There's a very slight dusting of ash on everything - you can see it if you run your fingers along something smooth like a car (and as someone said, some of that ash used to be someone's house). The traffic is, apparently, worse than usual, because so many roads are closed too.

Animals (2)

We went to the Hollywood Safari Park which, despite it's name, is nowhere near California - it's in Germany. (There is a Hollywood connection, but I never fully grasped it.) It's a safari park, with animals, and then a bit of a theme park.

The whole place is a little like it's been trapped in a time warp, with almost nothing done to it for 20 years. There are some white tigers, with a sign that proudly announces (in English and German, which is how I know) that they hope to have produced offspring by 1989. The sign talks about only two white tigers, but we saw more, so maybe the offspring were produced (maybe we saw the offspring? I'm not sure how long tigers live).

The monkeys were in a large enclosure, with a train that went around it. The monkeys jumped on the train and the passengers could feed them popcorn through the bars of the cage.



Here's Alex on an electric boat. You put in 50 cents, and the motor started, and then when the motor stopped, you hoped the boat was somewhere near the edge, so you could retrieve your offspring. If it wasn't, you threw coins at the boat until your child manages to catch on and put it into the slot, and then the process repeats.
There was a petting zoo with goats, which you could feed popcorn to. The shop that sold the popcorn that was next to the goats was shut, so no one had popcorn. We had popcorn (from the monkeys) so the goats were very excited.

Here's a camel. And the back of Dan's head.

S had bought corduroy jackets for the boys with patches on the elbows (so they looked like teachers). She was determined to get a photo of them together in a car ride. They were determined not to. A compromise (of sorts) was reached by Dan sticking his foot in the air, in an attempt to spoil the photo.

Animals (1)

The

Germans (and all continentals, as far as I can tell) have a different attitude towards conkers. When I see conkers lying on the ground, I can barely resist the urge to scoop them all up and take them home. (Actually, I don't resist the urge, but I usually only pick up a couple). People from other countries don't seem to realise what prized possessions they are, and ignore them - one sees huge piles of them on the ground, in the middle of cities. We visited an animal park type of place (a bit like a zoo) in Bielefeld. Outside was a trailer and two large containers, full of conkers. I started to fill my pockets (as you would), imagining that they had picked these up and place them here so that people would take them away. But I had it the wrong way around. You were supposed to give them the conkers you have collected, and they feed them to their pigs.

Shocking.

We arrived (coincidentally) at feeding time for the bear. (It used to be bears, but one of them is no more). Opa always brings the boys to look at the bear(s) and they usually have no interest, and wander away, leaving Opa disappointed. Most commonly they see something boring and commonplace and get much more excited about that than about the bear in the distance ("Leaf!" or "Cow!").

This time it was feeding time. The bear was was given a selection of fruit and vegetables (or fruits and vegetables, as it always says here), and two dead pigeons. To make things more exciting for the bear, the foodstuffs are hidden around the enclosure. The bear found a carrot first, but moments before it ate the carrots, it smelled (I'm guessing) the pigeons, spat out the carrots, and extracted the pigeons from the cranny they had been placed in.

The bear made fairly short work of the pigeons - it chose to pull or bite bits from the pigeons, rather than chew it up and swallow them whole, but the ease with which it pulled the wings off before eating them made me even less anxious to meet a bear that didn't have an electric fence separating me from it.

The boys have become enthusiastic about taking photos with my camera. This means we get a lot of duff photos, and the odd reasonable one. It also removes any burden I might have felt to document our lives. Here's a couple of the more successful ones.

First, a bear with two pigeons in its mouth:

A deer. Aim: Good. Angle: Poor.

Back from Germany

We arrived back from Germany last night, where we'd been for two weeks. I tried to blog from their, but the computer crashed and it demoralized me, so I didn't. Photos, and some blogs later.

Ollie the Octopus

The day after Alex brought Tommy the Turtle home (for being such a good listener), Daniel brought Ollie the Octopus home, also as a reward for being a good listener. A coincidence? Or something more sinister? You decide.

The day after that school was closed, so Ollie the Octopus got to go out for the day. Where do you take an octopus when you have to go out for the day? To the aquarium, to see his octopussy friends, of course. There weren't actually any octopuses at the aquarium, but there were lots of other sea creatures for Ollie to look at.

Tommy the Turtle

Alex was 'such a good listener' (didn't shout quite as much as all the other children) that he was given Tommy the Turtle to bring home. Tommy comes home with the child, and there is a journal, where the adventures of Tommy are described. When Tommy was at our house, he went in a pretend swimming pool, he got a little frightened and hid under the table, and he looked at Daniel's machine. [Daniel's machine needs a blog entry all on its own, which I'll get around to doing sometime.]

What not to say

S bought some new shoes. She said that they looked Californian, so they would fit in.

I said they looked like porn star shoes.

That was the wrong thing to say, it seems.

Cheating the System

The boy's school is "Natural Science Magnet", which means two things. First (and most obviously) it specialises in natural sciences. It has more qualified teachers than most schools, most have master's degrees, and it's supposed to be better at teaching natural sciences (as opposed to artificial ones). But this also means that it doesn't have a catchment area - this means that anyone within the city of Los Angeles (or strictly, within the LA Unified School District) can apply to have their child enter, with an equal chance of getting in - it's done by lottery.

The boys are currently in kindergarten, which doesn't follow those rules, for kindergarten you have to live in the area. So there is no guarantee of a place next year, in grade 1.

However, the lottery is not quite random, because they say that they tweak the results to ensure that there is an appropriate range of groups and backgrounds - they don't say what they mean by background (one imagines race and class), and this might mean that there is flexibility in the description. In which case it's possible to cheat.

Outside each classroom, and sent home with the children on the first day, is a'wishlist' - things that the teacher would like for the classroom. These range from the mundane (pack of crayons, white photocopying paper of the kind you can steal from work if you were so minded), to the less mundane (what's the opposite of mundane?) - a teaching easel for 100 dollars, an equipment cart for 160 dollars, a subscription to a book thing for 125 dollars. For many of these, the gave an order number and a description, but nothing else (so it said 'teaching easel - pj342, or something like that).

Bearing in mind that first impressions count, I scratched the most expensive item in each classroom off the list, and ran home to hit Google. Typing in the description and order number gives one web page, which I guessed was the place to order it from.

I should make it clear that if this was you attempting to cheat the system by increasing the chances of getting your kids in to a better school by throwing money at it (money that other parents, whose children are just as deserving as a place in that school as ours, and may even be more so), I would disapprove. I would even vote for laws that made it illegal. But they're not your offspring, they're ours, and it's not illegal, so it's OK.

First day of school

The boys went to school, for the first time. School starts here at 8:20, so it's lucky that we live 2 minutes from the school. We were a bit worried about getting there on time (well, more worried because Alex likes to arrive at places first - he's not good at joining a group of children) so we arrived at about 5 to 8, and chatted with other parents.

We were let into the playground at about 8, and Daniel played on the climbing frame, while Alex just looked a little nervous.

The boys are in different classrooms, so S took Dan, and I took Alex (on the grounds that Alex was more likely to be sad). Alex was a bit sad, but his fingers were soon pried from my hands, and he was dragged into the classroom. I think more of the problem with Alex is that he didn't want to be somewhere different from Daniel - he's much more of a follower.

S wanted me to stay at home, in case there was a crisis that had to be dealt with. Actually, she would have liked us both to stay at home, in case each boy had a crisis simultaneously. I tried to explain to S that they had people at the school who had qualifications in dealing with children in crisis, which is way more than we had, but she didn't care. She couldn't stay at home anyway, she had a meeting to go to, and I didn't.

Anyway, the day passed, and surprisingly there were no crises.

We went to pick the boys up together, and give them their Schultute. The children were released one by one to their parents (or whoever came to pick them up) while the parents waited outside the gate. They were so weary they could hardly walk - I had to carry Dan all the way home (except for the stairs, I made him walk up them) because his tummy hurt. (When he got home he did 'so many poohs that you couldn't count them all' which might have been related.)

Oh, we should have some photos, I suppose.

Here's S, outside the school with the Schultutes. ('School cones' - full of school type equipment [which is ignored] and sweets [which are consumed]).

Here is the school, with the classrooms. Dan's is on the left, and Alex's is on the right.
Outside the school.
Walking out of the gate for the first time.
Alex, inspecting the contents of his Schultute.
Daniel, looking a little dazed. The hat says 'Happy 1st day of school'.

Anti-Psychiatry Museum

I met Katrina through Facebook, which was a little weird. She was Facebook friends with two of my facebook friends. One (Erin) of whom lives in LA, and she met at a wedding. The other (Patrick) lives in London, and she went to college with. She decided I was her Kevin Bacon.


So we went (not just the two of us, it wasn't like a date) to the Anti-Psychiatry Museum, because that's what you should do with people you meet on Facebook. It's called "Psychiatry: An Industry of Death". It's about all the bad things that psychiatrists do, and how they have a plan to, errrmmm, well the museum was a bit vague on what the actual plan was, but it was very clear that psychiatrists had a plan.

Bits of it were interesting. Lots of it was true. Mental hospitals in 1800 were very unpleasant. Some psychiatrists were nazis. Lobotomies were a bad thing. Too many children are on Ritalin. But how this all linked together into a masterplan was a little vague. One of the last exhibits was a copy of every issue of the DSM (1, 2, 3, 3R, 4 and 4TR) which I thought was quite cool. But that probably wasn't the point. (I'm not sure what the point was though).

You had a receiver thing, and headphones to hear the text accompanying a whole lot of videos. But you only had one receiver, per two headphones.