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.

Karen and Karensander

The boys have been saying for a while that they wanted a hamster. We said that if they were very good on their first day at school, they could have a rat each. (Not a hamster, because hamsters are dull).

We asked them what they were going to call their rats. Alex said "Karen" and Dan said "My friend rat".

So, the boys were good (actually, we bought the rats while they were at school), and rats arrived. They were so worn out after their day at school that they didn't notice that the rat cage had rats in it for about an hour. When they saw them, they decided who was having which rat, and what their names were to be. Alex said "Karen", and I said that Karen was a girl's name, and the rats were boys. So Alex decided his rat would be called Karensander. And Daniel said "Karen" and wouldn't change his mind.

Here's their abode. It's a Bel Air 5 storey Rat Mansion.

And here's a picture of Karensander. Karen wasn't feeling very photogenic.


Alex sometimes gets confused, and calls them hamsters.

Average Weather

The weird thing about the weather here is that there isn't much of it. The average is 'pleasantly warm', and +/- 2.7 SDs of the mean is 'Warm enough that it could be a bit cooler' or 'I might consider putting a light jacket on soon'. The wind is virtually always a moderate breeze, coming from the West. (When it comes from the East, the planes take off in the opposite direction from the airport, I've seen that once.) Sometimes it gets as strong as 'strong breeze' and occasionally it's 'Very light breeze'.

I've been rained on once when riding to work, and once it's been windy (it was the talk of the locker rooms on that day). Today was the hottest day for two years, and it reached 30 degrees, for about 10 minutes, S claimed.

So yesterday, the boys were watching the TV, and I was pottering about. Suddenly, there was shouting from the living room - this usually means that something has gone wrong with the TV, like someone has sat on the remote control. This time, the screen had gone blank, and there was a spoken message and text scrolling across the screen with a commentary that said (something like): "Warning, there will be heavy rain, thunderstorms and flash floods in Los Angeles County, in the North Eastern Region. Do not drive through water. Most people who drown in floods are in their cars." It then came again, and said basically the same thing, but also said "Tornado warning in Lancaster and Palmdale. 5:00 pm to 5:19pm"

Given our lack of interesting weather, I thought this was very, very exciting. So I looked hopefully out of the window: the weather was just a bit warmer than pleasant, the breeze was slight, and coming from the west.

I checked the web, on things like the LA Times but there wasn't anything there. I found the same information repeated on the National Weather Service web page. But the weather just stayed slightly warmer than pleasantly warm.