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.

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.

The price of luxury

In October, it's Oma's birthday so it seems we are both morally and legally obliged to take the twins to her birthday party so that they can knock people's drinks over for a half hour, shout that they want to go home, cause a general tantrum and be dragged away after an hour.

In my extensive searches on the interweb, I've found that Air India fly from LAX to Frankfurt, and they charge about $200 less per ticket than anyone else. That's £400 total savings, in old money.

The reviews I've found aren't really all that mixed. It's crap. Well, the food is good (if you like vegetarian food, and curry - so two thumbs up there) but everything else is a bit grim.

It's about 24 hours of total flying time - which makes £16 per hour. I can't decide between statement A:

• Flying is really grim anyway. It's only going to be relatively a tiny bit grimmer.

And statement B:

• Flying is really grim anyway. It's worth paying to make it less grim.

Coincidental Reunions

When I was in London, I chatted with my uncle. He said that he thought that L, my cousin, might live somewhere in Los Angeles, but he would speak with his brother (that's my other uncle) and find out.

And, indeed she does. Let's have a bit of background. My father's brother, which would be my Uncle David moved to Canada, ooh, a long time ago, and had three children (they would be my cousins). I have only ever (in my memory) met one of these three cousins, at that was (I think) in about 1975 (or maybe 1976), when she was in England at our grandparents house. Other than that, I knew pretty much nothing about them - we're not the best of extended families at keeping in touch.

Anyway, it turns out that not only does she live in Los Angeles, but she lives about 8 miles away (less, if you didn't have to drive around the airport), and used to live closer than that - she would buy lunch from our local Indian restaurant.

I mentioned this to someone at work, and they explained that it wasn't really a coincidence, after all, LA is a big place, and it's very common for people to move here (very few people are from around here), especially people from other countries, and I have a number of cousins, and started to do calculations on my whiteboard.

Today she, and her 18 month old offspring (who is, according to my mother, D and A's second cousin - but I've never understood that) came to visit, and she turned out to be not unpleasant at all. We gossiped about various family mysteries - I had hoped she might have answers to questions that have been family hearsay and gossip for as long as I can remember, but she knew even less than I did.

We had lunch, and then she was going to have to leave to go to a barbecue, but it started to rain (!) so she stayed a bit longer and generally hung out. A and D were extremely grumpy - partly because they were a bit tired, but also I think because they were not used to having a younger child around, who garnered more attention than they did. (When their cousin came to visit, there was the opposite effect - she got grumpy because they were younger and got more attention).