Words matter

This week on NPR, I heard a story about t-shirts sold at either Forever 21 or Penney’s (I forget which and am too lazy to go look it up) that have slogans like Allergic to Algebra on them. The story described how a mother was disturbed enough by the message on those shirts that she started a tweet campaign against them, and enough people joined in that the shirts were removed from the stores.

What really caught my attention was the sound clip from another woman, also a mother, who basically said she didn’t see what difference a shirt like that made, they’re just kids and it’s just words or something to that effect.

I couldn’t disagree with her more. Words do matter, they matter a lot. What we tell our children has a lot to do with how they see themselves including what they think they can and cannot do. We all have those childhood tapes in our heads—some are positive and sadly, many are not.

If we tell them they are clever and good at something, I think that can influence their behavior. I remember overhearing my mother and first grade teacher talking about me right before Christmas break that year. My mother asked how I was doing and my teacher, Miss Floyd, gave her an update on me. She said that I was in the second reading group but there was no reason I couldn’t be in the top reading group if I wanted to be. That idea was new to me, that I could be in the top reading group and it was almost like I was given permission to get there. So I did. I’m not sure that would have happened without her saying that and me overhearing it.

I wish I’d gotten that message about math too. I didn’t do well in math until I got to college. Partly that’s because I went to five different elementary schools so math was very disjointed for me. I didn’t get the continuity or practice that’s necessary to master basic math skills. I also wasn’t told I could be good at math. Based on how difficult math was for me, I decided I was awful at it and that I hated it.

Flash forward to college. That was the first time I had to do a lot of math, over and over until I mastered the concepts. I realized I was actually quite good at it once I’d had enough practice. I still didn’t particularly love it, well not all of it, although I absolutely adored statistics and computer science math.

My experience with math is why I tell every little girl I see that she will be really good at math and science. Sometimes I get puzzled looks from the adults nearby but I don’t care. I want that message to get out and I want girls to realize they can be cute and also kick ass at algebra.

Edited to add a link to the article Jeanne mentioned in the comments. Go read it!

The indignity of it all

Now that we have a decent HVAC system (one of the few positive things to come out of our flood), our apartment gets quite dry in the winter. I have to add water to the cat’s water fountain twice a day, my poor nose suffers and so do the cats. They all get a bit of dandruff on their backs near the bases of their tails. It’s especially bad for Eddie because he’s large enough that he can’t really groom there all that well.

I do my best to stay on top of the problem by grooming all three frequently but this year has been unusually dry quite early in the season. So last weekend, we bathed all three cats but only on their backs near their tails. I took this video after they were all done and as you can see, they don’t hate me.

Where did they go?

I have three sets of measuring cups in my kitchen. Two are cheap plastic sets by Kitchen Aid I think, plus I have a set of Foley metal measuring cups. We make the majority of our food from scratch and use all three sets at the same time pretty regularly. But the Foley set is my favorite set by far. Partly it's because they stack better, always a good thing in a home with not much storage. It's also because the metal cups have the amounts they measure stamped into the handle, while it's just painted on the plastic cups and the paint is wearing off. Plus the metal cups are a lot sturdier. The other day, when a handle from one of the plastic ¼ C measuring cup broke clean off, I decided to look around online for another set of the Foley ones and order them.

Only Foley is out of business.

I can find other metal measuring cups but they have very long handles which means the cups don’t fit well in our drawer. I also tracked down a set online, and learned to my surprise that Foley, whether metal or plastic, are now considered vintage. Who knew?

So now I need to decide if $14 plus shipping is just way too much to pay for a set of measuring cups.

No poo? Not for me, thanks

Have you heard about no poo? No, I’m not referring to toilet habits but to shampooing. Some folks are forgoing shampoo or switching to specialized hair cleaning products that aren't shampoo, either for the environment or to improve the condition of their hair.

I could never see myself embracing this idea entirely because I’ve got oily hair. As oily hair goes, mine’s not the worst case in the world—you wouldn’t look at my hair at the end of the day and think “gee, let’s harvest that to solve the world’s oil crisis.” But it’s meant I need to wash my hair every day. I have some friends, including my best friend Kerry, who have dry hair and can gleefully skip washing their hair for days on end. Or at least they can skip a day. I’ve always been a little wistful about that because washing and drying my hair takes more time than the rest of my morning routine put together. I have a lot of hair and even though each piece isn’t thick, there’s so much of it that drying it generally takes about 20 minutes.

Recently I’ve been on a big kick to get out of self-imposed ruts. These ruts include things like only wearing super bright pink polish on my toes, wearing my hair only parted on the right, or not trying on clothing I’ve decided will look horrible on me while it’s still on the hanger. So this fall I’ve bought and used a dark purple nail polish (still not entirely comfortable with that color yet), and I’ve tried on a cowl neck shirt even though I was positive it would look awful on me (I was wrong and I got the shirt). Yesterday I decided I would try not shampooing my hair.

I put my hair up in a clip, took an otherwise normal shower and followed the rest of my morning routine regarding clothes, make up and so on. I was tickled to gain the extra time normally devoted to fixing my hair.

And that’s the end of the positive report. Even though every other bit of me was entirely clean, I felt ultra greasy all day long. Plus my hair, which normally looks good when it’s put up, just looked nasty. Or maybe that's the greasy feeling affecting me. All I know is that this morning’s shampoo never felt so good.

Can you skip days for hair washing? If you can, then know I’m a tiny bit jealous. But I’m not jealous enough to try that again. At least not for another 10 years or so.

76 Trombones

Well no, actually it’s 76 sewing patterns. I took an inventory of my patterns so I could sort them out and know exactly what I had. I even created a spreadsheet that contains the pattern company name, pattern number, a brief description and whether or not I’d made it.

First, I don’t need any more skirt patterns in my life ever. Second, I have more than a few patterns I haven’t sewn yet. Shame on me. Third, I do not know what I was thinking when I bought the stuffed animal patterns. I hate making those.

Finally here’s the sorting/inventory mess in progress.

Christmas Past

This week I got out our Christmas decorations. As I told Kent in October, I missed having the house decorated last year. Of course last year we were both gone so much, plus we went to Oklahoma for Christmas itself that we really didn’t have an opportunity to decorate. But this year is different. We are staying home.

We need this time together. My previous job’s travel tended to cluster in the spring and summer, while Kent’s job gets crazy starting late summer and continuing through the end of the year. Between work and Thanksgiving, he’s been gone the last three weeks and was home a week before that but gone several weeks before that. So we are looking forward to some quiet together time.

As I unpacked the boxes, I realized we had not really decorated for Christmas since 2006. We had the best house for Christmas decorations in Kansas City but in 2007, the house was on the market so most Christmas decorations weren’t allowed, although I did put some artificial garlands on our mantel. We had Eddie and Wally by then and Wally promptly started eating the garlands so they got put away almost immediately. In 2008, we were here but still had far too many things in the house to put up decorations. The tree had been abandoned before our move as far too large for Boston living (plus Wally would eat it). Without a mantel, I had no place to put stockings. I did put up a wall hanging my mother made for me years ago but that was about it.

Eddie is our present?

2009 was a bust since we’d flooded and the surviving Christmas decorations were at the salvage company. That’s the year we bought our little ornament tree and I cried in Target when Kent said we should get it. And of course last year we were just not around.

Going through the boxes was almost like opening presents. I found a pet collar I really didn’t remember we had. It's the one in the video I posted earlier this week. I think we bought it for poor little Sammie cat. Since he was pure black and the servant stairs in our Kansas City house had no lighting, we had already put a belled collar on him so we’d know where he was. We figured he wouldn’t mind the collar but sadly I have no pictures of him in it.

I know we got this stocking for him, because I remember the conversation Kent and I had about how silly it was to spend $12 on a stocking for a cat. Now I wish I had two more, although I still don’t know where I will put any stockings, let alone stockings for cats.

Do you decorate? If so, how much? When do you take things down? I take our decorations down on New Year’s Day. I also stop listening to Christmas music the day after Christmas.

I'm a mean one

Just ask my cats.