I Want to Write a Book

Most of the time Kevin's autism doesn't get in the way of life. That's just the way life is. On the other hand, if he were "normal," he'd be a loud teenage boy, driving, with a girlfriend and I don't know how I'd cope. You moms with teenage boys do great with your kids, and I'm sure if I had that kid all along, I'd be right there with you. But, I have this life with this Kevin, and it's just different. I'm doing a terrible job in explaining what I mean. It's kinda like two families living in identical houses, but one has the mirror-image floor plan. You adapt to your floor plan, and are thrown for a loop when you suddenly have to navigate the other house with your eyes closed.

Anyway, Kevin's been doing great lately. His spontaneous speech is fuller with more descriptions. He's even starting to get the idea of "why & because." The area of speech he still has trouble with is personal and possessive pronouns.

Kevin has problems with the concepts of me, my, mine, I, you, your, and yours. He understands these as concrete adjectives, just like "blue car" means the car is always blue. He doesn't get they change meaning based on who is speaking so "my room" means the master bedroom is mine when I'm speaking and his room is "my room" when he is speaking. In his mind, "my room" is always the master bedroom.

I end up talking in third person a lot: "This is Mommy's, that is Kevin's." It gets the point across, sometimes, but it's still frustrating, because once something has been dubbed with the "my" or "your" adjective, that's the way it will always be.

So, I have this idea for a picture book that would help autistics with these concepts. It'll have lots of pictures of people with thought bubbles identifying things. For example, a kid would be holding a toy and the bubble will have "This is my toy." The next picture would have the same kid with the same toy and another kid would have a bubble that said, "That is your toy." And so forth and so on, very repetitive, me, my, you, your, our, their, etc.

It might be too late to change his understanding of possession, it might already be ingrained, but I still think a picture book might help.


 

A note about the picture below.

Many years ago, maybe ten, I bought an applique pattern for an amaryllis. After I opened it I quickly realized it was going to be a bit harder than I thought for a beginner appliquer. At that point in my quilting career I should have stuck with patterns with five or fewer pieces.

I chose the pattern in the first place because the amaryllis flower is so regal and beautiful. They are quite easy to grow, but tricky to get to bloom again after the first year. My mom grows a lot of them, so the quilt was to be for her. The quilt pattern is regal, too. It is large, finishing at about 30" tall. But, over the years I pretty much resigned to the fact I wasn't really going to do this pattern. I really prefer straight lines of pieced patterns instead.

Then, sometime in the past year we had a speaker at our quilt guild who designs applique patterns. I thought applique is not for me, I should just go home. She talked about her design process and how she uses fusible web and sewing machine in her pieces instead of turning under the raw edge of fabric by hand for each piece of the pattern to sew it down.

I was sold. Debra Gable's method saved me, I didn't need to feel guilty about the amaryllis anymore, because I knew I could finish it. Debra has a whole line of patterns depicting cities in the form of postage stamps. Very cool. I bought the one of Baltimore. Maybe I'll finish that one, too. But in the mean time, I'm about more than halfway done with the flower, and am very excited with my progress.




 

In the long run, folks are gonna suffer

I am sad for my daughter and her friends.
I'm sad for all the kids going to schools in districts where they've eliminated Home Economics because of budget constraints.

Getting back to natural is a big new craze in the food industry. A lot of people have books out now about how bad things are, how the hormones injected into cattle are making kids hit puberty at younger ages, how folks are consuming 300 to 500 more calories per day than they were in the 1950's because of the way foods are processed, how convenience foods are the death of us all.

I'm not disputing any of these things. I haven't read the books, I don't have the facts. I just hear things.

What troubles me is there seems to be no education for today's youth in the home sciences. I've complained before that at my daughter's school, she got one quarter, every-other day of health education. She received no real substantial nutritional information, nothing that'll stick with her. The nutrition lesson may have been: here's a food pyramid. I am constantly reminding her she needs protein and vegetables to go with those [fill in a starchy food/snacks here].

I don't know how long it's been since they've quit teaching home-ec in school, but I suspect those girls are now raising kids of their own. Or trying to. Do they know how to cook? Did their moms teach them? Are their kids overweight because they eat a lot of fast food? Would the obesity rates in kids coincide with the removal of home-ec in our schools? I'm sure there is going to be a long-term connection.

What's going to happen when there are several generations of people who grow up without a home-ec education? Will they even put kitchens in houses in the future? OK, that's a bit of an exaggeration, but you get the point. I'm giving the school systems some of the blame for not providing the basic knowledge of good nutrition, cooking and self-sufficient survival to our youth.

Even if the food industry is revitalized, I still fear for the future, fresh, hormone-free food will be abundant, but no one will be able to prepare it.

 

The incident that spurred this rant was an attempted pineapple upside-down cake. Fern and her friend wanted to make a cake over the weekend. They found a recipe in one of those church collection cookbooks, recipes from little old church ladies who assume you know what they mean so the directions are a bit abbreviated.

They went something like this:
Melt the butter and the brown sugar in the skillet. Arrange the pineapple rings in the skillet. Sift the flour and baking powder together. Separate the eggs and beat the yolks and slowly add the sugar, then the pineapple juice. Add the flour mixture. Beat the egg whites until stiff and fold into the batter. Pour batter over pineapple slices and bake.... It made sense to me. However,

I got called into the kitchen when the girls were complaining the batter was too runny and they didn't know what to do. They also thought they had to transfer it all to a cake pan. It was a mess.

I got the sugar/butter stuff back in the skillet and remelted it and added the pineapple slices back in. I remade the batter from scratch since I couldn't use what the girls had done. I called them back when I got to the part about folding the beaten whites into the batter. Fern's friend was amazed at the sight, she'd never seen, or heard of beaten egg whites. How long did that take? Only about a minute. Wow

I demonstrated the art of "folding" and had her try too. I reviewed the recipe and explained the steps. The cake turned out well despite its shaky start. I think the girls just read the ingredient list and dumped them in a bowl. I learned to cook basic family meals from my mother, but I learned skills at school. Does anyone else notice this gaping whole? I'll teach what I can to my own children, if they are willing to learn. (Learning from one's parent versus an outside teacher is a whole other blog topic...)



Here is a similar recipe I found on the web with better instructions.

• 1/4 cup butter
• 1 cup firmly packed brown sugar
• 3/4 cup chopped pecans
• 20-ounce can of pineapple slices, drained, reserving 5 tablespoons juice
• 3 eggs, separated
• 1 cup sugar
• 1 cup all-purpose flour
• 1 teaspoon baking powder
• 1/2 teaspoon salt
• maraschino cherries

Preheat oven to 350°F.

Melt the butter in a 9-inch cast iron skillet. Add the brown sugar and pecans; stir well to thoroughly combine, then turn off the heat -- don't cook it. Arrange 8 pineapple slices in a single layer over the brown sugar mixture (your 9-inch skillet should accommodate 8 slices without overlapping). Set the skillet aside.

Combine the flour, baking powder and salt in a bowl; set aside.

Beat the egg yolks at medium speed until they are thick and lemon colored. Gradually add the sugar, continuing to beat. Add the flour mixture to the yolk mixture, and stir in the reserved pineapple juice.

Beat the egg whites until stiff peaks form. Fold the whites into the cake batter. Pour or spoon the batter evenly over the pineapple slices.

Bake at 350°F for 40 to 45 minutes. Cool the cake in the skillet for 30 minutes; then invert it onto a serving plate. Place a maraschino cherry in the center of each pineapple ring.


Enjoy!

Almost Done

Quilters [generally] love tote bags. Our quilt guild is doing a tote bag exchange at our next meeting. Several months ago everyone who wanted to participate filled out a slip identifying preferences. The slips were put into cheap plain canvas tote bags and we each got one. Our goal was to create a bag for that person.

The person's bag I drew likes blues, purples, the beach and quilting (of course). I was stumped with what to do for a long time. I even sat near my recipient at guild meetings trying to glean helpful information and got nothing.

Then, a couple weeks ago during my morning walk, L and I were talking about our bags and that I had had no inspiration yet and it hit me. I'd hand-dye my bag blue and decorate it with a beach theme. Then I remembered the famous 1820's woodblock print by Hokusai Katsushika, The Great Wave. I used that for inspiration to hand bead the bag.



I have a few more sprays of water to add, but this is the current state of the bag. I'm rather pleased with the way it's turning out.

Here's the inspiration:



I had printed out the picture in the beginning for guidance but lost misplaced it after the first week and beaded the rest, making it up as I went along. The exchange takes place at the guild's anniversary dinner next Wednesday. I hope my recipient likes it!

---

I've been taking a ceramics class on Tuesday nights. After I took that parent-child class with Fern in February I decided I wanted to do more ceramics work. The class is eight weeks long and we are half-way through now. I love to work on the wheel but since my skills have not been used on a regular basis for a long time I'm having a hard time creating pieces my mind thinks I should be able to do.

I took ceramics classes when I was a kid, like 5th and 6th grades. My instructor was Bill Meadows. He taught at the art gallery in town, He also taught the ceramics part of shop to the boys in junior high. This was before girls were allowed to take shop. I'm still bitter about that. Anyway, Mr. Meadows taught us to center the clay his way. There are lots of ways to do it, but even all these years later, my inclination is to start centering clay the way I first learned.

Now it's not working for me and I have to try different methods, different hand positions to get the clay centered. We used kick wheels when I was a kid and I'm thinking I had the wheel spinning clock-wise back then. The electric wheels I use now spin counter-clock-wise so maybe that's why I'm having trouble, the force is going the other way, that whole physics thing.

OK, enough of that. If you've stuck with me this far, here is one of the bowls I managed not to ruin. I love this glaze. I love how it's a forest green where it's thin and Caribbean blue where it's thick.





There was very little glaze in the bucket the night I glazed this so I didn't get it glazed evenly. I'm happy with it anyway. Click the photo to enlarge so you can see the detail. Maybe I'll ask my instructor to teach me how to mix up a batch of this glaze on Tuesday.

This will make a good cereal bowl and cereal doesn't complain about uneven glaze.


 

I'm sitting in a classroom in Rockville, MD class now waiting for the lecture to start. The rest of the class is finishing up an exercise my class partner and I finished yesterday. I brought my laptop in because they have wireless here and I haven't checked my work email in a couple days.

The class is good, it's CSS, and I'm learning a lot which I'll be able to apply right away when I get back to work next week. If I don't forget it all over the weekend.

My class/lab partner is a hoot. We're getting along swimmingly, we get each other's humor and she and I are equally matched in programming skills so we fly though the exercises.

I'd hate to have to work in this neighborhood. The commute is so variable. Wednesday it took me an hour and 20 minutes to get here, yesterday it took an hour and today there were two accidents on the top-side of the beltway so I took a back way with lots of traffic lights and still got here in about an hour.

Anyway, back to class.


 

A Night for Day

The League for People with Disabilities celebrated their new Day Habilitation Program for Adults with Autism and other Developmental Disabilities last night. They're the folks who run Greentop, the special needs summer camp Kevin goes to. They do tremendous things for folks of all ages with disabilities. Dan and I support the League so we're on their mailing list. That's how I got the invite to the celebration.

The invitation was for me and a guest, but I ended up going alone. The League's offices are in north Baltimore, which turned out to be a longer drive from my office than expected, about 95 minutes. In the rain. And tolls on the Harbor Tunnel. Both ways. Thank-you EZpass.

Anyway, the event was for women to "refresh, re-energize, and renew" and featured vendors to do just that. When I arrived, I made my way around the room counter-clockwise. The woman at the first table displayed facial care products. I can't remember the name of the company, I didn't recognize the brand, but I put my name in the hat for a door prize drawing. A woman from Merrill Lynch was next. She gave out packets of information. It wasn't the typical financial planning stuff, but more a planning sheet where you could record pertinent information about you, like bank accounts, credit cards, and accounts you might not even think of like EZpass, so it's all in one place.

Smashbox had a large set-up along the back wall with three make-up artists working. They looked busy and crowded so I kept going. The lady at the next table had a pile of pens and desk paraphernalia spread out. She said she wasn't selling the mess, she is Ann from SOS and helps you get organized. I told her she had my attention and she got me a chair. I spent a long time chatting with her.

My whole life needs reorganizing but we talked mostly about my sewing room. I got some superfantastic help I hope to put into action soon. The coolest tip is for decluttering and purging. Say I'm going through a bin of sewing supplies. First I'll sort by functionality and put like things together. Then I'll "shop" in one pile. If I have a pretend limited amount of money, what would I buy right now. I would not buy the 30 yards of laces and trims now, I don't sew with that stuff. Then, she says to put away what you didn't buy, either get rid of it now or store it out of sight for a year. If you don't miss it, get rid of it. I know the 30 yards of trims will be out the door soon.

Her "shopping" technique works for everything, especially clothes. She says it's also good to have a impartial friend hang with you while you sort, to keep you anchored and focused.

After I took up enough of Ann's time, I toured the rest of the room where nothing really grabbed my attention and got a snack at the wine and cheese table. I ate and listened to the welcoming speeches and missed having one of the winning the door-prize ticket numbers by one digit. I didn't need a $200 gift certificate to Neiman's anyway. Pout.

Then there was an empty seat at Smashbox. I don't normally wear make-up much but it's always fun to be pampered. I ended up staying there the rest of the evening. The make-up artist, Timber (interesting name, huh?), spent a lot of time asking what I like and what I'm comfortable with. So many make-up folks doing demos in department stores do way too much and I always feel I need a mini skirt and stilettos when I see the results. Not Timber. He was great. He talked about each product, the ones he used and the ones he didn't, and why they were right or wrong for my skin or style.

I looked really good and was so pleased with the result I ended up ordering several items in the Smashbox line. I love getting goodies in the mail and I'll have them tomorrow if I'm lucky. Most of the vendors were packing up with I was finished with Timber. I told you I was there for a long time. I stopped back by the first table. I won the door prize: $100 of products. She was out of catalogs so I'll have wait until she sends me a catalog in the mail to choose my booty. I love winning things.

I got home a bit after 9:00 feeling pretty good, it was a fun night.

ABL

In the academic world ABD is All But Dissertation, referring to having done all the work required for a PhD but not finishing the the written work.

ABL in the quilting world is All But Label. I've finished my quilts for the show this weekend, quilting, binding, hanging sleeve, ABL. I just have to get them sewn on before I turn them in so they know the quilts are mine. I'm pretty sure I can sneak in a stitch here and there during the day here at work.


I'm particularly proud of this one, I've never quilted like this before. The background pattern and the feathers are both new for me. If you look very closely you'll see lots of mistakes but if you stand back a couple feet it looks great. I'm pleased, also, because I know now what I can do and with a bit of practice, I can do it well.



This is the wedding quilt for my cousin. I'll be sending it down after the show. It's a bit rippley because of the amount of dense quilting. I'll have to block it well and try to get it more flat. I'll have to add that to my goals, practice more even quilting density.
 

The thing I learned today

Whenever my grandfather saw me he'd ask, "What did you learn today?" And I had to tell him. It was a good exercise. He died 17 years ago this month. My nickname for him was Doc-doc Buddy, or just Doc-Doc. (He was a doctor, did you guess that?) I still miss him. But I digress.

Fern is not being the model student these days. She has taken "missing assignments" to new lows, dropping a 95 average on tests to something a lot lower when you factor in zeros for homework grades. Her teachers are more than happy to email progress notes to me, but usually they only remember when I email them first, easier for them to reply that way. They are busy and I understand that. That means I'm the one who needs to remember to write them first.

So, being a programmer, I learned how to program a cron job to email them once each week so I don't have to remember myself. This is the code:

00 12 * * 5 (echo "This is an automated weekly email to check how Fern is doing in your class this week.";echo;echo "Thanks,"; echo "Anne";)|/bin/mail -s "Fern" teachers@middleschool.org

So, what this does is send an email every Thursday at noon to her teachers that says:

This is an automated weekly email to check how Fern is doing in your class this week.

Thanks,
Anne

Pretty cool, huh?

What did you learn today?