I had a beautiful week in Buenos Aires, and still have to upload some of the pictures I took. We started out on Wednesday morning by going to the MALBA, (free on Wednesdays), but didn't stay there long. I'm not a huge fan of a lot of modern art, not so surprising since I'm not a particulary modern person in general. My favorite thing in there was this very cool bench in one of the rooms that was carved out of a huge piece of tree root (or carved to look like it). It was comfortable to sit on and looked so impossibly twirly that I fell in love with it.

From there, we walked past a bunch of embassies towards Recoleta to see the big metal flower in the park (where is my map of Buenos Aires? Argh.) I took some pictures of buildings, but none even came close to this amazingly grand palace that I saw later in the week. It took up a whole city block. When we went to see what it was, we discovered that it was the "Palacio de Agua Corriente" or "Palace of Running Water" or "Water District". :-)

Anyway, back to Recoleta. There's a huge metal flower that opens and closes with the sun. The sheer magnitude of it was amazing. From there, we ate lunch at the design center and then stopped by the cemetery. I could have spent hours in the cemetery. It's like a little city in there, with 15-foot high mausoleums for family after family. And cats everywhere. In fact, there were cats all over Buenos Aires, wandering around. But cats definitely ruled the cemetery. Some of the crypts were not in such great condition, and occasionally you would get a sweet whiff of decay, which made me wonder what those cats are eating...but then I saw a man feeding some of the cats so at least they're not only eating dead bodies. :-)

I don't know why I liked the cemetery so much. The hushed alleyways? The amazing tombs? The greenery taking hold and engulfing some of the buildings? I don't know, but I definitely want to go back there again.

Ack, I think it is Spring, because the crocuses are up and because I feel crappy. Something about the transition out of Winter always brings on muscular fatigue and mental fogginess, and added to the general exhaustion from school, it makes for one lethargic Val. It's such a beautiful day today and I vow that I will get out there again. This morning I spent an hour adjusting the derailleurs on my bike and still couldn't get the front one quite right. I've been riding my mom's Diamondback since last summer after she had one too many crashes on it and decided to take "a break" from cycling, and I wonder if something bent during one of her crashes and that's why the front derailleur is wonky. Oh well. After fiddling with it for a while, I decided that since the rear derailleur is now adjusted perfectly, I care less about shifting into the lowest gear on the front since I can happily shift into the lowest gear on the back without the chain jumping off the sprocket. To be continued.

I will now attempt to hoist myself out of this malaise by practicing the violin. And maybe an apple cider vinegar tonic...

Because of Passover Seder, two of my violin students didn't have their usual Monday night lessons. This meant that I could meet P. over at C. and L.'s house to do a bunch of dancing in preparation for some Tango demonstrations we'll be doing in May for a Leukemia/Lymphoma benefit. I arrived home to Lori's message on my answering machine: did I know what had happened to Foghorn, the Dreamweaver team's checkin chicken? Wow, that takes me back.

When I interviewed with the Dreamweaver team, one thing I liked was the wackiness. Foghorn is one example. Foghorn was a rubber chicken dressed in a blue shirt who lived in an inverted traffic cone that hung on the wall near my cube. When someone was ready to check some code into the master, s/he would check out a certain "token" file from the source control system so that anyone using the system could see that a checkin was in process. That person would then remove Foghorn from the cone and take him back to the cube. If you wanted to know whether the master was locked, you could (back in the day when the team was pretty small) just look up to the wall and see whether Foghorn was in the cone or not.

Foghorn is in at least one Easter egg in Dreamweaver (maybe in the quick tag editor? I can't remember...). One particular Easter egg would bring up the browser with an info window that told all about Foghorn. Funnily enough, that HTML file was actually translated into all of the languages by localization, and I remember H. getting an e-mail from some guy in France who had found the Easter egg, in French, and sent e-mail saying how super-cool the DW team was.

Wacky, wacky, wacky. That was part of the crazy silliness of being on the Dreamweaver team, which almost made up for the part where you were at work a lot. (Actually, my problem was that when I interviewed, my manager had made a point of telling me how reasonable the working hours were, how they didn't want to burn programmers out, etc., which caused me to be completely confused for the first year I was there. If he'd said nothing of the sort, I would have just absorbed the culture, but I spent a long time trying to reconcile his description of the team with what I actually experienced). That wackiness could almost make up for missed dates, crappy diet, not enough exercise, tendonitis...and plus, after working like crazy for a bunch of months to ship the next release, you got almost a month off. When the team switched to a longer dev cycle, everyone started getting really tired.

Thinking back to that schedule and thinking of my schedule now, I'd say I'm far more tired than I was back then, but in a more well-rounded way. Coding for long hours exercised one side of my brain. Teaching exercises all of me, so that I feel exhausted, but also like I've really lived at the end of a day. And thank god I have 2 months in the summer to sleep.

I'm pretty sure Foghorn is dead--when I switched to the Odyssey team his rubber was getting kind of sticky and crunchy, and his feet were going to fall off. But thinking about him reminds me why I stayed at Macromedia for so long when the work was killing my personality: the people there are/were so freakin' cool.

I don't know why I bothered to wait until Portland was listed under the school closings this morning; it was pretty obvious that I wouldn't be at school today. I always think "maybe we'll have a snow day, and then I can sleep in!" but the reality is that once I'm up to see if it is a snow day, I'm totally awake, Bonita is tearing around the house, and at that point I might as well eat breakfast and then go start up the snowblower.

My snowblower is a "perfectly good" snowblower that appeared in my dad's yard "needing a little work." It actually runs pretty well, for a while, and it has an electric start. When I first moved back to Maine, trying to pull-start my original snowblower would kick in major MS fatigue, and always messed my shoulder up. With this snowblower, I plug it in, press the starter, get it going, unplug it, and then drive it out of the garage. Fantastic.

Howevah. When there is quite a bit of snow, or sometimes for no good reason at all, the snowblower gets tired and overheats and dies, and then I leave it where it is to cool off and go shovel the back porch or something. But today after I finished my shoveling and went to drag the snowblower back in the garage to start it again, I noticed that the light in the garage had gone off. No power. Ugh.

Fortunately, at that moment I was distracted by my neighbor getting stuck in the street after pulling out of her driveway. Our street is one of the last to be plowed and it's not driveable right now unless you have an SUV with a lot of clearance. With the help of another neighbor, we pushed her car off the road and back up the driveway. Go girl power! And then I went to see if the power was back on. Nope. But what do you know? I can now pull-start my snowblower. A new skill. :-) I used both hands and did a lot of pulling with my legs. Good balance and leverage makes up for lack of muscle sometimes.

Still snowing. I bet my flight to New York this evening will not be going. Feh.

Except for one night when we had to take a cab, D. and I rode the bus or walked everywhere. In Buenos Aires, the bus is the "Colectivo", and riding it was...wow. Stressful. It would have been confusing enough in English, but I was already in culture shock, and thank goodness D. told me to stop worrying about things and just let him do all the worrying. :-)

How to Ride the Colectivo

Step 1 (not pictured): look up the street you're on and the street you're going to in the back of the booklet to see where they are on the main map. If you already know where you are and where you're going on the main map, find which page you need. In this case we will be taking a short trip inside Palermo from Page 9 to Page 8.

Step 2: Once you've found your departure page, go there and find out exactly where you are.

Step 3: Now go to the opposite page. In the matching square, you will find the bus numbers that go by your location. Keep your finger in this page! You will need it in a moment.

Step 4. Go to the page with your destination. Locate the square where you wish to arrive.

Step 5. Look on the opposite page to find the bus numbers that go by this location.

Step 6. Now flip back and forth between the two pages to see whether there are any buses that serve both locations. If there aren't, look around the squares near your destination square to see whether there's a bus that goes sort of close to where you want to go. Or check in the route descriptions in the back to see where the bus goes.

I'm not sure what you do if you need to make a transfer. Somehow there was always a bus that went between the 2 places we were going, though sometimes via a circuitous route. And sometimes we did a bunch of walking to get to a bus we could take.

Oh right, now, once you know the number of the bus (and the color, if you looked the bus up in the back of the book), you are ready to look for the stop.

Step 7: Walk to the street where the bus goes. Now walk down the street until you find your bus stop. After you pass several hundred bus stops that are not for your bus, you will finally find your stop, cleverly disguised as a street lamp with a small route number taped or zip-tied to it (not always the case, but I am not kidding).

Step 8: Watch closely for your bus. Fortunately, the numbers on the buses are pretty big, which is great, because those buses are cruising down the street and you better wave your hands or jump into the street to get that driver to stop. Ahoy, there!

Step 9: When getting on the bus, take a firm hold with both hands in case the driver starts to depart while you are halfway on the bus. Tell the driver how much your fare is (either 75 or 80 centavos, though D. said he didn't understand the zones). The driver will punch it into the ticket machine and once you have inserted your coins you will get your receipt.

Step 10: Figure out when you need to get off: good luck! When you've just missed your stop, pull the cord. Get ready, because those bus doors open when the bus is going "no more than 5 km/h" supposedly, but I think most drivers were pushing it. When it seems like you're going slowly enough to get off without killing yourself, leap out of the bus to the curb. Yeehaw!

Congratulations! You've just arrived pretty close to your destination! Now, to get back...

You can do a lot in seven minutes. For example, you can make Seven-Minute Frosting. You can also develop consistent beginning violin technique.

I have quite a few students who don't practice, or don't practice nearly enough. It's quite amazing how much they improve with little or no practice, actually. What they lack is consistency. The older students can kind of get away with it, because they sometimes play fairly well, but I had one younger student who wasn't practicing and ata that stage, I can't go on and teach technique if the basics aren't there. Finally I got frustrated enough at repeating lessons that we figured out a plan: he would set a timer and start practicing. When his mind wandered, he would look at the timer. His practice time would be one minute less than what was on the timer.

His threshold was 8 minutes, so he had a 7-minute practice time. He was allowed to practice for as many different 7-minute chunks as he wanted, but he was not allowed to practice for more than 7 minutes at once. He improved a little bit, but he was still playing at far below the level he should have been, and I couldn't figure out why. I asked him how much he was practicing. "7 minutes." Oh. I told him to practice for at least 2 7-minute segments, and to do something else in between. His first 7 minutes would be on warmup pieces, and his second 7 minutes would be on his working piece.

Yesterday he came in for his lesson and we started warming up. As we played and I watched him, I could see him adjusting: loosening a shoulder, popping his left hand open, letting his elbow relax. Suddenly he looked like he'd been playing the violin forever. It was striking. I knew right then that he had added the second 7-minute chunk, and sure enough, he had.

The best thing was that he could see how much more he had improved with just an extra 7 minutes. At the end of the lesson he said, "should I do 21 minutes this week?" I told him no, not yet. Let him get used to 14 first. 14 very focused minutes. Yay.

Blech. I'm lonely after a long crazy weekend in NYC with E., coming off a weekend of sugar and wheat and dairy and not enough sleep and socializing with tons of famous musicians and actors and writers and...feeling a little like "why the heck am I doing what I'm doing? I'm never going to be great." Then I remember why: because there are artists who will meet you and judge you based on how good an artist they think you are, and then there are artists who understand that the reason all of us are artists is because there's something inside of us that has to be satisfied by making art, by experiencing the world in a different way, to the extent that each of us is able. It was lovely to see a certain iconic singer again and to be reminded that some super-duper famous people are just lovely people in general. Many great artists are not like that. So that was uplifting.

But I'm still coming down. I did start exercising again and am eating good food (E. and I are both detoxing this week after far too much Easter candy), and teaching violin students this week has reminded me why I'm doing what I'm doing: because now I look at my violin students after 2 years and see that most of them look like they've been playing the violin forever, and are happy and comfortable and starting to really be able to play. If I can help them express themselves through music, I'm doing something good for the world.

There's a house near me that's been for sale since I moved back to Portland. It's a small, dilapidated Cape sitting on an acre of tangled swampy brush. It's old...has curving steps made of large chunks of rock, stacked on each other. I think it's just two rooms downstairs, on either side of the entrance, with a tiny upstairs. I would never buy it; it's right on the road with a shady backyard, doesn't get enough sun, needs too much work for the price they're asking. But when I look at it, I see what it was in its prime.

A few weeks ago I walked to school early in the morning and noticed that the front door of the house was hanging open. As I passed by, I looked inside at a beautiful curving staircase going right up the middle of the house. Shipbuilders in San Francisco built glorious staircases like this on a grander scale. The front door hasn't been open since, but the image of that staircase sits in my mind whenever I pass the house now. That house will continue to rot away with that beautiful staircase in it, and then one day someone will buy that property, raze the house, and build condos, or a parking lot, or something. I hope I get another glimpse of the staircase before then. Or I hope I don't, because maybe it was something about the light on the staircase that morning that made me look again. Maybe the next time it wouldn't be as beautiful to me. Maybe I just want to remember my awe at that moment. But I'll probably continue to slow down as I pass it most mornings.

I gave a bunch of money to the National MS Society last year, and now I'm on their mailing list. Today I received "Inside MS", the magazine for members of the National MS Society. Now I don't know what to do with it.

I'm not sure how I feel about the NMSS. On the one hand, I support them because they do offer services to MS sufferers and their families, and because they raise awareness of MS. On the other hand, they're heavily funded by drug companies, so any "therapies" they push are skewed towards the pharmaceutical industry. But I still give them money.

I don't want to read this magazine, because I don't want to dwell on my MS. But I do want to read this magazine, because maybe there will be an interesting article that will help me draw a connection to something I've been doing for my health. But I don't want to read too much of the magazine at a time, because too much dwelling on MS makes me depressed. But I'd rather just sit and read the whole thing so I can get it over with.

OK, I just read the Table of Contents, and I skimmed a couple of the interesting-sounding articles (one on dealing with cognitive problems on the job, and one on B cells), and determined that this magazine will go in the "MS and Related Info" file in my file cabinet, to be used when I get worse to the point of serious cognitive or motor function problems. If I get worse. I think the "when" is my newly sugar-free body talking.

It occurs to me that the best medicine for cognitive function might be teaching and playing the violin, which together definitely exercise all parts of my brain every day. Now, if I could just get a little more sleep...

I've just sat down at my computer for some Web design work. Not exactly what I want to be doing during my vacation, but a nice break from pulling down tons of plaster on my head, which is what I was doing this morning and on Sunday morning. Now I am really done with the demolition part. I was worrying so much about the bed pulling the wall down that I decided to anchor the new closet walls to the floor joists of the third floor, requiring me to tear out more of the closet ceiling. But now I'm sure the bed will be secure. I figure if overbuilding was good enough for the ancient Greeks, it's good enough for me.

It's kind of a relief to be doing something again, after an enforced vacation yesterday due to torrential downpour, high winds and a 24-hour power outage. I'm lucky--there are a hundred thousand Mainahs out theyah right now who still don't have powah. Bonita's quite perky today, too, after spending yesterday curled into a tight ball of fur, shooting me baleful looks that meant "why is it 45 degrees in here?" Back to work for me and back to lap-sitting, pouncing on nothing, and tail-chasing for her.

I know where the cute boyz hang out!

Riverside Drive Home Depot, weekdays 1-2pm. And probably other times. :-)

"Wall bed? You mean like in the Pink Panther?" Yessah.

Last Saturday I took the bus to Boston to spend a day with N. before he returned to India. That night I returned to Portland with a borrowed copy of Jared Diamond's Collapse. This will go in my summer book pile, along with another of Diamond's books, (on loan from B.), Guns, Germs and Steel, but I browsed a bit of the beginning of Collapse as I waited for my bus back to Portland.

The book begins by quoting Ozymandias, which I hadn't read since I was forced (er, "required") to read it in high school. The power of the imagery and the motion of the words just blew me away, and I realized that during high school I was in no way prepared to experience that poem. I know I didn't have the capacity to understand the vastness I now feel when I read that poem, nor the wrenching feeling of time sweeping by, erasing evil and good, no matter the intentions of a person at any given time.

Not so in high school. I just count my blessings that I loved to read before I had to take high school English, because if I'd been on the fence at all, 4 years of English would have totally killed my love of reading. Fortunately, I quickly saw what was happening and made up a rule that got me through it all: whenever I received the next book, I would go home and read it, start to finish, so I could enjoy it once before having to go through every sentence dragging symbolism out of the damned thing. The Scarlet Letter? Great book, the first time. I'm actually getting a feeling of revulsion right now thinking about it and remembering having to write essays on it. Ack. I played the game, I aced the AP English test, I learned to find sexual symbolism in absolutely anything. Good grief. But the real joy was getting a new book and staying up all night to finish it. I still do this--it gets me into trouble every so often when I start something like Atlas Shrugged or The Diamond Age. Although actually, I read Atlas Shrugged when I was 3 weeks out of the hospital, and I stayed up all night reading, kind of using my left hand to prop up the book when I could, and finally at 5 a.m. I fell asleep and when I woke up I could move my hand a little, so maybe marathon reading is good brain-building exercise. :-)

This week, N. e-mailed and asked whether I'd read Walden, and I said I had in high school but not recently. I remember liking Walden and transcendentalism in general, and I even got into some of the symbolism until I wrote an essay and my teacher gushed about the symbolism I had used. Um, what symbolism? At that moment I sort of stopped caring about comp lit.

Of course my writing had symbolism--the very act of writing down thoughts involves symbolism. But it's easy for me to get disgusted with analysis when I'm being told whether my idea of the symbolism is "correct". I will never understand exactly what some of my English teachers experienced when they read a certain work, because their life experiences were not my own. High school English was all about trying to figure out what my teacher would think the symbolism was and then write about that, and I was good at it, but it was a loveless act of survival. Reading something like Ozymandias again, I cringe at the thought of taking something so immense and powerful and simple and vast and trying to analyze it and break it down and explain why it "works". It seems sacrilegious and pedantic. Now I'm thinking I should go back and reread some of the things I grew to hate in high school. I'd like to let the words flow into me now, at 32, and see how they change me.

Yesterday I awoke with sun in my face and noticed that it was 40 degrees! At 6 a.m.! After breakfast I got on the bike to do some errands and then headed over the bridge. The sun! The breeze! The adjusted derailleurs! The ferry terminal was uninspiring as a hangout spot, but lying in the sun on the gazebo was just the thing.

I returned home to eat lunch on the deck. Indoors, Bonita was busy getting ready for summer by practicing falling off the third floor stair railing. Spring is here!

From an article in the Patriot News:

According to the Environmental Protection Agency, pig, chicken and cattle wastes have polluted 35,000 miles of rivers and contaminated groundwater in 17 states. Cesspool lagoons leak and emit dangerous and toxic bacteria and gases such as ammonia, methane and hydrogen sulfide.

From Collapse:

Another form [of soil salinization] arises from an industrial method to extract methane for natural gas from coal beds by drilling into the coal and pumping out water to let methan escape to the surface. Unfortunately, the water contains dissolved salt.

So let me get this straight: in America we are letting vast cesspools on huge factory farms pollute the air with methane (which, though a greenhouse gas, is a useful form of energy) and then we're instead letting companies go drill for methane, causing more pollution? Hello?

It's really enough to drive a person crazy. I am so not allowed to think about this until school's out.

Today I was in the conference room with a student, saying that I was frustrated because I can't read his mind and feel like he's not giving me anything to work with, and something he said (unusual, since he rarely talks) gave me a glimpse of what his mental life is like, and as I told him that I wanted more for him, I just started crying. I felt so overwhelmingly depressingly powerless.

After school in one of our many teacher meetings, other teachers told me that I'm really a teacher now that I've cried in front of a student. D. says it sounds like that student needs a psychologist. I think he's unlikely to get one. It's at times like this that I feel like I'd do more good teaching elementary school, because by the time I get these kids, they're so old and have built such tough shells around themselves. I think I'll be ready for summer break.

Maine has a teacher retention problem, as do many other states. Apparently Maine has decided that more teachers will stay if it's harder to become a teacher, though I don't quite understand the logic there. Yesterday I got up at 4:00 a.m., drove to Farmington, and spent the whole day taking tests that will (I hope) convince the State of Maine that I am a competent person who should be allowed to teach the class that I've been teaching for almost 2 years now. <sarcasm>Yay</sarcasm>.

The highlight of yesterday came at 2:15 p.m., when a bunch of us took the PLT ("Principles of Learning and Teaching"), a test that Maine decided to add last year. Maine is still trying to figure out what the minimum score requirement should be, so what they're doing is requiring new teachers to take it (at our expense) and using our scores to form the basis for deciding what the minimum requirement should be. Um, huh? Tell a bunch of people that they have to take this test but that it won't count, thereby essentially telling them that they shouldn't bother to study for it, and then use those scores as the basis for a minimum score requirement? The logic escapes me.

I'd heard that the PLT was both impossible to study for and an impossible test to take. It was grueling, 2 hours with about 1.5 of those spent writing essays. I thought the multiple choice was pretty easy, if I put a halo on and answered as if I were a perfectly angelic theoretical teacher who had had no real-world experience. The essays weren't bad, but I didn't relate my essay answers to any of the various theories on teaching that they mentioned, since I had no idea what they were. Ah well, at least I can rest easy knowing that my score will be used to help determine minimum score requirements.

That morning I had taken the Praxis II ("General Vocational Knowledge"). It was harder than I expected, given the number of people at my school who said it was a piece of cake. I'm sure I did abysmally in the Social Studies section, but I should have gotten a near-perfect score on the Math, so with luck I'll come out OK. I'd just like to mention how much I hate ambiguous math questions. Does a question that says "which of the following are strategies for solving this problem..." mean "which would work in this case" or "which would work in all cases involving problems of this sort"? The problem would have been solved by finding the first number, and then giving its factorial. One of the answers said* to find the first number and then multiply it by another number. That would work in this case, but not in any other case. Then I tried to guess at what level of math knowledge they would think I had, and how would I answer it in that case, and then finally I decided I just didn't care and just picked something. Feh.

After driving the 2 hours back home, I ate dinner, crashed on my bed and slept for a full 12 hours. Brain fatigue. Just now I calculated that in order to get my teaching certificate I will have spent $675 in tests and fees. Good grief.

*note that I am disguising the question a bit, so ETS doesn't come after me for discussing the PRAXIS where another test-taker might remember it and thus have the advantage of being just as confused as I was! Horrors!