Wow, interesting how much spam the title “Homeschooling Myself” attracted.  That may have been a record.

This weekend, I went over to a friend’s house and four of us did a lot of canning.  We made pickles, pickled eggs, and pickled beets.  I haven’t tried the last two, but I’m trying to keep an open mind.  In theory, I should love pickled eggs, at least.  I love eggs and everything that went into them.  I’m still scared, though!  We also made some jam.  We had to improvise, because we didn’t quite have enough berries.  We rounded the fruit table out with some grapes.  The jam appears to be a loose set, but that only makes it more versatile, right?  It can be either jam or syrup this way.

Aren't they pretty?

I’m very glad I went.  When I originally got the email, I almost declined, simply because I’m tending to be reclusive right now.  Prying myself out of the house generally ends up to be a good idea, but when social settings are involved,  I worry that I’ll make people uncomfortable if the subject gets too personal.  But these friends have been very understanding and treating me like I’m still a normal person, not a contagious leper.  They talk to me, and ask how I’m doing in a way that tells me I can talk if I need to, or not.  Also, this type of adventure in kitchen science are my type of domesticity.

Trying new foods is always fun.  I told the girls that I drew the line at pickled pigs’ feet, though.  Those things smell rank.  I am really a very finicky eater, so it took a long time for me to become adventurous.  I used to be the kid who took Burger King into the Chinese restaurant because even the compromise food – tempura chicken – yicked me.  Now in my wise old age, I’ve learned that the more new things I try, the more I discover I like.  It’s easier to avoid the common food that disgusts me if there’s some alternative I can find.

Learning how to do something from scratch is something I put a high value on, too.  Soap is next on my list of things to learn.  Yes, often I’ll learn how to do something, and decide it’s too much trouble to do on my own.  Tortillas are a good example of that.  I have friends who swear tortillas are easy, but I’ll save myself the 6 hours of rise time and spend $1.50 at the store.  No matter what, it’s still worth the learning. I mean, the apocalypse is right around the corner! Anyone with any brains knows the fate of the world is in the hands of the Mayan calendar, after all.  And I’ll be the merchant who is able to provide paper, yogurt, crackers, body lotion, and scarves to the poor souls that survive.

This morning, walking the kids to school, I had the most gorgeous brainstorm!  I’ve got a lot of basic coursework to make up, and the admissions department encouraged me to do the catchup work elsewhere.  Basically, it would be a good idea not to prejudice my profs against me by starting off from the very bottom of the rung.  If I showed up able to place higher in math and physics, in particular, they’d show me more respect.  As it is, I’m to expect a certain amount of bias because of my age and humanities degrees.  I’ve been trying to figure out how to get the money and time to do a Princeton Review type course, or go to a community college and take courses to get ready to go to Big Girl School.

Such an obvious solution was staring me in the face.  I’d been twisting this idea around, inside and out, and the easy thing to do is right there.  I’ll homeschool myself!  So, for the next quarter, I’m back to school, but at home.  Since my brain is really kind of fried right now, I figure this will be a good way to ease myself into the whole rigorous world  of academia once more anyway.  I’m really excited, honestly, but I also know I’ve been absentminded and foggy lately.

I figure I’ll start with the basics and work my way forward.  If it’s easy, then I’ll just fly through it.  Thrift stores around here should have text books that will do me well, on top of what I find online to help me. A friend of mine referred me to a Cliffs Notes homework help page to help me brush up.  I’m trying to ignore the spectre of Dr. Vance who is in the back of my head yelling, “These are terrible.  They contain factual errors!”  Another friend pointed me in the direction that lead to some free online Aeronautics and Astronautics courses and lectures from MIT and St. Petersburg College.  I’m trying to remain hopeful that these will be of use to me.

The main thing, though, is the schedule.  The structure of my typical day is nonexistant.  I just do what I need to do, when I feel like doing it.  Right now, I really need a more rigid schedule.  It doesn’t have to be ironclad, but I keep trying to drift through life.  If it weren’t for that coffee addiction that I’m cultivating, I don’t know what I’d be doing.  I considered getting a part time job, because of course more money would be nice, but I know that I would use that as an excuse to keep from doing this.  To that end, I have worked in plans to address the money issue in other ways, without going out and getting a boss.

I’m so excited; I have a real plan!  It’s a very simple one, and doesn’t address much more than the next few months.  I’m aware there will be distractions, or times my decisions will be all wrong, and I’ll have to rethink everything. The important thing right now is that I’m moving.

Years ago, I came across a nifty website.   Users can create their own Johari window, which is a psychological tool that helps map a person’s personality. I saved the link to mine as a bookmark.

Originally, this was something I did just for fun, like any of the myriad Meyers-Briggs Star Trek tests.  (I’m usually an INTP, which is Worf.)  As time has passed, I’ve found it to be more powerful than most Internet memes.  Even though only 6 people participated at that time, and it hasn’t been updated since 2006 or so, it’s been a very helpful to keep around.  I’ve been told repeatedly that my self image is skewed.  I’ve looked at the words I chose for myself, and I still think they all apply.  But this is how others see me.

Lately my self esteem has taken a beating.  No matter how self-aware I try to be, I don’t ever see the whole picture. The visual aid really helps to bring perspective, and that Blind Spot is especially informative. Feeling weak and helpless is quite common for me, but other people think otherwise.  Just knowing that helps me tap into that strength.

Interestingly, there’s also at least one trait in that blind spot that I don’t believe is accurate at all. That reminds me that some people will see what they want to, whether or not it’s there.  So I try to respect other people’s opinions, and can use their views of me to help me have a fresh perspective.  I just have to remember not to be tempted to define myself by other people’s views.

Dominant Traits

66% of people agree that LadyGlutter is intelligent

All Percentages

able (16%) accepting (16%) adaptable (0%) bold (0%) brave (16%) calm (0%) caring (50%) cheerful (0%) clever (0%) complex (16%) confident (0%) dependable (16%) dignified (0%) energetic (33%) extroverted (0%) friendly (33%) giving (16%) happy (0%) helpful (0%) idealistic (0%) independent (16%) ingenious (16%) intelligent (66%) introverted (16%) kind (16%) knowledgeable (0%) logical (0%) loving (50%) mature (0%) modest (0%) nervous (16%) observant (0%) organised (0%) patient (0%) powerful (16%) proud (16%) quiet (0%) reflective (0%) relaxed (0%) religious (16%) responsive (0%) searching (0%) self-assertive (0%) self-conscious (16%) sensible (0%) sentimental (33%) shy (0%) silly (16%) spontaneous (0%) sympathetic (16%) tense (0%) trustworthy (33%) warm (0%) wise (0%) witty (16%)

Feel free to contribute to my window, or send me a link to yours. If you’re thick-skinned and truly looking for self discovery, you could always try out the Nohari window. That’s the darker, more critical version. Fun stuff!

where I’m no fun any more.  I am sorry.  Sometimes it hurts so badly I must cry out loud.  I am lonely.

This week has been hectic, what with me temping at my apartment office, Boy Scouts and flag football starting up, and the rumor mill running me ragged. I want to address this last bit really quick, since there are people who are apparently very concerned about my business. Maybe they’ll bother to check this blog, but even if not, I need to vent a bit of frustration.

I love my brother very much. Anyone who knows me at all gets that. I put up with a lot of drama from the people he associated with throughout his life. I still am. I love my neices and nephew. They’re all I have left of him  So, to you punks out there, don’t tell me what I believe, whether I love him, how I think of him, or that I “think the worst of him.” What I think of my brother is that I love him and he is dead. And I have a hard time believing that last one.  He unfortunately made some very bad choices, and some of those were the people he associated with.  I wish I could ask him what is going on with all of this, how to fix it, but I can’t.  I’m pretty sure if he’d had those answers, he’d be alive right now himself.

Right now I’m not sure if someone is just hatefully, spitefully trying to kick me when I’m down, or sincerely think they are honoring my brother by filling me in about circumstances surrounding his death. I’ve been told a lot of things, and some of them HAVE to be lies, because there are direct contradictions. Yes, I do want answers, but I wish people would understand that his hell didn’t die with him.  I guess because I was the closest person to him, I inherit it. I try to live with seeing his widow obviously dating already, and not returning my phone calls, as best as I can.  That doesn’t mean I’m happy with it.  It means I don’t know what to do!

If I have to outline my grief, my thoughts on everything, to prove I loved him, well, I’m going to meetings at least once a week, sometimes twice, to deal with my grief.  I can’t hear regular turns of phrase like “I’ll give him enough rope to hang himself” or see something as stupid as Bone Thugz-N-Harmony without hyperventilating.  My only sibling, the only person who grew up with me, is missing from my daily life.  I have to get out of bed every morning and try not to lash out at everyone because the barely contained anger at others — who hold the key to the only people alive with his DNA in them– spills over onto anyone in range.

I need to learn how to set up boundaries to protect myself.  I was told that last time at group.  But I desperately want to understand.  I can’t even figure out what is right to do.  My heart is sick, my soul is battered, and I can’t think what else to do but vent.

Suite: Judy Blue Eyes

This is not really so much a review, as much as a recounting of lessons learned. Dragon*Con was mostly a failure, but not because the Con wasn’t cool or there wasn’t stuff to do.   I’ll try to work in what things we did see along the way, though.

Planning errors were our biggest downfall. I knew there were events in downtown Atlanta, but I was actually using this as a way to get away from college football — specifically the Alabama/Virginia Tech game. See, my brother Lauren was all about Alabama football, and he was living in Hokey territory. It was a badge of honor to him to piss off Tech fans around him. This game was something we’d been looking forward to for most of the year. So, I was glad I’d be at a convention and a baseball game, to avoid that first hard game of the season.  Yeah, guess where they played? The Georgia Dome, because that’s a natural venue for that game. But you already knew this, didn’t you? This is what I get for avoiding the news. I started seeing Virginia Tech jerseys everywhere. It was like a sledgehammer to my gut.  An emotional booby trap.

There were other issues, of course. We shouldn’t have taken the kids, or should have taken them straight to the daycare services. There were a million people there, and the kids were well behaved, but constantly on the verge of being lost or trampled. I shouldn’t have allowed us to get double booked with the ball game, because we had the bright idea of avoiding the 10 minutes a block traffic and hoofed it to Turner Stadium. We should have tattooed a map of downtown Atlanta to one of us. I mean, there were henna artists right there. They’d have done it for no more than $20.

The line was long, and we should have brought more cash to pay for tickets. That would have saved us two hours. In fact, we should have started out with cash and credit, because we finally found ourselves a parking space and it took credit.  All in all, we missed out on a hugely fun time because the expectations were too high, we didn’t plan well enough, and we kept wandering in circles and trying to keep the kids from being bored to death. Also, because I kept bursting into tears and apologising for being an angry, broken person.

I hate that I don’t have much shiny stuff to tell everyone, but I know people want to know what I saw. We went to one presentation by Lucasfilm, which was very exciting for the boys.  It highlighted the upcoming Season 2 of Star Wars: The Clone Wars and the Old Republic MMORPG coming out soon. That looked really wicked.

The cosplay was colorful and varied.  For a bunch of introverts, I saw tons of skin and self-confidence.  There were steampunk, anime, comic book, period, and any other types of costumes you can think of.  There were even two Coralines that I saw.  No, we don’t have a lot of pictures.  Refer back to me trying to keep the kids from being trampled and general crowd panic.

There were some really cool vendors.  We wanted to find some dice, but there were no GameScience anywhere.  In fact, the only dice to be had were Chessex.  I wouldn’t be caught rolling those things, but they didn’t have a decent collection of dicebags, either.  That was a big disappointment.  Maybe next year I can represent GameScience, and if I learn to sew or leatherwork between then and now, I can provide those as well.  There was certainly a market for them that wasn’t filled.

There were some spectacular artists, my favorite being Kevin Dyer.   His artwork is made of cast paper, and he relies heavily on Celtic themes.  I’ve never seen anything quite like it, but I loved all the Celtic Knots and dragons and trees. I want one of everything, and a house big enough to house it along with my Ansel Adams prints that I will own one day.

OH!  I do have one encounter with someone nifty in particular.  I had to say “excuse me” because I almost bumped into this dude in a pink dress, with a white mohawk and black corset that matched his combat boots.  I think it was Malcolm McDowell, from A Clockwork Orange and Heroes.  So that did send my tummy swimming a bit.  For a few moments I was very excited.  But then Red Chief almost plowed into him and I thought the earth was going to swallow me whole, so we walked away.

Next year we’ll be much more prepared, and I’ll regale you with all sorts of stories.  If anyone else went, I’d love to know more of what happened around the Con.  I know that there were four buildings and days of events, so we missed out on a lot.  I’d love to hear about it.

Who else is going?  We’ll be there at least Saturday and Sunday. We’ve never made it before, but this summer wasn’t so hot for vacating or relaxation of any sort. It’s going to be a bit of a tight squeeze for the budget, but we’re going to make it work. We all need this.

We do have a Braves game we’re going to Saturday night, though. So we’ll miss the aquarium event, which kind of bites, but we’ll have fun anyway.  My Mom is a huge Reds fan, and the rest of my family are Braves fans. (I hate baseball, but I’m a trooper.) So, it’s a tradition to go to at least one Reds vs. Braves game every year.  There’s only one this year. It often falls on the weekend of Dragon*Con, and we see all the people dressed up in their costumes as we drive through downtown and pine for the fjords.

So are you going?  Would you like to meet up?  Let me know.   I’d love to at least be on the lookout for crazy internet people to dying to mug me in a very public, crowded venue.  Plus, there’s gonna be Felicia Day, Bill Shatner, and Patrick Stewart!   And others!  Go look!