We sure have been busy!

[entirelysonja]

It has been a busy few weeks here!

In our Ancient History Activities class at co-op, we started mummifying a chicken.

This is what it looked like after a couple of days:



We also made the board game Senet, and made bricks out of sand and glue. It's been a lot of fun, and very messy!

We've also been on a lot of field trips, including to the College Park Aviation Museum, the National Gallery of Art, and pumpkin picking. And that's just this week!

Karl has also learned to ride a bicycle, and both kids have been doing a lot more biking. Erika's been enjoying her diving class, and is also having a lot more fun in soccer. She definitely has a heavy athletic schedule this fall!

Comments

[pthalo]

sounds like the kids are doing well and learning a lot. they've grown so much!

is that a real chicken they're mummifying?

[entirelysonja]

Yes, it's a real chicken. :-)

[pthalo]

Wow, interesting. How long does it take to mummify?

[entirelysonja]

It's supposed to take about six weeks. It took the Anciet Egyptians 70 days to mummify a person.

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[(Anonymous)]

@George:Fin has already nopited to an excellent resource, but I want to specifically speak up from one white straight man to another.Identifying the areas where you're *not* privileged doesn't get us off the hook for examining the privilege we *do* carry around. I'm not religious, and I live in the US, where declaring your devoutness has certain political benefits under many circumstances, but I still benefit tremendously (and without any effort on my part) from being white. and straight. and male.it's *extremely* easy for white straight guys to take a stand for the liberty to say whatever we want the truth is, *we already can*. We can't be hurt by slurs on our whiteness, on our maleness, or on our straightness. Those words just don't hurt, the way the words hurt that crap on people who are not white, not male, or not straight. male chauvinist pig is quaintly outdated and lacks the power to silence, while bitch has stayed in fashion, alas.I think everyone here *everyone* supports freedom of expression and freedom of conversation. Nobody has suggested that men be silenced. By taking a stand for freedom of speech here, you seem to be suggesting that Skud's talk or the other commenters here want to silence people. But read carefully: the request is really you're hurting me, and making me want to go away from your community. please stop, because I'd like to be part of it. This is not a request please never speak out or men should be punished .It's uncomfortable to know that we (the white straight guys) have been given something we didn't work for the liberty to say whatever we want, and to hear whatever we want, and know that we won't be doubted or dismissed on account of our race, sex, or sexuality. For me, it makes me uncomfortable because I don't like the feeling that the communities that I care for (OSS among them) aren't as fair and free for everyone as they are for me.I have a defensive reaction to that uncomfortableness: I want to say no! really, it *is* fair and open, and I know because it feels that way to me! and I suspect you're having such a reaction too. Please check. if you are, consider that Skud's original post addresses this question with statistics and suggestions, and no implication anywhere that men should be silenced.

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[(Anonymous)]

Does it work with the User agent switcher addon set to IE7? It could be as splime as hotmail sniffing your browser as suggested and just pushing you to classic even if the other version would work fine. I'd test, but I don't have a hotmail address.

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[(Anonymous)]

it.The problem with ealusxly-oriented presentations at tech conferences isn't that we don't like naked women and/or men. Hell, I love them! I just don't like them when I'm trying to work, especially when I'm trying to work in a predominantly-straight-male environment, because I don't want people's minds to be on boobs while I'm trying to get my job done with a pair of them attached to the front of my body. A really good read on this subject is Liz Keogh's (on the CouchDB Program like a pr0n star talk). Another thing to consider is this: when someone gives a presentation intended to titillate or amuse (presumably straight) men, he's saying, I assume that my audience are straight men. Any women (or gay guys) in the audience will tend to think, What am I, chopped liver? Does he realise I'm here? Is anyone even noticing or valuing my work? This is part of the insidious problem of invisibility: people assume that geeks/programmers/etc are guys, so any women are more or less treated as if they don't exist.Certainly we are free to walk out if we don't like something, and for the most part we do. We walk out of presentations, projects, companies, and entire industries because of this stuff. If it were an isolated incident, that wouldn't be a big deal. But when people repeatedly say, We're going to do something that excludes and marginalises one group, and if they don't like it they can leave, that is a big problem. That problem has a name, and I suspect you won't like hearing it, but I'm going to say it anyway: institutionalised sexism.Let's bring this back to a really simple example. Say I'm a young Ruby programmer, and a woman. I live somewhere on the West Coast, and I ask my boss whether he can send me to the Golden Gate Ruby Conference. It'll be great professional development, I say. So off I go, starry eyed and enthusiastic. When I get there, I find there's a talk called CouchDB: Program like a pr0n star. I really want to learn about that, so I go to the talk, hoping it won't be too awful. But the first couple of slides really put me off, so I leave the room. Next week, back at the office, my boss asks what I learned. Did you get to any talks on CouchDB? We're going to use that in our next project. Um, no, I reply, Didn't get to see that one. So now someone else gets put on the CouchDB project, and both me and my boss have the feeling that conferences just aren't that great or worth sending me to. Next year, someone else is keener to go and gets sent instead. I don't make a point of attending conferences much, and when I do, the bad experience is reinforced. So I miss out on more learning opportunities, and networking with other people in the community. When a round of layoffs is necessary, I'm out of work and I don't have as many resources as the guys around me when it comes to job hunting. I won't draw it out any further than that; I'll just say, there are a lot of reasons that women form a very small proportion of the tech industry, especially in open source fields, and that ealusxly-oriented presentations are a part of that web of problems.As for whether someone is an asshole for giving one: I'd say the asshole part is that they've managed to make it to adulthood and to some fairly advanced point in their professional life without realising or caring that certain behaviour can make people feel uncomfortable and unwanted. That takes a certain kind of obliviousness. But the real assholishness usually comes out afterwards, when someone points out, Hey, that's not cool, and the response is usually defensiveness and throwing the blame back on those who were made uncomfortable in the first place. I have only seen one instance of a ealusxly oriented conference presentation where this didn't happen. For all the other occasions, yes, I'm fairly comfortable using the asshole term. I don't say that there's a perfect correlation between sexy slides and assholes, but as I said in my post above, it's a good sign.Finally, on political correctness and freedom of expression . I have found, in discussing this sort of issue a lot online, that these terms tend to be used by people who are feeling defensive because we've asked them to act like decent human beings. Nobody's saying we can't talk about sex, or argue, or whatever. I'm just asking that we consider the effects of doing so, and if the effects (excluding a group of people from a community that claims to value openness) are not something we want, then to moderate our behaviour.

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[(Anonymous)]

Laura - I watched the movie Soul Surfer with my kids and their frnieds. I didnt know what it was about until then. I loved Bethany's story so much and my daughter, who is turning five in two weeks, wants a birthday party themed around Soul Surfer . It is such a wonderful thing to see my daughter look up to such a great role model. Thank you and Gob Bless you all!

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[(Anonymous)]

Good heavens. I have, with my glesass, 20/20 vision and visual processing good enough to get remarked upon and even still am not certain what exactly that's suppose to say. Even with the hint, I had to squint and tilt my head to see it. One wonders if the folks at Google ever look at them. Conversely, my audio processing is rather less than optimal and your description of the audio captcha made me nearly twitch. It would be very nice if Google stepped back from all their work on shiny new toys occasionally to consider who they're excluding from their use (either due to privacy or accessibility concerns).