I sit here wondering if I have, once and for all, truly lost my mind.

In a very few hours, some time after the sun rises, I am joining the legions of homeschoolers once again. Last time we did this, it was a disaster.

The first time I did this, it was with my daughter, in California, two husbands and a life time ago. It was a raging success. Amy thrived under it, I thrived under it, and when Amy decided she wanted classroom experience, we said "Okay, go for it" and she's happily making her way through the school system now. That's all good.

The second time I did this was last fall, when Sam and I decided that homeschooling our (then) 11 year old, Widget, was a good idea. Oh man. No. This is a kid who needed more stimulation than just being one child with one adult focused on his learning. This was a kid who it just didn't work with on the one to one basis.

We moved here to Podunkville, Texas a few weeks ago and have been trying to get the three boys, Widget (now 12), Gadget (10) and Munchkin (7) enrolled in the local school district.

But when their Mama died three years ago, she apparently had things like their official shot records and social security cards stashed away, God knows where, because certainly nobody else does. And we cannot get them enrolled without these papers. Never mind that the old school has photocopies and will send. Podunkville schools require the originals, thanks.

The boys need their entire immunization series done over again. The doctor tells us this will take a minimum of three months. Getting their social security cards will take a couple of weeks.

In the meantime, my kids' brains are supposed to rot, or something. The hell with that.

Tomorrow we begin homeschooling. We've purchased some curriculum materials, such as grade appropriate workbooks. We have an encyclopedia. We have tons of old National Geographics. We have the internet.

We have three special needs boys (ADHD and Asperger's Syndrome, among other things) who are extremely bright and hard to keep focused.

This just might be hard. Somehow, though, I am thinking that with three of them all working in the same space, doing some stuff together (art, music, "citizenship" (required by Texas law for homeschoolers), some science and suchlike) and some schoolwork on their own personal levels (math, language arts) I am thinking that this may work very well.

We've joined a local homeschooler's community, there will be park days, there will be field trips. I'll be starting up my old arts and crafts group like I used to run in San Francisco. The boys are excited that tomorrow they get to do schoolwork. My kids hate summer, they see it as time away from learning, which is something they love!

So here we go. Off to the adventure.

Ma is biting her nails, hoping it works this time.

Be careful what you blog.

I read an interesting article on Yahoo!, must've been maybe a few months ago, about how blogging has started to come back and bite people in the ass. People on Livejournal, etc., write pretty personal stuff. After all, to a lot of folks, blogs are online diaries or journals. What the citizens of Blogsville may not have anticipated was that whenever they bitch/rant/complain about somebody or something, the wrong people might happen upon it and figure out who you are. Hell, some bloggers just use their real name (dumbasses!) Even though the blogs or websites they're on have absolutely nothing to do with their schools, students are getting into trouble for blogs with complaints about teachers, principals, administration, or other students. I think that's crap, (hello? Free Speech?), but it's a fact of blogging life. Also some inviduals are being fired from their jobs when their bosses happen uplong employees' blogs who are giving away secret information about their companies or calling their bosses "raging fuckwads" and the like. People who showcase their criminal exploits are being discovered and arrested - sometimes not soon enough as is the case with a few blogs of serial killers (like the BTK dude).

Of course daylogs, depending on what you put in them, can be blogs of a sort.

I'm going to go out on a limb a little and guess that a good portion of us expect that relatives of ours that aren't so internet-savvy, or even ones that are - but not as much so as you - probably won't end up ever reading your nodes unless you show them to said relatives. This could also apply to friends and peers, depending on...whatever. I would imagine that most of our parents would not be privy to the everything2 community - I would say the chances of them happening upon your e2 stuff goes down exponentially as your age goes up. I would also venture to say that noders here still of high school age don't expect your teachers and whatnot to ever happen upon your nodes, either.

But, let's not forget the old parable "expect the unexpected." (Is that really considered a parable? I dunno, let's move on, anyway...)

One important thing to realize that, lately, Google has been spidering our writeups en masse. If you do a writeup on, say, a historical or sports figure, somebody Googling that dude or dudette might come across your article. And then they might decide to go to your home node. And then, depending on what you put in it or what you use as a username, they might figure out who you are. "Oh, cool, this is so-and-so!" and then they might proceed to peruse your body of work. That would be a potentially Very Bad Thing if you ever bitched about said web surfer or said not-so-nice things about them in daylogs. This could be especially dangerous for any Chinese noders (are there any?) complaining about the powers that be in China.

What spurred me to write this warning? you may be asking. As you might have already suspected, this sort of happened to me. Now before you say "Uh oh!!" don't worry I've never said anything really bad about anybody, not bad enough to really piss anybody off to a significant degree, in any of my daylogs. However, there was plenty of stuff that really wasn't meant for the eyes of anybody who wasn't a perfect stranger. (Funny how sometimes we'd rather pour our hearts out or rant about our deepest troubles or speak of our deepest desires to people who we don't know and not to those of us we're closest to - but that is a different subject entirely maybe worth pursuing later.) My younger sister was surfing around (if you're reading this now, "Hi, sis, how ya doin?!"), looking for information on Barret Jackman, and came across my writeup on him. I haven't spoken to her yet, but I guess she figured out it was me and ended up on my homenode and then subsequently began surfing my body of work. I think she's read a great many of my writeups, which in a way is kind of cool. She has found out a lot about me she didn't know before (according to my mom, who I have talked to) like my political views and such. I hope she enjoyed some of my factuals and fiction, but it appears she may have for some reason only stuck to the daylogs. There were a few family-related rants that she decided to tell my mother about, things I didn't ever want her to know about. My September 20, 2005 daylog - which I have since shortened and changed - was one of particular concern to her. She phoned my mom at an ungodly hour usually reserved for telling people somebody has died, to tell her about it. But anyway, it was kind of sweet because I was really worried about stuff like money and whatnot in that daylog and she subsequently became worried about me. It all worked out for the best, though, I guess. No harm, no foul (at least I hope).

So, to sum up, be careful if you've got ranty daylogs, and factuals that somebody might come across while googling, especially if that somebody is a person you don't want reading those ranty daylogs.

If you write it, they might come.

Or something...

Haunted by your eyes.

It's been five days, and I still can't get you out of my head. I keep seeing your face, or more specifically your eyes, boring into mine - and wondering what you felt when I couldn't keep it up, and looked away. Was I imagining that dark look of knowledge and wanting in your eyes? Was I wrong to turn at that moment, shy and confused as I was - as I suppose I am?
Then I didn't see or hear from you, until tonight, and all I could see, all I could think about, was that look in your eyes. And I felt stupid for not doing what I so badly wanted to do - leaning into you, pressing my mouth on yours, feeling your arms around me as we would finally fall into that one passionate embrace that I have been burning for for a month or more.

It is no matter. I am impatient, but anticipation can be sweet, and though I fidget and dream, I enjoy it as much as the events that I hope will follow.

We shall see.
I will have another chance tomorrow.

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