Well I don't know what happened to the rest of May. The calendar tells me it's June. I hope you are doing OK-ish wherever you are. Things have been a little nuts in the US for, well, since before we were even a country. There's a lot to sort out. I hope that 2020 really is the year we've been waiting for in terms of WATERSHED MOMENTS and POSITIVE CHANGE.
This is the last week of remote school learning for my two children, so I'm going to be stopping the "specials" that I've been doing with them on school-day afternoons (except for Fridays). But here are some highlights of what we've done in the last few weeks.
Money Matters
You hear people say "They never teach you anything useful when you're young. Like, they never teach personal finance!" Well I'm not letting this happen to my kids. We had a frank conversation about money as a social and political construct. We discussed saving money, earning money, and borrowing money. We talked about large debts that are kind of OK (like a mortgage) and small debts that are pretty much not OK (like one with a high interest rate). We talked about the idea of interest--how it can work in your favor if it's interest compounding on savings, but work against you if it's accruing on a debt. We checked out our household's monthly mortgage statement and goggled at how much of each monthly payment goes to interest rather than principal.
We also made a list of typical expenses for everyday grownup life, such as electricity, cat food, water/sewer, groceries, housing, phone and cable, car loan, and insurance.
Finally, each child set a goal to earn a certain dollar amount by doing chores and tasks over the summer. I'm planning to make some charts to help us keep track of this over the coming weeks. I hope this was a useful lesson.
Plant identification
For this activity, I offered a financial incentive if the kids could name 50 plants without help. They did it!
- White clover
- Grass
- Plantain
- Dandelion
- Wood sorrel
- Peach tree
- Buttercup
- Maple tree
- Fern
- Chive
- Thyme
- Sage
- Basil
- Summer Squash
- Mint
- Lavender
- Parsley
- Viola/pansies
- Iris
- Lily
- Rose
- Lupine
- Radish
- Kale
- Cucumbers
- Tomatoes
- Barberry
- Bloodroot
- Wild black raspberry
- Rhubarb
- Tiger lily
- Elderberry
- Nettle
- Lilies of the valley
- Violet
- Honeysuckle
- Spruce
- Garlic
- Nasturtium
- Pear tree
- Milkweed
- Bleeding heart
- Oak
- Strawberries
- Blueberries
- Red clover
- Peony
- Apple tree
- Balloon flowers
- Succulent
Items 1-39 were in our own yard, then we walked around the block to find
40-50. (I gave credit for plant categories rather than specific names
in some cases.)
Soap-making
I had some melt-and-pour soap materials from a past Christmas gift project. We got it out one day and made layered, cucumber-scented soaps using a simple mold that came with the kit. One soap layer was a pale aqua-green, and a greenish-white layer was poured over that.
I was impatient with the second layer so we poured it before the first layer had completely hardened, but I really like the cloudy whorled effect. Others were not as pleased. Here are the unmolded soaps. Unfortunately the cucumber scent seems to attract tiny ants... it is some kind of ant-nip.
Historical Computing
Some say that the pandemic/quarantine period is the time to do things you've been putting off and would never do at any other time. One thing I've been putting off for years is turning on the ancient Macintosh 512K computer that has been stashed in the basement since we moved into this house. The computer was a big part of my teens and early 20s, and I was terrified that it would no longer work, and then I'd be sad at having to say goodbye to it. But it worked!
Some not so good news: It can only read one of the discs that we tried.
It wasn't the Flight Simulator, or the Puppy care program, or the
Wizardry game to which I have dedicated hours of my life, or the
knockoff Tetris, or the discs of saved writing--both mine and my deceased
father's. The one disc that worked was MacWrite, which is like an early
version of Word, and fairly useless.
Also the disk eject mechanism has failed, so we had to
use the paperclip method to manually eject every single disk. However, we now have a new project to put off for a long period of time, which is to watch YouTube videos and figure out how to repair the thing. Maybe I'll finally work up to getting rid of it before that happens.
In other news, I'm happy that it's strawberry season.
In Vermont, COVID-19 cases now total 1,027.
How are you?
