Halloween Sewer from Hell

We woke in darkness to Frost shouting "Mom, Mom, get up get up.  GET UP NOW"   I thought I might have overslept but it was barely 6.30am.

"Why?" 

"The basement is FULL OF WATER!!!"

We staggered around a bit but eventually discovered that heavy rain overnight had backed up the sewer into the shower drain in Frost's bathroom and there was sewer water - no sewerage we could SEE though - was spread from Frost's bathroom, through the downstairs living room to the game room, halfway through the laundry and deeply in the furnace room. 

We mopped and drained what we could and arranged a sewer specialist to come and clear the line.  The first one who came to the house was one who had done refused to do it, saying he was worried that the blade of his rooter would become stuck.  Finally, a Ukrainian "expert" came from another rooter company and proceeded to wrestle his snake into the sewer through the toilet drain in the basement.

In the interim, Josh had ripped out the sodden wood floor of the bathroom and found that the sub-floor was rotten.  He ripped that out and I mopped the rotten wood sludge into a contractors industrial strength waste bag.

The "guest" bathroom now has a cement slab with the remnants of past linoleum clinging to it.  The toilet it outside.  The basement carpet is rolled up and we have a heater.

We need to borrow a dehumidifier.

I shall post tomorrow about Halloween.

Pictures from easier days:

Beautiful amanitas I spotted on a ride home from dropping
Wren at school.  A few of these were ones I had drawn.

Wren so enjoyed shellfish at Google for lunch that I bought him a
number of mussels and prawns and sauteed them for his dinner.
He ate almost all of them, including big fat jiggly ones that needed two mouthfuls.

Wren was insulted and angered by this street sign. He said
"It is rude and it is NOT LEGAL to change a sign
so that is says only buddhas can cross here!  What
about people who are not buddhas!  They feel bad."

About Wren

At dinner Wren was telling me about weapon classes in Minecraft.  He added, in one mode you can punch a wooden wall with your FIST and mine it and not get hurt.  "Just like Chuck Norris could do that!"

"Chuck Norris?"  I asked.  "What do you know about Chuck Norris?"

"Oh" Wren said.  "Frost always says that.  When my guy can dive to the ground and not die Frost says - GO ON, CHUCK NORRIS IT!"

I am seriously old.

As we were driving home from school today, Wren said "I have three modes.  These are my modes:

1) Normal mode

2) Staring blurry eyed into space THINKING mode.

3) Math mode:  when I think a lot about math.

Another time he told me one of his modes was 4) Game mode.

Wren helping to press cider at the
harvest festival

This about sums Wren up.  He is loving math - often starts calculating how many minutes in an hour or seconds in a minute.  He loves multiplying.  Today, while shopping, he read the prices of the three types of popsicle I bought:

$4.99 - I told him to make it $5.

$3.50

$4.69

and totalled them $13.19c  !  I was a bit startled.  Personally, I think he combined mode 2 and 3 for that sum.

He is still not reading sentences with any fluency although he is much better at the Set 1 Bob Books.  I think we need to practice.  He continues to draw and write lots of things.  Here are some recent examples:

Magical Creatures.  Their abilities.  I can read Wren and it says things like
diamond and golden and gold.  

Various weapons and charms.

He is also quite excited about making books and charts.  At school, the kids have been making books and I helped him make a chart of the number of dogs we see each day on our ride around Greenlake.  He is very interested in his chart and keeps talking about it.

The Dog Chart.  As you can see, dog density increased through the week.

Beautiful Bicycle

This weekend we bought Wren a trailer bicycle.  Its a bicycle that has one wheel and attaches to the rear of an adult bicycle.  This way, Wren can ride with us on longer distances than he could on a tiny bike with training wheels.  He has just outgrown the ride-behind childseat he has used for years.

After much research we bought a Burley Piccolo.

This morning we rode our bicycles to school.  The weather is STILL dry and sunny - most unusual for Seattle at this point in fall - its already OCTOBER folks!  The dry weather makes for good cycling and we enjoyed rounding the lake and seeing ducks and squirrels and mushrooms that we would have overlooked from the car.

There is a great freedom on a bicycle.  You're close enough to things to stop and connect and yet fast enough to cover great distances with ease.

Wren said "You know, I am just as happy ON this bicycle as OFF this bicycle which means I like this bicycle!"

He peddles (wobbling side to side somewhat) and has not yet managed to shift the gears much, although he runs a constant dialogue about it as we ride.

"This is 7th gear.  Is that okay?  STOP STOP, I need gear 1!"

As we reach the bike path around Greenlake we start to count dogs.   We are making a bar chart of the dogs we see.  The data is as follows:

Monday:  5 dogs
Tuesday:  15 dogs
Wednesday:  16 dogs
Friday: 26 dogs.

I have an hypothesis that people are increasingly likely to walk their dogs as the week progresses but it may be utterly random.  We will continue to assess in coming week.

I love this bike and also the delayed onset of the rain which is making for ideal cycling conditions.

PE is just like shop

I am starting to feel a rant coming on about the PE - Physical Education - class in Frost's school.

My reference point is Gym from my school in South Africa.   At gym we did track, javelin, discus, netball, field hockey, tennis, swimming and squash (raquette-ball).  We did gymnastics with a horse and a beam and mats.  We were made to run around fields and 'warm up'.  There was a lot of moaning about it but it was about SPORT.

Today Frost told me he is the only kid he knows in APP (the accelerated academic stream) to be doing PE.  All his friends have applied for "Directed athletics" PE Waivers so they can do both a language AND music class.  To qualify, they have to show that they do 60 hours of sports.

Frost has come home with a flyer for me to sign.  It informs me that this semester in PE they will "present wellness concepts and create activities and projects that promote an active and healthy lifestyle."

He is going to be introduced to some activities (aka Sports) that will support this.  However, there is no playing field at school, just a gym.  I am not sure really sure they are going to do anything like a sport or learn to clobber their enemies and bask in individual glory.  Is that not PC?

My cousin's 7 year old daughter was doing rugby team when we visited!  

I am starting to feel that Frost should be doing Spanish instead of this oddly paternalistic form of PE which is about introducing the food pyramid, measuring how easily he can touch his toes and whether his BMI is in healthy range!

Is it like this everywhere in the USA?  Is it going to get better?   Will he every DO sport (other than Ultimate Frisbee - not that he has heard about it yet but there are rumors...) in school.   How do we have world class athletes if there is no public program for SPORT!  If sport is all about helicopter parents knowing how to sign up for teams on a purely individual basis?

Elsewhere in the world and presumably in the USA, high achieving schools have high achieving athletics programs.    It seems that PE has has much to do with that idea as home economics to advanced math.

Could someone please tell me how Frost can do track?  Where he gets to try a discus?  When he gets beyond the BMI into the world of Sport.

Travels with a Paperclip - overseas with an iPhone 4S Verizon

I know that many of you travel from time to time and also have iPhones.  Having heard the horror stories of $1000s of dollars in roaming charges, I felt dread, taking a smartphone overseas so I thought I would share my experiences of our recent Australian trip.

The facts:
1) I had an iPhone 4S with service by Verizon.
2)  I wanted to be able to use data and phone but was not concerned about maintaining my home number.
3) I was not prepared to pay a fortune.
4) I mainly expected local calls with a few international 'ET phone home' exceptions.

After researching the international plan, the international chat, the cost of international calls and the potential for roaming charges to occur unless I had roaming off and / or was in airplane mode, I decided I would buy an international SIM card when I arrived in Australia.

I chose Telstra because they have good coverage countrywide, are well supported and had good reviews from other international visitors.

Before we left I called Verizon and asked for my phone to be unlocked so I could use an International SIM.  I told them that I did not want to use their international plan.  They read me a required user agreement disclosure thing which I had to receive via email, also saying this only lasted 3 months or 10 months, I forget which.  They then gave me instructions about what to do to to activate my international SIM and asked me to power down my phone.

With the phone turned off, it took a few minutes while they unlocked it and then I could turn it on again.

While websites I had read warned me that I would have to log into iTunes to complete the unlock, I never did.  I ignored all the Verizon instructions and simply popped out the Verizon micro-sim when we were on the runway.

Note, remember to travel with a paperclip so you can pop it out when you want.  In an emergency an unravelled staple works well too.

When we arrived at Brisbane International, I found that micro-sim cards are sold in the airport concourse newsagents.  I made a note of the ID number on the SIM (KEEP THE PACKAGING as it has your phone number and the SIM ID required for activation) and tried to activate it via the wifi activation screens.

These are extremely tedious and frustrating.  At the end of various screens in which I had to input my name, passport number, a local address, the sim number, the sim ID etc.... it said that the process had failed and I should call the service number to have it done by an operator.

I couldn't do that because I didn't have a phone.  I needed the phone to call the dimwits!

Thankfully, I used Mum's cellphone to call and it took only 5 minutes to activate.

I purchased a $30 pre-paid Telstra Micro-Sim starter kit.  These kits require you to choose from various offers.  Despite patient explanation, I could not grasp what these were for.  As it turns out, they offer different lengths of time for which the prepaid credit is valid (mine expired after a month), costs for calls vs texts and data.  They also offer some credits which can be used.

Here was my charge basis in Australia:

These are the main charges used to calculate your usage
in Australia.
Telstra Pre-Paid Cap Encore™
• Standard calls 39¢ call connection fee and
89¢ per 60 seconds or part
• Standard SMS 29¢ per message sent per recipient
• MessageBank®
39¢ call connection fee and
retrieval 89¢ per 60 seconds or part


A week before I left, I had used my 'free credit' 400 MB of data and had to buy a recharge "$10 Data Plus Pack" for a further 200 MB.  

I checked my account and found I had used none of my "recharge amount" on calls (but wasn't really chatting, just calling for short periods and texting to find someone.

So, for full data and phone and txt for my month in Australia I spent $40.

On the runway in LAX I popped in the US Verizon SIM and was back on my US network.

All in all, despite some confusion about the Telstra offers, my iPhone use in Australia was  successful.   My concern was actually that it was so cheap that I was secretly being charged somewhere else.  This would have been difficult as I paid cash for the SIM but it felt extremely affordable and easy.

My only difficulty was that since my number was new, only people I was seeing called me!

I will definitely try this again when travelling abroad.

Middle School

Frost is starting Middle School next week.  Today we had our first school tour where he received his class assignment, schedule and locker.

In the US middle school stretches from 6th-8th Grade.  In many areas it is a separate school building.  Frost's school has 1000 students in three grades.

During elementary years, kids have most of their lessons in one classroom and only go out for special classes like art, PE and library work.  During middle school you don't have a desk, instead you have a locker and carry the supplies you need to each period.

Their are 6 periods in the day and for each period a child has an assigned course.  Classes do not move together from class to class but each child follows their individual schedule based on their electives and assignments.  In this way it is much like a university or high-school class when I was in school with kids moving along on their own.

As he and his friends from last year compared schedules, Frost will not see any of his 'best' familiar friends more than once a day.  The classes they share are things like PE or band.

That said, Frost is happy with his schedule.  His greatest complaint is the lockers.  There are about 1200 lockers in the school.  Each child is assigned a locker and the code to a combination lock and a sheet of instructions on how to enter them.    The instructions are tedious and exacting - rotate right to the number exactly, rotate left PAST the number and then around again to reach it, rotate RIGHT to the number.  Even getting them right, none of the parents or kids could open the lockers.  Then, with persistance and assistance we learned you have to continue rotating and pulling FIRMLY on the dial, without releasing pressure.  At some point you encountered a resistance and then the door opened.

At this point, if a wicked friend clicked your dial around, the locker door LOCKS in the open position.  This requires the whole sequence to be repeated to enable you to open the lock so as to relock the locker with the door closed.

Apparently, last year this pranking caused such delays and trauma to children who were already stressed by the locker technology that it became a punishable offense called "flicking" or "clicking".  I forget the correct term.

Frost and Nelson discussed never putting anything in their locker.  They decided they would carry everything around all the time to avoid the risk of not being able to get stuff from the locker at a crucial time.  At 10pm tonight Frost was still interested in the way he could reduce the number of times he was forced to access his locker per day.

Clearly, his drum will not fit in the locker so we are going to have to figure out a way to deal with that.

Pavlova with Caitlin

Caitlin is showing me how to make pavlova.

Here is the recipe:

Recipe for 1 pavlova

4 egg whites

Lemon Juice 1 T

1 T Corn flour

1/4 C granulated sugar

1 Cup Caster sugar

Set oven to 140 C fan forced

First, get the bowls and put the egg whites in them.

We are using 8 eggs because we are making
two pavs for a dinner party tonight.

 

Whisk egg whites until soft peaks form.  Gradually add castor sugar beating until lite and white peaks form.  This takes a long time.

Fold combined granulated sugar and cornflower into meringue with lemon juice gradually over 8 minutes.

Pile into a baking paper lined tray.

Bake for 40 minutes on 140 C.  Turn off oven and leave to cool for 3 hours or more.

Remove from the oven.

Whip cream - sweeten if desired.

Assemble with sliced fruit, berries, bananas, kiwi and passionfruit.

Wren Prefers Australia a Bit

This morning Wren looked out the window thoughtfully, while sucking kumquats from Granny's tree.

"Mum, I am sorry.  I think I might like Australia more than America because it has different animals and things."

He winced at the sourness.

"Mum, did you write in the emus in my diary.  I want to write all of the animals in my diary."

The Animals Wren likes:
Koala
Emu
Cassowary
Pademelon
Kangaroo
Potoroo and bandicoot
Bilbies and hopping mice

Frost is silent because he has started reading Wilbur Price and is alternatively laughing as the boys self-incise their wounds to remove maggots and frowning as they nearly die again.  He says "This series is awesome because it could never happen!"

Bitten by a Scorpion

Wren has been bitten by a very small scorpion.

Wren:  "I was sitting on the floor and playing Lego when it felt like I got a splinter and it got owier and owier and I got up to tell Mom and I saw a tiny scorpion on the ground!"

Meanwhile, I was drinking tea and trying to figure out iCloud and photostream when Wren started crying and shouting loudly that he had been bitten by a scorpion.  I looked over and sure enough there was a small scorpion a bit over an inch long walking across the carpet.

Wren was shrieking and crying that he was bitten.  Mum put a bag of iced peas on it and rushed to google stings.  I shouted for Mervyn that there was a scorpion.  He walked in and squashed it.

He said "lets incinerate the scorpion remains" and put it in the potbelly

My mother was also bitten by a scorpion when she was little and living in East Africa.  It was a much larger scorpion.  Here is her story:

"It was 1950 living in Same (pronounced Sah-may) in Northern Tanzania.  I was about 2 years old.  I was with my aiah (we always had aiahs around because it was dangerous with hyenas, leopards, snakes and even elephants within sight of the house).   I was digging in the sand under a tree under the house.  My father was District Commissioner of a vast area.  The nearest hospital was 3 hours away but there was a local indian doctor. 

I was bitten on the hand by a big scorpion.  I have a memory that it was very big and black.   I am not sure if that was a real memory.  We had been warned about Scorpions.  At night when you went ot the loo you had to know out your shoes.  We wore gum boots everywhere.   

I screamed and screamed.  My mother rushed over and she was cross with the aiah because she had let me get bitten.  We also had snakes of course, there were snakes under the house, snakes in the playing pool, snakes in the water tank. 

I think she went to the Indian Doctor who said do nothing. 

I was in extreme pain it was very sore. 

The next day I went paralyzed down the whole side of the body.  The poison was spreading.  It totally alarmed my mother.  They probably had no medical dictionaries in those days.  They didn't know if it was going to stay or not. "

My granny Audrey and my mother Anne in Same,
Tanganyika early 1950s.

The children's swimming pool at Same had snakes in it.

The view from the house at Same

Mervyn also recalls a story about a scorpion bite.  This one relates from his Uncle Beville while he was in the Eastern Transvaal.  Apparently he climbed into his car one day and sat on a scorpion which bit him on the arse.  This did not earn him the sympathy he deserved.  To this day the story cannot be told without a smile!

Wren is doing fine.  He had a sore foot for an hour but says it is now fine and he can walk okay and that he was mainly crying so loud because he was afraid he was going to get sick because scorpions are poisonous.

Incidents with Koala

Every morning we wake up and play "spot the koala" in the trees around Mum's house.  They are nocturnal but move in the day sometimes and seem to mysteriously hop from trees in the dawn and dusk.  We see one and then 10 minutes later it has vanished but I have never seen one on the ground.

Frost with a Koala in Mum's Garden

The Closest Koala to the house

A little Zoom goes a long way

On the second day we were in Adelaide, Mum found a dead koala on the road during her morning walk.  She said it was too big for her to move off the road.   She reported it to the council and it was taken away.

Despite signs to warn drivers to go slowly to avoid hitting koala's, especially at night, there are many koala killed on the roads.

At Cleland Wildlife Sanctuary we lined up for 20 minutes in the rain to have a chance to stroke a koala.  The fur is surprisingly soft and warm - not coarse as I had expected.  Whether or not you have them in the garden, they are iconic animals and tourists love to see and be seen with them.

The Cleland koala monument

Wren at Cleland with the captive koala whom he stroked.

Driving down from Cleland through the mist Mum spotted another wild koala in the top of a gum tree.  The tree was growing on a steep slope below the road so the koala was swaying the mist, not too high above eye level.  Mum is the master koala spotter and sees them all over the place.