Head Pick-up Hiccups

Last night Sariah informed me that she had hiccups and that when she laid her head on a chair and then hiccuped, the hiccup would pick up her head.

I'm always looking for an opportunity to be sarcastic or play a joke, so I ran with it.

I said excitedly to Joseph, "Oh no, she has the head pick-up hiccups. You better take her to the hospital."

Joseph, to Sariah, "Go get some socks. We gotta go!"

Sariah runs to her room.

Joseph said, "Oh! Never mind, we don' t have time for socks, we've got to get to the emergency room!"

They run to the door where the shoes are kept and Joseph can't stop himself from laughing so the joke is over.

But, the really funny part was that Sariah's hiccups were over too!

Oh No!!

Brigham and I were sitting near our big window when Joseph pulled into the driveway. I said something like, "Look, who is that coming?" then, "Look, it's Papa, yeah, Papa is home!!" Joseph waved at us. Brigham suddenly said, "Oh no, he's gonna come in and tickle me!" How funny is that? Then I said, "Ah oh, you better go hide." He slid off the couch and ran off as fast as his little legs could carry him!

Baking and Cooking MAGIC

Even if you are only a mediocre baker/cook, like myself, all you need to become an excellent baker/cook is a husband who says things like, "Kids, do you know how lucky you are to have a mom who can cook so well? Do you know how lucky you are???"

I've Got a European Cold!

I didn't even have to travel to get it, which doesn't seem fair somehow. It seems that a professor at MSU was in Denmark (I might have the country wrong) at some academic meetings and caught this terrible virus, bringing it home to the U.S. Then, some people in Joseph's office were with this professor at some mandatory meetings last week. Joseph told me about it and was feeling lucky not to have caught it himself, since he's a magnet for exotic viruses and homegrown viruses too, for that matter. This weekend, I started having painful joints and general weakness and then yesterday the cold part hit both Joseph and I. Down and out for the count...

Joseph

It's his birthday. I won't say which because he's so much older than myself (inside joke).

I'm so happy to celebrate the birthday of this incredible person. He's the reason for much of the good in my life. Just four months after we were married, he agreed to let me go to Monterey, CA to study marine biology for seven weeks. Then two years later, he agreed to let me go again! We had such good times when he'd come from Utah to visit me there! This summer, he took us all to the upper peninsula. I don' t know when we ever would have gone, but he scheduled his meeting in Marquette, MI during the summer so that he could take his family with him. This past weekend, he took each of our children to a quiet place and had an interview with them. I loved reading the list of questions he had decided to ask them. Those are just three of many examples of wonderful things he has done to help me and our family.

This is the kind of dad he is:


FUN! We're all so lucky to have him around!

Happy Birthday, J!

P.S. He has great taste in menu too. Tonight's dinner is Teriyaki Chicken and for dessert Cream Pies!

Sand!

I vacuumed out my van today because it has been all summer with lots of time on the road. With the rising costs of fuel, I can't justify lugging all this sand with me as I drive. I estimated vacuuming out 2 pounds of sand with another 1 pound that is so ingrained that it and my van are indistinguishable.

The Magic Treehouse

Joseph is amazing! I had this idea that we (he) should build a tree house this year, because who wouldn't want to give the kiddos a magical place of their own (OUTSIDE the house)?

He made some plans and then began his work. The only thing is that his plans didn't work out. Who needs them? He reworked them as he went along (Have I ever mentioned how brilliant he is?). He even finished it in the dark and then stayed up half the night planning his modifications. Here are the photos I took to show the progress:





The kids are loving it out there. They climb up there and just stay. It's magical! Can you see me smiling from where you are?

"LUVYAPA"

A couple of weeks ago, Joseph happened to be home when the UPS man dropped in with a package. On the way out of my driveway, the UPS man turned around and asked whose car was parked there. I told him it was Joseph's and he laughed and said, "LUVYAPA?" I hurriedly explained that some of the kids do indeed call him "Pa." That license plate message was cooked up for last Father's Day and now we've rolled around to another.

I'm taken back to when Joseph first became a father. He was so in awe of that little creature, staying up all night if necessary to help soothe Nathan's little colicky belly. Swinging him back and forth to Bach's Air in G. Speaking hushing Spanish tones in the wee hours of the night. Then came May, the sweet little girl child. She didn't need her Papa to pull all-nighters. Still there was the temptation to stay up later than necessary just to drink in her loveliness. Each baby has brought their own wonders and troubles into the world. Joseph has been there for each one.

As the children grow, I see him expanding himself. Taking them one on one. Teaching. Talking. Playing. Laughing. He knows where his treasure is! Happy Father's Day, Joseph!

A Love-Hate Relationship with my Bathroom

But, first, a couple of thoughts.

The sky is a lovely cerulean blue today and it's about 60 degrees and breezy. I simply have to share this information with someone.

Me: The sky is cerulean blue today.

Joseph: What color is that?

Me: Well, it's the color of the City trash bins, but a little more sky-ey. Know what I mean?

---

Sariah was playing around with the gummy worms I bought her (another shopping bribe) and was breaking them in to pieces to make a family.

Sariah (playing with her worm family): What? The baby has come?!! I can't believe the baby is already here. (Dad voice) Oh, look, the baby, I think I'm going to eat her. (Mom voice) NO! You can't eat her, she's our baby!!!

---

I am a ball of anger bouncing around the world. This is probably due to my coming off my medication. Joseph very kindly asked me if it was worth it to come off of the medication. I can't answer him. It's not time yet. I need more time.

---

Did you know that ants protect the peony blossoms until they are ready to bloom? I think they protect them from wasps laying their eggs, but I could be wrong. The ants benefit because there is some kind of sweet stuff they eat on the peonies. It's been a long time since I read about it and I don't have time to research it now. Still, every year when I see this it amazes me. Luckily I read about this before the first time I ever saw it because I'm definitely someone who would have set out to eradicate the ants if I didn't know better.

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Nathan took the camera outside yesterday because he wanted to try to photograph some birds. He got a great shot here of a male and female cardinal. Can you find them both?

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Now, for my bathroom.

When we were searching for houses, there were really only three or four in our price range contrasting to the hundreds of similar houses for sale like ours now. Limited choices can be a good thing. This house was the best of the three, but we still had some concerns because the inspector told us that there had been standing water in the basement, despite the owner insisting otherwise. I'm a worrier. Joseph was probably pestered to death during that time because I really wanted this house, but I also really didn't want problems.


On our second time through the house, I noticed something. The bathroom walls had a pattern on them. The then-owner had sponge painted this pattern onto the wall with a sea sponge. She had used three colors. Cornflower blue, moss green and a dark mauve color. While I'm really not very fond of the walls in my bathroom, something hit me about those colors. Those were the exact colors of the towels we have. I'm not kidding. We had at least two or three of each of those color towels including hand towels, rugs, and wash cloths.

To me, this qualified as a sign. It meant that things would be o.k. if we bought this new house. You know what? Looking back over nine years, we've had some problems, even some water in the basement, but I don't regret buying this house. I think it was a good decision.

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P.S. It's really hard to redecorate a bathroom when there's only one in the house. I'll be waiting until we have more than one bathroom to paint over the sponge painting. Until then, it's a good reminder that God is watching out for me. He always has and He always will.

Sucker Punched: The Sequel

Today, out of the blue, the same boy just punched me in the nose again. I must say, the shock was not as great as the last time, and I pulled him aside, and told him not to punch me again. He said "I had too much candy today! I'm CRAZY!"

He is on notice!

A Card, a Message and a ZING!

This blog post is more spiritual in nature, but I feel like posting it here rather than my other blog.

Joseph and I have made each other some cards over the years. It started when we were dating and he made me a card for something or other. I was really impressed! He drew a funny little heel on the back of the card with the label "Heelmark: For when you can't afford to send Hallmark." College students...!

After he made me a few spectacular cards, I caught on and made some of my own. I've run across some of our cards recently. Today, I ran across this one that I made some years ago and the message was for me:



Have you ever had that feeling where some idea was trying to get through to you and then suddenly ZING! you got it? There's an idea floating around time and space for me right now, but the ZING isn't happening. I'm too collapsed, fearful and spending my energy trying to ward it off.

I'm going to try deep breathing!

Doughnuts and gratitude

So, tonight I brought Krispy Kreme home for the Family Night treat. The kids were eating them, and Sariah says "Pretend we got these from a nice person. We would say 'Thanks for bringing the doughnuts.'"

All hypothetical, of course!

Our Dilapidated Shed

The first spring we moved to this house, the neighbor girl dropped by to give us some mail that had accidentally gotten delivered to their house. We were working the back yard and she came back and sat down and proceeded to say, "What are you gonna do with that shed. It is UG-ly." We lived with it for a while and then one year Joseph painted it, but it has become more leaky and rodent filled so today is the day we say good-bye. He's also breaking up the picnic table that has rotted out underneath.


We rented this lovely sight (above). I'm sure the neighbors love it, one especially, is probably waiting on pins and needles hoping this means we'll be moving.


That sledge hammer is the best purchase we ever made! Man, that husband of mine can do anything! Good luck with the big cement pad, honey!

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States and Countries

My kids are always wanting me to list the states and countries I have been to, so here goes:

Countries:

1. Guatemala (as a missionary)
   
2. Mexico (to visit my dad's childhood home)
   
3. El Salvador (unauthorized excursion as a missionary)
   
4. Canada (for a professional conference)
   

States:

1. Hawai'i (construction work)
   
2. California (construction work, professional conference, job interview, vacation)
3. Nevada (scouts)
4. Arizona (vacation, professional conference)
5. New Mexico (driving through)
6. Utah (lived there)
7. Idaho (vacation)
8. Montana (vacation)
9. Wyoming (vacation, scouts)
10. Colorado (vacation)
11. Texas (professional conference, work, visit relatives)
12. Oklahoma (driving through)
13. Kansas (driving through)
14. Nebraska (vacation)
15. South Dakota (vacation)
16. Minnesota (consulting)
17. Iowa (work)
18. Louisiana (professional conference)
19. Tennessee (consulting, professional conference)
20. Kentucky (consulting, vacation)
21. Illinois (vacation, professional conference, work)
    
22. Indiana (vacation)
23. Ohio (vacation, job interview)
24. Wisconsin (consulting, professional conference)
25. Michigan (lived there)
26. New York (vacation)
27. Maine (vacation)
28. New Hampshire (vacation)
29. Massachusetts (vacation)
30. Rhode Island (vacation)
31. Connecticut (vacation)
32. Pennsylvania (vacation, professional conference)
33. Maryland (professional conference)
34. Delaware (professional conference)
35. Washington, DC (professional conference)
36. Virginia (professional conference)
37. North Carolina (work)
38. South Carolina (professional conference)
39. Georgia (professional conference, vacation)
40. Florida (professional conference, vacation)

What's missing?

1. Alaska
2. Washington
3. Oregon
4. Missouri
5. Arkansas
6. Mississippi
7. Alabama
8. North Dakota
9. West Virginia
10. Vermont
11. New Jersey
    

Readability

This is just from my recollection in the late 1990s, not from original documents of the research on readability.

The first readability formulae were based on a small set of passages that had been rated as appropriate for specific grade levels by a single person in the 1930s. That set of passages, and the associated grade level ratings continued to be the benchmark against which the validity of all readability formulae were measured lasting into the 1990s. Most existing formulae, therefore, continue to be based on a single person's ratings of grade level appropriateness from 70+ years ago.

There are two basic measures in the vast majority of readability formulae:

• Vocabulary load, typically measured as (1) the percentage of words in a passage that do not appear on lists of frequently used words, or (2) the average length of words in a passage (in letters or syllables). Other measures are used as well. Each of these options has its own set of problems.
• Syntactic complexity, typically measured as (1) sentence length (in words), or paragraph length (in sentences). Other measures are used as well. Each of these also has its own set of problems.

When I was working for the BYU English Language Center on an educational software product called SoftRead, I programmed over 30 different readability indices into the software. There were about as many different measures of vocabulary load and syntactic complexity as there were readability formulae.

For the stats geeks like me, the typical methodology, and an oversimplified methodology at that, is to run a linear or non-linear regression of the benchmark readabilities (the criterion for validation is always an expert human judgment of readability) on the measures of vocabulary load and syntactic complexity. One has to wonder why readability formulae are used at all for legal purposes, since the ultimate validation criterion is expert human judgment of grade level.

In very simplistic terms, this is using a statistical procedure to estimate what is already an estimate given by a human. Pretty difficult to defend.

There are some more sophisticated approaches to readability, which essentially use the statistical sub-specialty of psychometrics using cloze tests (passages with a few words strategically removed where readers have to supply or select an appropriate word to fill in the blank) where passages are rank ordered statistically to identify harder passages and easier passages. Some of the problems with this is that the selection of words removed is very important and still remains a subjective portion of the procedure. One pro of this approach is that it does not rely on human judgment of passage level, even though it does rely on human judgment of what words should be removed. I tend to be more accepting of this type of readability formula, though still quite skeptical.

I thought I was going to do my dissertation on readability, until I decided that it was all smoke and mirrors, and I had better not base my future career on something I thought was not sufficiently valid to have a strong place in education.

Some of the reasons I came to that conclusion were the following:

• The genre of reading (e.g. story, information, poetry, test items, instructions) is typically not varied in the development of readability formulae. It is typically narrative (story) passages that are used to create the formulae, but then the formulae are applied to all kinds of genres. This is a very strong assumption that the relationship of vocabulary load and syntactic complexity can be extrapolated from the sample of passages to a completely different type of passage.
• The literature indicates that high vocabulary load and syntactic complexity are less important in predicting comprehension than people's level of interest in the subject of the passage.
• The literature indicates that at best readability identifies a rough level of comprehensibility, but should not be used to guide writing. When readability indices are used to guide writing, very complex writing may be done with short words and short sentences, be nearly incomprehensible, and show up as a very low level text (and vice versa).
• The literature is rife with applications of readability formulae to short passages, yet the literature is also full of cautions against using readability formulae to evaluate the reading level of short passages.

At the same time, I did notice something interesting about the measures of readability. Almost all measures of readability use in their formulae measures of the average (the average word length, the average number of words a common word list, the average sentence length, the average paragraph length).

None of the formulae look at variation in these measures (e.g. the standard deviation of word length, sentence length, paragraph length). It seems to me that changes in vocabulary load and syntactic complexity across different portions of a text would also change the comprehensibility of a text. I never carried out the study I had planned to include these things because I became convinced that even if I could achieve better relationships between computed (estimated) readability and expert ratings using these new indicators, I still could not overcome the issues described above.

Despite this, I think readability results probably give some useful information. I just wouldn't want to use it for anything important. Using readability formulae to satisfy curiosity is probably safe. Any type of evaluation really seems to be taking it too far for me.

I wonder how readable this post is. D'oh!

A $300 Haircut

Due to the fact that I was very tired yesterday from my decluttering efforts (and secretly due to the fact that I might be a little behind Joseph in value of services provided) and because he wouldn't pose properly for the before picture, I'm charging extra for my barber services. The supply and demand principles of economics were still in play. It was past closing time at Fantastic Sam's.

Before:


After:

Cheap Handyman

The other day when we pulled out of my Dr.'s office, Joseph saw a sign that said "Cheap Handimen." I looked over at him. I said, "I don't need a cheap handyman, I have a free handyman." He scoffed, "Your handyman isn't free, he charges $50.00 an hour." I'm pretty sure the amount of annoyance I felt didn't exude from my face. "Well," I retorted "I just hope that when all of the fees for the jobs we do are calculated, you don't owe me too much!"

Still, it's so nice to have a handyman! He's far from free (he came home yesterday with a new table saw), but he does gud wurk.

Remember my broken wall? He fixed it! Doesn't it look nice?





And yesterday he put shelves in the tops and bottoms of some of the closets. I'll keep him around.

Here's the before picture of Joseph's closet (names have been removed to protect the guilty):


Here are the after pictures:



Many of those binders actually contain my college notes, so they have yet to be dealt with.

Sucker Punched

So, yesterday, I taught Cindi's primary class of 6 year olds at church. During a lesson from one of the primary leaders, the kids were all asked to show what strong looks like. While all the other kids flexed their muscles, the boy sitting next to me reared back, punched me in the nose, and said "That's what strong looks like!" He was so proud of himself!

I tell you, I saw stars! My nose still hurts!

Crazy Fluke!

Earlier today I logged on the the lds.org website (website of my church) today to get the phone number of my Relief Society President. The sign in window came up and since my computer saves passwords and Joseph signed in last, it had his information in the little boxes: username and password. I clicked the "Sign In" button which takes you to the page with a link for ward directory. This was when I was confronted with the information that my husband has the address: Revere, MA 02149. Great! When did he move? I swear he was here this morning getting ready for work like usual, now he lives in Massachusetts!?! I wish he would have consulted me first. I could have told him that the Massachusetts State Tax form is really hard to fill out. That you practically need a Master's Degree in forms in order to file taxes there. I would have told him that Plymouth Rock is really just a big rock that's cemented together housed in a big shrine, stamped with 1620 (Oh! wait a minute, he's seen it). I would have told him that the aquarium in Boston can't hold a candle to the aquarium in Monterey, CA and the coastlines can't compare either. (Hmm, he's seen both). I would have told him that people in MA are cold and unfriendly (Wait a minute, he married me, didn't he?). Maybe he made a more informed decision than I'm willing to admit.

Well, honey, I'm blowing you a kiss (hand to mouth, Ppfffwah!, blowing). I hope you decide to come back. I'll miss you.

P.S. It's true. By some fluke, Joseph's church records have been transferred to the Revere 1st (Spanish) Ward!

Changed My Comments Settings

I decided to change the settings on my comments so that anyone, even anonymous users, can leave a comment. Some family and friends have told me that because they don't have a Google account, they don't comment. If you decide to comment under anonymous, just sign your name, so I know who it is!



As a side note, have you heard of Tintin? I never had, but was introduced to me through "The Read-Aloud Handbook" by Jim Trelease. Joseph read them as a kid. I asked Joseph and Nathan why Tintin is so great. Joseph, who is into learning about WWII right now, is intrigued by the issues raised in Tintin. It was written just post WWII. So maybe this is equivalent to the t.v. program "24," (made for a post 9/11 world) except it's primarily written for kids?? Nathan and Joseph both like the language used in Tintin's adventures. Nathan really likes the pictures.


Nathan spent his entire week reading Tintin's adventures. It's apparently my fault because I picked up the books on hold at the library and among them were four of the books as pictured above. Each adventure boasts at least 8000 words which is pretty darn good for a graphic novel. To paraphrase Jim Trelease, "Kids don't even realize how much they are reading." They are recommended especially for reluctant readers.