Welfareloser's Blog

My sister, EvilBigmouth, and brother-in-law, PhillyCheeseSteak, are both architects. EBM’s company focuses on student housing and educational facilities, and specializes in schools for those with special needs, like schools for deaf or autistic children. PCS’s company focuses on theme parks. no shit. PCS is the guy who designed the new Cheetah Hunt roller coaster at Busch Gardens, Tampa. apparently, he did a good enough job on it that they then handed him the multi-bajillion dollar construction project at the Kennedy Space Center. No shit! the man got skills.

So instead of flying his ass back and forth from St. Louis to Cape Canaveral, they moved his ass to Florida for two years. which means we have a free place to stay in Florida. VACATION TIME, bitches! all we had to do was get there.

the 11 hours from iowa city to denver is pretty much the limit of what we’re willing to do in a van with 4 kids. the 25 hours from iowa city to merritt island was not fucking happening. but plane fare for 6 isn’t the easiest thing to come up with on a resident’s salary, either… oddly enough, though, the podunk regional airport less than an hour from house has round-trip direct flights to orlando for $250 a person. so!

it went amazingly well. really, the only hangup was trying to get through security… apparently, the way the make sure children too young for drivers licenses are not terrorists is to require each child to hand his own boarding pass to the TSA officer and state his own name.

right. we’ve got one kid who can pull that off. Evilgremlin is a few weeks shy of 12. he’s smart, he’s responsible, he knows his first name. EvilGremlin sailed right through gate security.

next came MonkeyBeef. I handed him his boarding pass, which he promptly wadded into a ball and damn near threw across the room before his daddy stopped him. the twits cackling didn’t make him any more inclined to do what he was told. after clutching his wrist and guiding him to hand the boarding pass to the TSA officer, i asked him, repeatedly, to say his name. his responses included “no.” “hi mommy!” “get on the plane now?” and “what’s YOUR name?” i finally hit him in his soft spot – he’s learning to read, write and spell, and wrong answers are irresistible to him. so when i hissed “F-E-L-I-X spells ‘turd,’” he chirped, “no, it’s FELIX!” beaming at the officer and pointing to himself.

next was DramaQueen. the kid whose kindergarten teacher described as “capable of amazingly advanced work on those occasions when he chooses to join us from the parallel dimension that he usually inhabits.” the kid who i sometimes find standing in front of the open refrigerator, staring blankly ahead, and when i ask if he’s looking for food, answers (after a half-minute pause) “i don’t know.” the kid who was already so absorbed with looking like a deer in the headlights that i couldn’t get his fingers to grip the boarding pass. after the fourth time the officerasked him “what’s your name?” DQ opened his mouth… he took a breath… his lips began to move… he paused… exhaled… started over… finally, his voice squeaked out… “why do you need to know my name?”

fuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuck.

anyway. we eventually made it onto the plane. my original decision to take a plane was based on 25 hours in the van being the shittier of the two options, even if all four kids spent the entire 2-1/2 hour flight screaming in terror and throwing up. but we lucked out – the weather was good, the dramamine worked, and everyone loved the flight.

4 days on the beach!

and 5 nights of hanging out with the family:

the toy:

the learning curve:

apparently, the new toy handles a bit differently from the old toy it replaces. PositiveRoleModel twanged himself so hard with the bowstring that he thought he was going to have to go get the welt drained as it swelled. this picture is almost a week after the test-drive injury. but the freezer is full of deer meat again, so i guess he’s trainable.

…stop me if you’ve heard this one.

So, the zombie and Mario costumes are re-used from previous years, but the Spartan costume from the Halo video games and Marcus Fenix from the Gears of War video games were newly constructed this year. DramaQueen’s Spartan involved an official Halo mask, motocross body armor that had been clearanced out on amazon.com and then covered in digital camo duck tape, and the UNSC belt buckle and pins we used for SpazMonkey’s much more ghetto Spartan costume from last year:

SpazMonkey’s Marcus Fenix involved motocross armor, an x-acto knife, white, yellow and blue craft foam, a ripped-up black t-shirt, and official GOW cog tags:

MonkeyBeef wore EvilGremlin’s old Mario hat and a foam mustache for two days leading up to halloween, and then wanted nothing to do with the mustache when it was finally time to get some damn candy:

and i’d like to mention that i once again got fucked out of my butterfingers this year. at least this time i prepared in advance by buying a bag of them for myself. but seriously. you disappoint me, Iowans.

…or, “same shit, different day” for short. Anyway. We just finished a week-long standardized test. And I hereby confess that I am now the parent I used to make fun of. I MADE MY KIDS STUDY FOR THE ELEMENTARY SCHOOL STANDARDIZED TESTS. Yeah, I know. I fully appreciate how fucked up that is. Here’s my take on it, though: Don’t hate the player; hate the game. I hate the game, but I’m damned sure going to do what I can to help my kids win the game. This No Child Left Behind bullshit is supposed to measure how well the school is doing. However, it’s used to measure my individual children against all the other kids in the country who have to take this test. It shapes how teachers view them. It decides whether or not they get into the gifted program. It dictates what math track they’re put on. IT GOES ON THEIR PERMANENT RECORD. Eek!

The biggest problem i have with this is that the test is a piece of shit. It doesn’t measure their aptitude for learning. It doesn’t measure what they have and have not learned. All it measures is how good they are at choosing the least-stupid answers to poorly-worded questions. Seriously. I could go on for pages about all the stupid fucking questions and answers, but will spare you the diatribe, and myself the cortisol surge, and limit myself to a single (paraphrased) sample “science” question.

Yahaira is doing science. She puts two bean plants in pots. She puts one pot in a window in the attic where it’s quiet, and the other in her bedroom window where she plays music for it. The one in her bedroom grew taller. What was she probably testing?

a) if plants grow in the dark
b) if onions make her poop stink
c) if plants grow better with or without music
d) if plants grow better in the attic or bedroom

Apparently, the “correct” answer was c. This question was in the 6th grade practice test book I bought. And both my third-graders also realized that there were two variables in this experiment, and that putting each of the variables in a separate answer choice and pretending that one is right and one is wrong is FUCKING BULLSHIT.

Ham-fisted. This is the term i used over and over again while teaching them how to choose the “correct” answers. These questions were written by ham-fisted motherfuckers incapable of nuance. All of the details that spring into your mind do not exist for the knuckle-dragging asshole who crayoned this artificially-science-flavored bullshit. If you attack this test armed with all the scientific knowledge you have acquired from reading thousands of pages worth of high school and college-level books, you will fucking fail.

The first round of practice tests were frustrating as hell for them, but after going over the answers and explaining the Hamfist Principle, they developed the Hamfist Corollary, a sort of ITBS WWJD: “What answer does the idiot want me to choose?” Going into the second practice test, they improved their scores fromaround 80% correct to over 90% correct.

The Council of Barely-Sentient Hamfisted Assholes who get paid by taxpayers to write this bullshit have a handful of obvious favorite topics. We spent a couple of days making study sheets. “Characteristics of Important Taxonomic Phyla, Classes and Orders” (Birds have feathers. Snakes have spines. Penguins are birds. Whales are mammals. Spiders are not insects.) “Differences between Animal and Plant Cells” (Cell walls.) “Orders of Magnitude and Spatial Relationships in the Solar System.” (Venus is closer to the Sun than Earth. Mars is farther. Jupiter is a lot bigger than Earth and a lot smaller than the Sun. Comets and asteroids are not planets. The Sun is a star.) “The Carbon Cycle.” “Characteristics of Ecosystems.”

The third round of practice questions had all three of them at 100%, which was pretty goddamned gratifying. Not as gratifying, however, as what we did with the scribbled-up practice test books when ITBS week was finished: made smores over their flaming corpses!

To celebrate the kids being back in school, we did some fun shit without them. There are very few bands that PositiveRoleModel and I both enjoy, since his musical taste tends toward “unpolished garage-tinged angst you can mosh to” and mine tends more toward “bubblegum twitpop with as few instruments invented before 1950 as possible.” One of the bands we both love is They Might Be Giants. Unlike some of the bands we’ve seen in concert repeatedly over the years, TMBG’s audience has not aged with us – they tend to play small venues on college campuses, and their audiences are a good mix of Gen X, Gen Y, and now Millenials, who turned a song about the chemistry and physics of the sun – from TMBG’s most recent children’s album – into a screaming mosh pit. Nerdgasm!

I also went to an Erasure concert. Despite the fact that it was a specific condition of our marriage that he accompany me to Erasure concerts, PRM assed out for the third time in our ten years together. He gets away with this because of his huge cock. So I took OrangeJewess instead! This worked out well not only because she’s a good date, but also because she lives quite near the venue in Chicago. The venue itself is unimportant. What WAS important was that it was a couple of blocks from Revolution Brewing.

ME: so i just looked at that on google maps. and looked at nearby restaurants. Revolution Brewing. they get 140 characters: bacon fat popcorn, goose island, smoked tomato sauce. so, you’re not, like, real jewish, right?!?!??! actually, they have potato cakes. they don’t specifically say those are fried in bacon fat…

OJ: Good call on the Revolution Brewing. Good beers and food. The bacon fat popcorn is something. Duh, it’s the first thing I ordered.

ME: good. because excessive jewitude on your part wasn’t going to prevent me from ordering my new favorite appetizer!

OJ: I’m a nut for popcorn! So, what’s the worst thing I can wear to an Erasure concert? I was thinking drag with a full 70s mustache and chocolate packy or just going totally hick in my “Does this Hat make My Ass Look Big?” tshirt. Maybe combine the two?

ME: technically, the worst thing you could wear would be a god hates fags t-shirt, but that doesn’t sound nearly as fun as the porn-stache.

so OJ did wind up wearing about the most inappropriate t-shirt for this particular concert. see, erasure is gay. really, really, gay. actually, the songwriter/soundmixer half of the duo is married with kids, but the lead singer is gay enough for both of them. and the music is gay. you could bitch at me for employing crass stereotype, or you can just accept the fact that the duo responsible for the soundtrack to Robot Unicorn Attack makes the most exquisitely gay music the planet has ever seen. seriously, I FOLLOWED A RAINBOW TO CHICAGO.

anyway. OJ wore a KSHE95 t-shirt from the 80s. KSHE95 provided the burning-down-the-trailerpark soundtrack to our childhoods in St. Louis: Ozzy, Motley Crue, Guns N Roses, and anything else with hair, leather pants and a drug problem.

KSHE95′s mascot is an anthropomorphic pig with a stratocaster and a mohawk named “Sweet Meat.” Somehow, this picture of OJ with Sweet Meat on her chest and a bowl of bacon-fat popcorn in front of her wasn’t enough to get her kicked out of her religion. I’m going to try photoshopping an uncircumcised cock onto her, and if that doesn’t do it, Judaism officially wins the “Most Inclusive of the Big Five Religions” award.

one of the fun parts of playing munchkin is that it has tons of expansion packs. you can get as streamlined or as silly as you want, by adding or removing the portals to different dungeons, the ability to ride steeds, the new races like orcs and gnomes, the new classes like bards and rangers.

obviously, around here, the sillier, the better. we use all of the expansions at the same time: the pink and glittery fairy dust cards! the munchkinomicon cards! the “mighty mask of the munchkin!“

so in a recent game, Spazmonkey wound up being an orc bard.

SM: wait, what’s a bard do?
me: travelling storytellers. they sing. and tell people the news.
SM: can orcs sing?
me: they probably sound pretty terrible.
PRM: they probably sound like willie nelson.

it changes every few weeks. this what it currently looks like – at least, when drenched in sweat after a long night of extremely athletic fencing with PulledAPeter, who got a pimpy new SLR camera before heading to college in Manhattan in a few weeks.

EvilGremlin: 6th grade. still playing the bass. continuing in the twice-a-week gifted program, plus getting bussed to 8th grade pre-algebra an hour early every day.
DramaQueen: 3rd grade. new braces. starting in the gifted program. still can’t find his ass with both hands.
SpazMonkey: 3rd grade – different classroom than his twin for the first time. writes books and snickers mercilessly while his brothers do their extra homework.
MonkeyBeef: one last year of preschool. he did it all for the booty.

a few random pictures of things we did during our last month of non-traveling summer vacation…

we finally went to the iowa city children’s museum. i haven’t ever taken the kids there, i think mostly because i’m so goddamned offended that it’s at the mall. yeah, because i want to drag my kid past the build-a-bear workshop and the popcorn factory to drop $7 per head on a shitty little pseudo-educational experience. as i expected, it was pretty rinky-dink, and geared mostly toward kids 6 and under. but it was worth one visit, entirely because of the aerodynamics room – the twits spent the entire visit designing ever-more-elaborate paper airplanes and stomp-rockets, and helping littler kids with their designs and construction. MonkeyBeef stomped a few rockets, and then came up with increasingly unsafe ways to go down the three-story slide.

there were a couple of trips to chuck e cheese, of course, where, in spite of the fact that the twits spent 2 hours and 90% of their tokens on a shoot-the-aliens video game that gave no tickets, we STILL managed a massive haul of prize loot with thousands of tickets, because they discovered how to beat one of the new games. this time, it was a massive version of the “operation” board game, where you use a joystick to line up a crane, then hit a button to drop it, and hopefully pick up the body part you were aiming for without hitting the sides of the hole it was in. they played it a couple of times, and then said, “hey… there are two axes of movement you can control here, neither of which you can see well from the joystick. but if you happen to have two brothers who can each line up their respective lines of sight with each of of the axes, and give you a thumbs up on when to hit the button… we’ll make millions!” the technician had to refill the ticket dispenser in the game. twice. so, i’m sure that game, like all the other games they have figured out how to rape for thousands of tickets at a time, will mysteriously disappear before our next visit! either that, or they’ll get red-flagged like card-counters at a casino, and escorted out by security.

then there was the undergraduate research fair, where polished poster presentations of truly impressive scientific and medical research from every department were presented. also, free cookies. the older boys got to go pepper some other poor bastards with science questions for a few hours… and MonkeyBeef enjoyed the “cookie party.” so much so that, every time we drive past the student union now, he asks if he can go back to the cookie party.

and finally, as PRM begins his final year of post-post-post-graduate training, it’s job interview time. so the kids got to experience the wonders of “some other motherfucker is paying for this” travel, complete with presidential suites at hotels with river views and gourmet room service.

this one is from sioux city, which is the current frontrunner due to excellent schools and an excellent fencing club in town (compare PRM’s other interview this month, the marshfield clinic site in wisconsin which offers me the almost-dealbreaking choices of a 90 minute drive to the Minnesota Sword Club, or the cringe-worthy amateur fencing scene at the University of Wisconsin campus in town.)

the kids made me shit. the three older kids made me potholders (MonkeyBeef got as far as picking up one of the cloth loops, putting it on the loom, and then demanding angry birds to shoot with his improvised slingshot.) and the three younger boys made me strawberry-scented soaps shaped like cupcakes (EvilGremlin got as far as the same room as the soap-making and threatened to barf from the smell.)

awwwwwww. i’m feeling the love. and smelling it!