Sofi's New Year's Resolution

I actually did happen to talk with Sofi last night about her New Year's Resolution. About how this is a time of the year to reflect about the past year and think about what we'd like to improve about ourselves in the future.

It might seem like this topic is a bit above our almost-4-year-old but she was actually quite interested. (She is acting quite mature these days...well SOME days :-) When I asked her what she would like to get better at this coming year she paused and thought a bit and then said that she would like to not be so cold in her clothes. I agreed that clothing choices are important. So we talked about how the clothes she chooses do affect how comfortable she is and that one has to sort of figure out what is needed and then change if what was was chosen doesn't work.

I was quite impressed with this resolution because she does often get confused as to why she needs warm clothes on a cold day instead of cold clothes on a cold day. And she gets confused over which clothes are warm or cold. In fact this summer I tried to help her by attaching a little picture of a snowman on the drawer containing her warmer clothes and a little picture of a swimming pool on the drawer containing her cool clothes. But all that resulted in was her thinking she was going to go swimming whenever she picked clothes from the swimming pool drawer! Her choices are also heavily influenced by fashion whims rather than temperature needs of the day but I know we will continue to work on this. Heck! Most of my High School students are still working on this!!! I wonder how long it will take them to figure out that spaghetti straps and flip flops are NOT sexy in the middle of winter...

All in all I think her resolution is spot on. Especially since today was a very cold day (a high of 12 degrees F!). I was wearing wool pants and fleece around the house this evening and my daughter was dancing around buck naked before her bath, giggling. It made me cold just looking at her! And yes, I must be turning into my mother.

Happy 2008!

Happy New Year to everyone!

It is said that one should start off the new year in the manner that you want the year to be. If this is the case, our new year is looking good. Despite some sickness (Isaac still recovering from a bad cold that came with a bad cough, and myself coming down with a sore throat and the chills) we spent New Years Eve at a city-wide party for families. "I love that place!" was the Sofi quote as we left the party. It was at the nearby high school and the gym was filled with inflatable slides and inflatable bounce houses and many other fun, exciting, distracting, yes-I'll-gladly-wait-in-line-for-that activities.

And today we started our New Year with a party with friends, where we all got together for a big meal and then the kids went to the basement to play and the adults stayed upstairs for conversation and a chocolate taste test (for you email subscribers more info on the taste test should be included below, if not follow the link). It was all a very enjoyable way to start the year!

Reflecting back on the year, we've seen Isaac grow from a small babe not able to move around or feed himself, to the exact opposite, crawling all over and grabbing hold of many things to go in his mouth. Sofi has even more imagination, playing with princesses and acting out dramas, singing songs and dancing even more than last year. She continues to get better and better at swimming.

Back in early 2007 Mary survived a second semester filled with show choir invitationals, including one hosted at her high school, solo/ensemble competitions (again hosted at her high school) and a school field trip over spring break to California. Together the family survived a trip to Chicago so that I could go to a kite festival there... and our survival (or at least mom and dad's sanity) was in doubt on the way out, and after the first day there! Thankfully the following day and the trip home proved to be redeeming.

As for those requisite resolutions, I'll have yet to ask Sofi what hers are, but I wouldn't be surprised if they involved TV or hot chocolate. Mary is already talking about her garden, and has found a used copy of the Square Foot Gardener, and she is very excited. So I'm sure spending time in dirt is one of Mary's resolutions.

I never seem able to complete my resolutions. Last year I resolved to send out more greeting cards and thank you cards and I failed miserably at that. I really want to do this, so I really should resolve to try this again. And then there is my health... I really should exercise more. So that is (always) a good resolution.

But this year I'm going to resolve to do something else. This is something I haven't had as a resolution before, and one that I haven't told anyone yet, but perhaps getting it out there will force me to commit to it more. This year I resolve to make more art. I resolve to work on it two hours every night once the kids are in bed, on Monday, Tuesdays, and Wednesdays. And my goal will be to create reflections on the Revised Common Lectionary.

Kind of an odd, specific resolution, I know. But with kids, the more specific I can be the more likely it will happen. This actually scratches a few itches:

• The desire to start building a portfolio
• Start experimenting with various media
• To use a blog to display work on a regular schedule (a practice in discipline)
• And a thought I've long had that "someday" I would like to create a series of art pieces based on the lectionary. In essence, to be a liturgical artist. (I probably need a special degree in this, but what the heck). And then I thought about it some more and I realized that the lectionary is a weekly thing, and that is just about the right amount of time I have for art right now. So why not just start it now?

So be it resolved. And since it is so amazingly easy to create a blog, be it resolved that all works of art created will be posted to the (brand spanking new) (un)Common Lectionary blog. If I actually follow through with my resolution, you should see something by the end of next week. But if historical evidence plays a factor in any of this, like my other resolutions this won't happen. But I don't usually make my resolutions known to anyone, so perhaps this factor alone will change things.

In closing I'd like to reflect on the news. Many newspapers and magazines like to post their top new stories of the year. I'd like to post mine. In my humble opinion, it is climate change. But this isn't because I happened to see An Inconvenient Truth this past year (though I do recommend that everyone see the movie and give it some thought). No, instead it is because of this:

• The President and the White House feel the evidence regarding climate change is not certain... a quote from whitehouse.gov, the White House's very own website: "The policy challenge is to act in a serious and sensible way, given the limits of our knowledge. While scientific uncertainties remain, we can begin now to address the factors that contribute to climate change."
• The White House has been accused by a committee of Congress of manipulating climate science, as expressed in a report which is the result of a 16-month probe by the Committee on Oversight and Government Reform.
• The U.S. proposed to weaken the Global Climate Change Treaty in Bali by making it voluntary instead of legally binding, which leads Al Gore to accuse his own country of blocking the climate talks.
• all of this while Russia, Canada and the U.S. start legal wrangling over rights to the riches on the bottom of the Arctic sea bed... which are becoming increasingly easier to access.

Talk about trying bury your head in the sand and try to reap the benefits, or to use another cliche, have your cake and eat it too. Leave it to my government to fight legal battles over the riches on the bottom of the ocean as the polar ice cap begins to melt, in order to lay claim to more oil, which in turn will only contribute to the production of carbon dioxide, which in turn will continue the melt of the polar ice cap... all the while trying to suggest that we can't really prove that climate change is really occurring. According to a report by the BBC "The current rate of shrinkage they calculate [is] at 8% per decade; at this rate there may be no [polar] ice at all during the summer of 2060." That could be within my life time, definitely within Sofi's and Isaac's. And once the polar cap is gone, it isn't coming back in any time span that will interest the human species. Some may say that this climate change isn't because of human behavior, but there has never been a time with the ice caps have completely melted. When I consider all this, I really wonder what things will be like for my kids.

On that note, let me make note of a few things for them, in case they ever happen to look back on this blog, and wonder what things were like for us...

• Today a gallon of gas was $3.09 (wouldn't be nice if they had to imagine what it was like to pump a gallon of gas?)
• I paid $2.28 for a gallon of milk in '07
• Your dad works as a dishwasher and earns about $6.50 an hour (before taxes, which take away about 25-30% of that). The federal minimal wage required by law is $5.85 an hour. Actually dad's main job is to stay at home and take care of both of you, which is mainly thanks to your mother who works as a music teacher and earns a lot more than minimum wage.
• There was snow for Christmas this year (over a foot! The news channels said that we haven't seen this much snow at Christmas for about 20 years!)
• Coldest Temperature in WI in '07:
  -35 degrees at Gurney (Iron County) on February 6 & 7.
  
• Warmest Temperature in WI in '07:
  99 degrees at both Grantsburg (Burnett County) and Crivitz High Falls (Marinette County)
• The computer I'm typing this on has a 2.66 GHz processor, 2 GB of RAM, and a 120 GB hard drive. The first computer I ever owned (a gift from my parents as I went into teaching back in 1997) Sofi is now using for computer games. She plays a game with Winnie the Pooh, one with Micky Mouse and friends, and one with Barbie as Sleeping Beauty. That computer has (at best) a 233 MHz processor, 32 MB of RAM, and a 2 GB hard drive.
  

For the Love of Chocolate

Mary loves chocolate.

More to the point, she loves dark chocolate. So for Christmas I gave Mary something I knew she'd love---a dark chocolate taste test. Seventeen different bars of dark chocolate of various brands.

The idea came from an article I'd read in Consumer Reports this past year. They'd done a taste test of their own on fourteen different kinds of dark chocolate, from the fancy organic kinds to the more consumer-based Hershey versions (not the well known Hershey bar, mind you, but their fancier dark chocolate versions). As I liked to think of it, it was a battle of local coop chocolate vs. nationwide drugstore chocolate (and that is where I got the various seventeen bars---throughout the year I bought any and all dark chocolates that I could find at the People's Food Coop and at Walgreen's).

Without giving the article away (because if you follow the Consumer Reports link above you'll only get the outline of the test, not the ratings---the results are for CR members only), what surprised me, and what Mary could not believe, is that Hershey's comes out on top. On the bottom was Newman's Own Organics.

Hence the idea for the taste test. It was more for me really---I just had to know, given no knowledge of the chocolate's origin, what Mary would really prefer.

So that is how we broke in the New Year. With four other family friends, who helped us break them into taste testing sized bits and label and number them to hide their identities. We decided beforehand though that seventeen was a bit to much to take at once, even in test tasting sized bits, so we just kept the sample size to a random six.

The results of the our sample of six? The top three (in no particular order, because everyone had their own personal top, but pretty much everyone agreed these were the top three) were...

• Equal Exchange Organic Very Dark Chocolate, 71% cocoa
  
• Hershey's Extra Dark, 60% cocoa (or as the label reads: "cacao")
  
• Endangered Species Intense Dark Chocolate with Cocoa Nibs, 75% cocoa
  

The least favorite?

• Dagoba Organic Extra Dark Chocolate, 87% cocoa
  (to be fair to this brand, this was one of Mary's top three, as she put it "It's the kind of bar was I can just have one square and feel satisfied", but was far too bitter for the rest of us)
  
• Lindt Extra Dark, 85% cocoa
  (tasted "waxy" compared to the others, and surprising because this was near the top in Consumer Reports)
• Cadbury Royal Dark
  (tasted "cheap" compared to the others... interesting, because it is made by Hershey's whose other bar rated top in both our taste test and in CR's)

We all agreed that after testing the six that we did, that it was just the right amount of dark chocolate, and that we'd be pushing it to test more. I guess no matter how much one claims to love chocolate, there is only so much one can ingest in one sitting. At least at our age any way.

I'll keep you posted as we get around to reviewing the other eleven bars....