Tuesday's NoPubl - Moving part 2

  When I left you for father's day sweetness, I was writing about moving.  I was talking about how to help the kids over the hump.  We'll begin where I left off.

. . .

• If it's not too far, or the expense is not prohibitive, let them invite an old friend to visit.  My experience is that they spend hours telling the old friend how great the new place is - even though they were planning to run away and go back to the old.
• This brings me to another point.  If you think your child yearns so desperately for the old place that you think they might run away, capitulate and arrange a stay for them at the house of a friend.  When that runs stale with too little privacy and too many new rules from their friend's parents, they can come back with honor.  
• If you wait until they run away, then you have to wait until they are ready to negotiate.  (Providing that they reach a safe haven.)  A teen has a hard time admitting that he/she has made a mistake and needs to return home.  The teen prefers to forge ahead until things get better - or until things are so bad he/she is forced to admit failure.  Even then, a teen would rather think it was your fault.  Don't take it personally.

Women need friends too.  So, now you are in the new town - again - and the house looks bare even with the packing box end tables and your husband is at work (making new acquaintances) and the kids are in school (or in the case of little ones, happily outside playing in their new yard), making new friends, and there you are staring at the soaps and worried to death you'll become like them.  You find yourself leaving the TV on even when you're out in the yard just so it isn't deathly quiet when you come back in.  I see two choices:

1. Get out and find some friends.
2. Go back to work.

I put going back to work second for a reason.  The people you meet at work are usually friendly, but not always friends.  Going back to work for the sole purpose of being near people just doesn't always fill the bill.

Note:   I found myself at a luncheon put on by the local welcome wagon.  After lunch there was a fashion show where they tried to convince the older attendees that they could and should wear fashionable, younger-looking clothing (all of it pencil thin, of course). At that time, I realized I didn't want to be there, I didn't like the people I was meeting, and what I really wanted to do was go back to work.  I love working.

Still, I stayed at home until I knew where my teens liked to go and who their friends were and only then went to work.

  Marilynne

A NoPubl for Saturday - Moving

This one was written about 1978.  It speaks for itself.

Moving

Well, here I am in a new town again.  We have moved so much these last few years that I feel like a perpetual newcomer, a packer and mover by profession, and a stranger living in other people's houses.  I'm not really a professional mover, but I rate packing as one of my skills should I need to support myself and the kids one day.  The last move, they only broke one thing and I wasn't the person who packed it. 

The movers broke one of the kid's beds by putting it together wrong, then snuck off without saying a thing about it.  I didn't know it was broken until my daughter cried out in the night and found herself on the floor.  It wasn't sleeping on the floor that bothered her, just the sudden descent.

Two houses ago she had to sleep on the floor because the room where she slept with her sister was too small to hold two twin beds, if you left the frames on them.  Two mattresses on the floor, yes - two beds, no.  She's used to roughing it.  They called it their "pad" and had black light posters all over the walls and ceiling. 

Later, I found out there was even a little "local atmosphere" outside the windows.  Someone was pushing dope there every night.  (We lived in an apartment complex.)  That's a little much to put up with.  I'm glad we moved from there - I think.

I can't complain that our new house doesn't have room for all the furniture.  The girls are growing up and they need a little privacy.  We made certain while we were house hunting that we chose a place with plenty of room.  (I flew here for a weekend house-hunting trip.)  We also made sure we weren't on the regular dope route.  (The kids are growing up, you know.)

The furniture.    We have plenty of room here, but the furniture is pretty much the same as we had two moves ago when we lived in the little place.  That brings up a technique for moving. 

• Buy furniture that will spread out or squeeze together
• Buy furniture that fill function in different rooms
• Buy furniture in neutral colors.  

We moved from a pale gold carpet, to a rust shag carpet, to a white with green stripes carpet, to wood floors and beige carpet.  If I had bought an avocado green sofa, no mater how pretty,  for the gold carpet house, I would have been in trouble with house #2.  The same applies for turquoise in houses #1 and 3. 

Believe me, there is enough trouble trying to fit your household needs into whatever your income says you can afford without having to look for a house that matches your furniture or worse yet, buying new furniture every time you move.

Packing boxes.   I discovered during this last move that packing boxes on the floor of the closet make great drawers for younger kids and leave plenty of space for play in the bedroom.  Packing boxes can also double as night stands and end tables.  All you do is throw a fabric or a cheap tablecloth over them and place a lamp on top.  The boxes they use for packing lamps are particularly nice for this purpose.  Eight of 10 people will call you clever - for the first year. 

We've also tried using the super size packing box for a makeshift dinner table, but there's no room to put your legs.  You end up lounging by the "table" in a style like a Roman orgy, with a hotdog dripping mustard into your lap.

Save some of your packing boxes for the things you had a place for in the last house, but you don't in this house.  If you save it, it may look great in the next house.  For me there's always been a next house. 

The kids.  Save some pity for your kids.  You were probably consulted about moving.  Your husband probably got the word from higher up.  But the kids, well face it, you just picked them up from where they were finally beginning to feel like they belonged and put them down again in a new place.

If you have older kids, you've given them extra work to do, griped about how they did it, and have always been too busy when they wanted to talk about it.  Sure, you say "Give it time and you'll like it here."  That is no comfort to the kid who thought she was going to make first string basketball  - before you moved - and who just found out that soccer is the big game in the new town and everyone else has been playing soccer since babyhood.

There comes a time when, although you ache for adult company, you are going to have to spend more time with the kids.  You have to take the place of the friends they left behind and be willing to abdicate when new friends take your place.

It's easier with smaller kids, because you're the center of their little world.  You can take them in your lap often, talk to them at their play, make cookies, color together, and play with them and their toys.

With older kids, teach them to play with your toys. 

• Teach them how to bake bread, pizza, and bagels.  
• If you have room, indulge in a ping pong table to encourage activity and crazy laughing.  Ping pong tables are inexpensive and easy to get rid of when you move again.
• Teach them your favorite card games, bridge, pinochle, or canasta.  Card games played for fun are a great way of diffusing tension, and you all will have tension.
• Go out to dinner.  I don't know why this one works.  Later, you won't be able to make them go to dinner, but when you're new in town, they LIKE it.

Be patient  with teens.  Let them stay home from school now and then.  Not every day, but perhaps when you sense they don't feel like facing another day of strange kids, rooms they can't find, no one to sit with at lunch, and teachers who think you couldn't know anything at all because you came from another school.  Be sympathetic.  They've got an uphill road.

Let the kids call their friends "back home."  Encourage them to write letters.  (This was in the 70's remember.)  Supply the stamps.  Show them how to save by using economy night rates.  Forgive them when they sneak in a person-to-person call on Wednesday afternoon because "I knew she'd be home then Mom."  (I have to explain to my younger readers, that for a big extra charge you could call and ask for a specific person.  If that person wasn't there to take the call, you weren't charged.  If they were there, the extra charge was by the minute.)

NOTE:  We're still far from the end of this note.  I'll continue it tomorrow.

Marilynne

Friday's noPubl - What's a typewriter?

Whatever IS that bunzie?

Our lives have changed so much.  I wrote the next piece in the early 1970's.  I have a hard time believing this was me talking.  It's hand typed on legal sized onionskin paper (so it erases easily).

Writing Tools

I have a new typewriter ribbon.  It surely is an improvement over the old ribbon.  It's the wrong ribbon for this typewriter, but I put it anyway.  By the way, I think it's silly to write yourself notes on the typewriter.  If it was one of these machines that talked back to you, wouldn't I feel strange?

I saw a machine like that at Learning Foundations last winter.  You put a card in the machine, typed the spelling for the word, and then the machine pronounced the word and gave you the correct spelling.  I wonder how a kid feels with this big machine telling him how to spell.  He certainly must feel he's smarter than the machine.

I feel that I'm smarter than the machine.  I just stand here watching it parrot out the words on the card and I feel so superior!  As a human being, I think thoughts other than those programmed into me and I make mistakes.  I have a right to make mistakes.  The machine doesn't. 

I resent the attention the machine receives for flawlessly reproducing the thoughts of men, and then receiving all the praise.  Isn't it so smart!  Think about it.  Somewhere there's a human who thought all this up.  This machine that receives so much attention is just a glorified tape recorder.

There's another machine - the computer!  Do you know how much of our lives are tied up in computers?  Did anyone ever tell you how these things count?  By ones and zeros.  You know - 01001101.  Using that method, the computer can count all the way up to 386,995,774,123.44 (where on earth did I get that number?).  Even my kindergartener can do better than that.

They do have a super smart computer that counts 2 x 2 x 2 x 2 x 2x 2,  The only problem with it is that it can't talk in any terms but 2 x 2 x 2.  So, if you want to know what 64 multiplied by 128 is, you have to tell it 2 to the 6th power multiplied by two to the seventh power which gives you 2 to the 42 power, and which I am not going to work out for you.  Use your friendly neighborhood computer.   (I am dismayed to find out that I can't raise the power numbers for easier reading.) 

My husband has a computer he uses in his work.  It saves him countless hours of man labor.  This computer is so small that it fits in the palm of your hand.  It's so fast you can't see the numbers flying by.  It just sort of blinks and gives up the answer.  It can even remember the answer until a later time - up to 16 totals, I believe.

That brings up microfilm and microfiche.  Now they don't have to save your original correspondence, they just film it on an 1/2 inch square of film and file it away with millions of other tiny squares of film  That way, there's room to keep everything.  No one has to clean out files any more, they just film it.  Do you have any idea how many boxes of tiny films are sitting around these days?

So people rebel.  The fold, staple, and mutilate the punch cards.  That's not destructive.  That's how an ordinary person shows a computer how easily they can crash it.  You can X-ray microfilm (accidentally, of course) and the film gets all cloudy.  Then we feel superior to the math machines.  They can't do anything until we let it.

Have you noticed no one criticizes or threatens to do away with these inventions?  Last week I saw someone give a computer a karate chop.  It was hillariously funny.  And we all laugh at a movie where a computer goes bersrk.

Still, the typewriter is quietly taking its place among the indispensable.  No one would think of throwing it away.  Besides, mine has a new ribbon in it.

Marilynne (who is shaking her head in disbelief.)