Educational. Testing. For the last couple of days, I've had to deal with Educational Testing Service, the nonprofit maker of the world's make-you-or-break you academic tests. In education, ETS does everything: the Test of Spoken English, major field tests across the disciplines, the MAPP test. ETS determines your college-readiness with the SAT. They write the tests that determine whether a teacher is qualified to teach your child.

And I'm hoping it's because they're really doing all that assessment that their site is so fakakta. You have to really slog through a lot of cutesy little tabs and redundant menus. I'm imagining that a visitor to the ETS site is extremely motivated: she wants a copy of her GRE scores, he wants to cancel or schedule a test. But ETS wants to make a good impression, so first they seize the moment of your rapt attention for branding, and then they little-puffy-clouds you into a state of academic self-confidence, a brief high of ambition that candy-coats the $130 you just put on your VISA to be shared between ETS and Thomson Prometric, the authorized private-sector proctor of these exams.

I don't want to have brand awareness of ETS. If I think about ETS too much, it makes me a little paranoid; ETS starts sounding as mysterious and powerful as the DHARMA Initiative. "Wait there, Michael," says ETS. "We just need to give Walt his AP Latin test--he might comp out in college!" Dude, who are these people? Is there a back exit to the hatch? Do I really have to wear this crazy suit?

I entirely sympathize with parents who homeschool. I love public education and the people who work in it, but there's too much testing. Even if you as a parent opt out of the tests for your child, the curriculum is still based on test performance. The kids know what a big deal these tests are. They get benchmarked at J's school within the first few weeks of the school year. They know the objective for the year is improving their performance on that test. That's the message we send kids about learning with No Child Left Behind: your goal is to improve on tests. Ah, the mystery of childhood! Horseplay is down 40 percent, youthful exuberance has been cut in half, high spirits are at an all-time low.

And ETS also has the parent by the shorts, somehow. They're going to make me do algebra.

I don't have enough dendrites left over from when I learned algebra the first time--it was 1988, and I had a spiral perm like David Coverdale's--to do it now. So I attempted to download ETS's prep-course software, which is free when you pay them $130. That part was weird. Anyhow, I went to download the software and found that every download apparently blows up. ETS has dedicated part of its customer service team to the problem and sends a CD-ROM of the program to you by mail automatically when you register for the test. That's the way educational technologist types solve a problem: by lowering the water rather than raising the bridge. Should we fix the download, Captain? "No, no. Let's leave it broken, but devote a customer service team to talk to users with the problem, and we'll send it out on disc automatically."

Oh, and: before you get to the download, you'll have to fill out a page of personal information on a server that's not secure.

Finally I just called ETS. Once I got to a person, it was no problem. She thought it was funny rather than annoying that I had a small child really struggling against the urge to climb onto my head and be as disruptive as possible after the previous twenty minutes of me being on hold and being yakked at by the ETS Guy recording, unable to listen to both of them at once, getting grouchy.

"Good luck on your exam," she said.

sick What is this thing going around? I ran a fever all night, I've been coughing, I'm delirious as a little girl, and I haven't left the house all day. Lozenges!

Motherhood has no sick leave. You can't lie down and rest. You can possibly sag into a semi-recumbent position and stay there for a few minutes before something else spills.

New column New column up today.

Are we safer yet? Apparently not.

girlfriend If I can get over my Allergy Season Drag-Ass, we're going to a party at Baldo's girlfriend's house. Hope it doesn't rain on the pinata.

Baldo has been to his girlfriend's house once prior; his pants fell down while he was holding two stuffed animals, one in each hand, and he froze, bare-assed, for several minutes, unsure of what to do. He's got the Ingman flair.

I'm not a kiddie yenta, and I don't like assigning romantic intentions to children's friendships. That stuff creeps me out a little. ("This picture will be so embarrassing when they're dating!") Yet from day one of knowing this kid, Baldo has insisted she is his girlfriend. He doesn't make a big deal of it and demurs whenever I suggest we call her on the phone or try to meet up at the park. "Girlfriend" is a state of being, not a state of doing.

"So," I said, "if you guys never play together, how exactly is she your girlfriend?"

"Well, you know," he shrugged, digging in our vinca. "If she needs any work on her yard, she can call me."

I like his style. That's the Texan Love Call, you know.

Resolved: Don't fuck men who read Maxim Via Feministing, which is almost too depressing to read these days.

Cute, guys. It's a slide show of the most "unboinkable" women on television. Because, you know, there's no other criterion for a woman's existence.

If you think Pam Grier is unboinkable and "keg-shaped," then please step aside and let me at her: I've been waiting since Coffy.

Next up: TV's most unboinkable men. God, where to start?

mom-o-rama I've been so mom-o-rama this week. Meetings, appointments, one open house. A dental checkup for Baldo. (Everything's great. On him. Memo to self: You also need dental care. It's been, what? Three years? Gross.) The minute stuff stops happening, I crawl into bed and sleep there. One of my favorite people was in town visiting from the Land of Enron* and I couldn't even make it down the street to freakin' Amy's Ice Cream to meet them--not even with Shiner ice cream as an inducement. That's sad.

We beat the rash back a bit with the elimination of the Dangerous Bagels (you can't buy the store brand; it has a shared-equipment allergy warning--that shizzle is fo rizzle) but Tuesday saw a barking cough. It sounded to me like a barking cough. It wasn't exactly a full-dog barking cough. "Kind of like a seal," Baldo says. But it was a little barky. But no fever. Never fever. Welcome to fall in Austin.

Meanwhile, on my mind: Why Willie Nelson? Does anyone feel personally imperiled by the pot smoking of Willie Nelson on his bus? I think the guy's getting Chonged on account of how he makes name-brand biodiesel. It's the Ethanol Enforcement Police, putting the hurt on Willie. Meanwhile, torture in Iraq is worse. But man, we sure showed Willie Nelson, dog!




*Don't you just love these Enron guys? That Jeff Skilling's got a temper! I love the bit in Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room where he cracks during the conference call.

No. Fucking. Way. The first female space tourist books a $20 million ticket.

(The article makes a pretty big deal over her being Iranian, burying the $20 million figure. Shall we put a pin in that?)

But my point here is you couldn't pay me $20 million to go into space. Let the record state that I don't ever want to be anywhere without an atmosphere, ever. I mean, there's "atmosphere I can't breathe," like being temporarily underwater, and then there's "no atmosphere at all."

Never.

I know human beings are supposed to be curious about space. You know, I'm totally not curious about space. I'm afraid of space. I don't want to be out in that shit, and I don't want any of that shit coming in here either, like that Oort Cloud shit. When I put together our giant floor puzzle of the solar system, I have to take a Klonopin looking at the asteroid belt that separates the inner and the outer planets, looking at the surface of Mercury so close to the sun, looking at the bright poison of Venus, looking at Saturn--the gas giant surrounded by rings of ice and shit.

Basically I'm not compatible with space. I think that people who strive to get into space are wack-ass motherfuckers. "But we have to colonize the moon!" We do? You ever think about harnessing the kind of intellectual capital and other resources that would be required to transfer people to the moon and using them to, like, fix Earth? But fine, you want to see the Earth from space. That's your party, and I'm not going to stop you. I hope you get what you want from the experience, and I think you are a wack-ass motherfucker. Try not to blow up.

Rate in Order Rate in order of scary:

• Well, there goes the economy, starting with Ford. (I had a person try to sell me on corporate bonds from Ford once. Whoa, Nelly!)


• Pope Benedict XVI pretty much calls Islam "evil and inhuman" and the Mujahedeen Army then offers to "shake your thrones and break your crosses in your home." Great news, everybody!


• Boom! It's hurricane season!


• People threatening to walk around killing people randomly.


• How about this one: US to cut funds for two renewable energy sources? Way to go, guys! We need fewer sources of energy around here!

Ann Richards, no! Ex-governor of Texas and kickass grandmother Ann Richards is dead at 73.

positive thoughts, part II I don't usually do happy-happy-joy-joy, but Karen inspires me. So what the fuck. Let's do this.

1. First off: Isabel's mom says: "Isabel's white blood cell count is up to 40,000 from her inital 21,000 count. Isabel's platelets are up to 11% up from her inital 3% Isabel's red blood cell count is up, also, but I forget the number. All her blood counts are up. Does that mean she is making bone marrow? Probably. Is if from the GCSF shots (to stimulate white blood cells) she gets every night? They don't know. She's been a mystery since day one."


2. I am watching Deadwood on DVD, and I motherfucking love it. It's just like Kari says.


3. Baldo's favorite song is still the William Shatner cover of "Common People." We agreed today that we'll write a letter to Joe Jackson thanking him for his contribution, which rocks. "Common People" came up in the shuffle today this morning while we were eating waffles, which we threw aside to dance. Waffles: also good, especially when multigrain.


4. RSS feeds for the Chronicle!


5. And did you know it's $20 Day at Envie?

As always, there's more. But as with all things it must wait until after preschool pickup.

Nine. Eleven. Each September 11 Baldo and I visit our neighborhood fire station. (Well, technically we're between two stations, so we go every-other between them.) We try to bring with us some token of appreciation for first responders--to remind them how grateful we are to have people among us who will run into a motherfucking burning building about to collapse in order to rescue our lucky asses.

Baldo has taken on more and more of the task with each passing year. It used to be me with a baby and a Gladware of cookies and a picture I drew while trying to interest my son in art. This year Baldo has chosen his own medium--printouts of the buildings he made playing Tonka Construction 2.

"I will show these to the firefighters!" he says. "They will like them and be happy."

So we printed them out and taped them together into a card, and I wrote Thank You for Helping Us on the top. Baldo wrote his name at the bottom--at least the part of his name he'll write. (He's very shy on the first letter. It's a tricky one.)

I know children are "supposed" to do representational art, and their drawings are chicken soup for the adult soul and whatnot, but construction is such the center of my child's world that this may be as close as he'll get. And when my kid gives you one of his buildings, you know he likes you. He just doesn't draw apple trees, the half-circle sun in the corner.

We're going by the station after school. I feel awkward giving firefighters pictures of buildings--cockeyed buildings designed by a kid, some without windows--on the anniversary of a day when people used buildings as weapons. But my kid doesn't understand that concept. He didn't see it happen.

Dear HMO, Hi. How are you?

You remember that uterine biopsy I had in April, was it? Yeah. I rocked that like a CHAMP. It was sort of unpleasant being scraped with a cannula, but that's what you do when you have irregular uterine bleeding for three continuous months. You say, "Wow. I'm bleeding almost constantly. Think I should ask a doctor about that?" And then you go in because "constant bleeding" is the kind of symptom you think even an HMO could get behind exploring.

The doctor was really interested when I told him I had a family history of breast cancer and my mom was currently being treated at MD Anderson. So he ordered a biopsy. It came back negative, and since we ruled out endometrial cancer as a cause of the bleeding, everyone was happy and we all went our separate ways, me still bleeding but less worried I had six months to live.

Then I got your bill for the biopsy. You won't cover it.

You people suck.

You make your own decisions about what is and is not medically necessary for me. That's my physician's prerogative, not yours. If you have a problem with that fact, I might suggest not participating with my doctor in a service arrangement and accepting my family's astronomical health-care premiums every month. They rival my mortgage. And it sure was cute of you to hike your rates just enough to absorb the "raise" AISD gave its teachers this year, which actually was a raise for you.

You guys sure have American families over a barrel. I curse you all with bleeding genitals.

lock the doors Because I don't go out much and talk mainly to small children, I was very surprised today to discover that there are 493,000 extra people in Austin (that's a rough estimate, based on the Allandale HEB) and they're wandering around all distracted wearing orange. Ohio State is involved, they tell me.

At first I was all, "WTF? OMG!" because I was just trying to get pads for my Clorox Ready-Mop, which I can't find anywhere, and of course I should use washable ones from Etsy, but I just haven't quite gotten to that yet. Plus we were out of things to eat, and that draws us out into the light sometimes. And would you believe that we actually thought when we left the house that we were early enough to make it to Hancock Center? Ha. Not going near that thing called campus today. Somebody, please bring pie and new episodes of Pee-Wee's Playhouse.

Kristin Rowe-Finkbeiner, You Rock So Hard You Can Have My Ass Anytime An interview on Feministing with the co-author of The Motherhood Manifesto.

when you're a mom you're a mom all the way! Newsflash from the listserv:
Fuckin' a, y'all. We're having a sandbox refill party at preschool. It's gonna be off the HOOK! Two families have already contributed their shovels and wheelbarrows, we got a dad coming in from Manor with the dirt, which was donated, and I might recommend we post a sign-up sheet for bringing snacks.

I mention this because I became really, sincerely excited about the sandbox refill party at preschool. That's my idea of fun now: pour a whole lot of sand into a big box and eat kolaches. There comes a point when you just give in to it. Is there something self-evidently wrong with playing with sand and eating kolaches? I thought on it a while, and it came out sounding like a pleasanter idea than a majority of other things.

Maybe it's that I'm getting old and slow and amotivational, which you might think would suck, but in truth it's not all that bad either. Or maybe I'm just continually surrounded by small children and their logic. Now they come in groups: with best friends, with siblings, with neighbor kids and classmates. There was a moment over the weekend where I was making a stack of quesadillas for several children at once, and the phone rang, and I stuck it next to my ear and tried to talk, but my brain collapsed and my hands were busy frying and all I could do was stand there and say, "I'm making quesadillas." That's exactly what Baldo sounds like on the phone. He reports what he's doing, then gets stuck.

When Baldo's bedtime comes, I pretty much crater. I have to get up early to be ready for the sandbox refill party.

The Other J. Give it up for The Other J., who's 34 today.

I would wish him adventures today, but I'm sure he's already pursuing a better idea than I can even generate.

For Isabel Help Isabel.

Or learn more about aplastic anemia, joining the marrow registry, donating frequent flyer miles, or donating your baby's cord blood.

I met Isabel's mom on the hipMama boards. She's a LiveJournal friend of mine. I know her the way we Know People in the Computer these days, and I'm very sorry Isabel is sick. Also, Isabel's mom has been kicked in the kidneys a few times on Teh Internets, and I think it'd be excellent if we could use our powers for good.

No fucking way. INT - BALDO'S ROOM - LATE AFTERNOON.
After an extremely traumatic bath, BALDO, a four-year-old kid in footed frog pajamas, reads a lite chapter book entitled Larryboy and the Emperor of Envy. He remains in place for twenty minutes, then falls asleep.

I'm completely serious. That just happened.

That's never happened before. One, he's taking a nap? What the fuck? He hasn't taken a nap since his second birthday. He'll be dragging up against the wall like an angry drunk: No, I will NOT nap, and you're NOT going to make me take this nap never EVER! He's not just opposed to a nap right now, he's making a stand against ALL NAPS EVERYWHERE! ATTICA! ATTICA!

So he just read a book and fell asleep, as if he's 27 years old.

I fucking unloaded the entire dishwasher and reloaded it, and he's STILL asleep. Is this what children do, this "nap"? I could go in and cook something not frozen in a bag to eat? This shit kicks ass. I better not get used to it.

Take a number Tom Cruise has apologized to Brooke Shields.

Good for you, Tom. The rest of us are still waiting to hear from you.