So, way back when we only had one kid and he was a baby, I was a stay at home mother and Mate was a working student, and we had one vehicle and never saw each other. Our income at the time was id/s-s which is diddly over squat minus the squat in which diddly is an imaginary number, and we had to cash out our pennies to rent movies from Blockbuster.

But dammit, we wanted date night.

So one night, we had a coupon and some pizza bites and decided to make it a double feature, and we rented Somersby with Richard Gere and Jodie Foster and Wild at Heart with Marisa Tomei and Christian Slater, and I hope you'll all forgive me for the spoilers when I tell you the hero dies at the end of both movies.

And that we only wished somebody had spoiled the movies for US. 

But they didn't. So there we were, FETAL on the couch at the end of Wild at Heart, wailing, "Wait a minute, he fuckin' DIES???" and Mate says to me, "Great date night, honey. We should do this again." And then we were laughing and sobbing at the same time and the couch was a mess, and it was another ten months and a new baby before we had enough money to hit the movies one more time. 

Now flashforward thirty years.

And Mate and I have made a date night appointment to see A Man Called Otto. Now I'm not going to spoil the movie for you--I will say that it was ultimately WAY more uplifting than either Wild at Heart or Somersby, and that there's a lot of suicidal ideation in it, so if that's a trigger warning, be aware.

But I will tell you that at the most emotional point in the movie, I was sobbing, and Mate's shoulders were shaking, and we were two of four people in the theater ugly crying all over ourselves and I turned to Mate and said, "Date night hasn't been this much fun since Somersby and Wild at Heart, and suddenly we were laughing and bazooka wookie snot-sobbing all over each other, and the intervening thirty years between the set up and delivery of that joke only made it richer.

There's got to be some ​benefits to aging after all, right?

So Bryar (Chicken!) called me yesterday, in tears. 

"Mom, I'm taking tomorrow off because a kid hit me repeatedly in the face and bit me twice and I had to yell at my aid and..."

And essentially had a shitty day all around, and kudos to her for saying, "I'm calling a friend of mine I TRUST with my class to come sub."

The kid who assaulted her--12 years old-- has been a problem. He assaulted an aid (not a very good one, by all accounts, who tends to escalate situations and behaviors) and Chicken before. He's a classic rules and regulations conundrum. He SHOULD be expelled, but there's a rule that says you can't expel a kid if they haven't attended so many hours of school. The rule is meant to protect kids from teachers who abuse the system--and yes, there are some--who will expel a kid they just don't like without making a good faith effort to teach the kid in the first place. The rule does NOT account for special needs kids who attend school so rarely that an instructor's attempts at basic behavior modification have no chance to work, rendering the kid a random chaos bomb. Once every two, three weeks, this kid attends school, creates weapons out of standard classroom objects, and goes around attacking teachers, staff, and other students. And then, when the bruised/bleeding teacher says, "Can we get this kid out of here please?" they are told that the kid's attendance isn't regular enough to expel.

I think they're going to overcome it this time--the principal doesn't want to let the kid back in because he's a danger to students and staff and it's a mess, and, like I said, she's taking an extra day off to make a four day weekend, and her entire staff is like, "Well done!! You do that! Well deserved!"

And I am drawn back to a week ago, when Geoffie ran around the restrooms again and came back to the car covered in people poop. 

Yuck. 

I wrapped her up in a towel this time and called Mate so he'd have the kids ready to wash her, but the kids were like, "People poop? Mom? The hell!"

And I was like, "Well, kids, there was a storm raging and the parks and rec people didn't get the bathrooms open and the homeless folks didn't have anywhere else to go."

And suddenly (this was ten minutes before I was on a Zoom panel by the way because my family sure can pick their moments) I was in an argument about how my dog covered in shit was all the fault of Republicans and late stage capitalism because if the capitalist pigs hadn't been allowed to run rampant the cost of housing wouldn't be completely astronomical and there wouldn't be so many homeless people and they wouldn't need to sleep at the park and use the bathrooms and be forced to crap on the bathroom concrete when it rained.

And I replied that yes, the world was a fucked up place but sometimes the best you could do--the best ANYBODY could do was defend the innocent from the people who'd been too fucked up by a hostile world to function. (This is sort of the theory behind all the zombie movies, actually... that just occurred to me as I was writing. I shall call it zombie theory from here on out.)

And that applies to the situation with the kid in school too. Yes, it's fucked up that this kid with the shitty homelife and the parents who can't get the kid to school more than once a month should now be so completely damaged by the world around him that the place where he should be safe now needs to be made safe FROM him instead of FOR him. It's fucked up. There is no doubt. This kid is twelve and at this point the best bet is Juvenile Hall because THEY at least are getting funding to deal with violent kids with severe learning disabilities as schools are not.

But nobody at the school can change any of that. All they can do is keep the kids who are NOT violent safe from this kid who keeps chasing them with scissors and beating up their teachers. 

​And every time I see some stupid fucking white person whining about "making schools safe" by banning books or imposing religious beliefs on a secular community or suggesting teachers should carry guns (oh my God the rampant fuckihng stupidity there) I'm going to say what I've always said.

I'd suggest they spend a day in a classroom to see what the job really entails, but they're so stupid there's no way they can NOT damage the students further.

They're the worst zombies of them all.

Okay-- Can you see the difference?

My photographing skills really don't do this justice, but I'm just so excited about this!

Most of the pictures--the pictures of the more colorful scarf--are of a scarf I made using two different Cotton Cakes. The cakes are cunningly designed--the yarn is made up of four strands (two plies per strand) of brightly colored yarn. The color shifts are made ONE STRAND AT A TIME. So, four strands of paddy green which changes to one strand of light green to three strands of paddy green, to two strands of light green and two strands of paddy green--and you can see the flow of the scarf in the pictures.

I made this scarf (which is insanely long) according to a pattern I found on Ravelry, and I loved it--but it wasn't that warm. Colorful and exciting, yes, but warm? Nope--cotton, right?

Anyway, it's pretty, and it caught the attention of my friend who asked (nicely and respectfully because us yarners are a prickly bunch) if I could make one for his friend.

I said yes automatically, ignoring a couple of facts about myself.

A. Sport weight cotton yarn takes forever to work up.

B. That pattern is SO long.

C. My hands hurt--my arthritis isn't quitting because Christmas, and cotton makes them hurt worse.

D. I get bored super easy, and doing the same pattern which is long and painful to begin with wasn't going to make me work any faster.

E. My friend--and his friend--live in the Bay Area which is not a place for cotton scarves in the winter. 

So aftrer the beginnings of that project sat in my bag for a good three months, I finished my Christmas knitting and had an epiphany.

I could, with a little imagination, achieve a similar effect using two strands of soft, warm, squishy wool/acrylic blend that was achieved by the cotton.

I simplified the color pattern--by a lot--although it would be fun to do a full out rainbow like this, in smaller color sections, don't get me wrong. And I changed up the stitch pattern, to something that would make the most of two strands of soft, squishy warm wool--something that would warm little pockets of air against the skin and keep the wearer really wrapped in joy, so to speak.

And then I added pompoms. 

The result is a little less subtle--and, like I said, fewer colors and shades, but... but I'm pretty excited about it. 

And, you know. I thought I'd share.