How beautiful are these pages from the new project at FreshPlans?

In case I haven't told you (because I recognize that I've been a terrible xangan lately and might not have mentioned any of this), I won   a credit at oDesk and spent it on the design services of Jay Jaro, one of my favorite designers. He and I did a very snazzy lesson plan for a client last year, and ever since then I've wanted to do more of them with him.

Well, oDesk did a contest asking what Big Idea people would like to have supported, and I said we needed a website for math that would be as exciting as a video game and appealing to both boys and girls (math websites, as you may or may not know, tend to be horrible).

My idea won, and I received a credit sufficient to hire Jay to collaborate on a math project. We did a data analysis unit focusing on the arctic ocean habitat, and here are a couple of pages from it. It's 8 pages long, with folktale reading sheets and stuff, and there are classroom activities for it over at FreshPlans.

If you know any teachers, please share with them that we're giving this reproducible unit away to subscribers for back to school. We'll sell it in the future, and I hope to make lots more. Jay sent us the Photoshop templates so we can do quite a bit of the work on future ones by ourselves, though I'll always want to have him involved.

We were fortunate, too, that The Computer Guy was moved to optimize the files for us so they download briskly.

We also have another guy working on a math concept video for us. We don't know quite what he's doing, actually. We gave him a very open-ended assignment about a month ago and haven't heard from him. He may be deep in the toils of creative work, or he may have forgotten all about the job.

We'll see. Anyway, things are getting very snazzy over at FreshPlans.

Here at my desk, there is a complete lack of snazz. I'm wearing baggy jeans and a stained T shirt, both of which spent the night getting wrinkled on my bathroom counter, because I also wore them yesterday. I need a haircut in the worst way, and I haven't even considered make up. I guess it's okay for me to look awful today, but I start teaching on Monday.

I've been to two meetings up at the college this week, actually, and made a sincere effort to be friendly with my colleagues, whom I won't see again till next year, but I didn't feel that any of them were soulmates. We did norming for grading papers, which is a very important thing to do, I believe. However, a lot of the people in the meeting were cruel and snarky about the papers. They thought they were being witty, but I wonder whether you can really help people if that's the mental approach you take.

So in amongst my work today, I hope to make a hair appointment, and possibly to sort out my wardrobe a bit. I didn't do any shopping for BTS this year, but I think I own enough clothes. I just have to wash them, mend them, toss the ones that can't be tossed or mended into respectability. Stuff like that. Might be a weekend job.

I'm reading a book called The Big Necessity: The Unmentionable World of Human Waste and Why It Matters. This global history of toilets begins with shocking data about sanitation worldwide. It continues with engineering and environmental stuff, and goes on to the political and charitable action currently being taken in an attempt to get some kind of decent sanitation to the people of the world.

In amongst all this serious stuff, though, is a chapter on the toilets of Japan.

We learn about Toto (I'm linking you to the philosophy page of TotoUSA, but you might prefer the fun of Neorest, where you can play with the fixtures with a mere mouseover). We learn about how the manufacturers of the toilets with special washing and drying devices figured out exactly where to place the devices. We learn what Japanese toilet scientists use to simulate human waste for experimental purposes. We learn about the Sound Princess. We learn about the marketing miracle that led to Japan's totally modern toilets when the rest of the world is stuck in the 17th century, where plumbing is concerned.

Richard Seaman has a nice blog post about his experiences of Japanese toilets.

There was also, in the course of discussion about why Japanese toilets haven't caught on in America, a lengthy discussion about toilet ads and toilet paper ads in the U.S. All the revolutionary changes (did you know there were government mandated changes to U.S. toilets that caused people to smuggle toilets out of Canada? Me neither) described took place in the 1990s. I totally missed them.

Toto achieved its marketing miracle in Japan with ads about happy bottoms. A beloved actress whom the author describes as a sort of Japanese Cyndi Lauper did commercials in which she read letters written to her by her bottom and said that "even bottoms should be happy." Toto tried this in America with the ad above, and a "Clean is happy" slogan.

Apparently a product known as "Rollwipes" tried the same trick in the U.S., and raised all sorts of exciting reaction with their advertising. I don't remember ever hearing about rollwipes, nor do I remember any controversial toilet ads.

I do find the toilet paper ads with the bears who get toilet paper stuck to their fur disgusting, I must admit. That whole bear family is just too focused on elimination.

Okay. That's all  I know about Japanese toilets.

I went and sat through the Division meeting at the college. "Sat through" is really the only term for it.

The whole division of fine arts and communication was there, and we had a lot of speakers. A dozen, probably. Each of them felt that he or she had something really important to say, some had PowerPoints, one or two managed to be witty.

Overall, it was incredibly boring. I kept trying to be interested. I kept wondering whether, if I were full time faculty again instead of merely three quarter time, I would have been more interested. I tried to remember whether I had ever, in my full time teaching years, found these things interesting.

I don't know. However, we had to go to the meeting in order to sign our contracts.

There were refreshments, of which I ate none, and social opportunities, in which I took no part. Then I came home and worked on my online courses.

Later, I cooked dinner for the family and finished up the second of the fronts for this nice cardigan, "Flying Diagonals" from Lacy Little Knits. I even got a bit of a start on the back. It was a great relief to find that the lacy diagonal stripes met in the middle.

The back, as you can see here, has the lace ribs meet in the center, too. Since it's one piece, I'm confident of keeping them straight. The sleeves will be another matter.

Supposing I succeed, then this nice cardigan in Endless Summer's Connemara cotton will be very nice for fall and spring.

I tried to link you  to information about this yarn, but it seems to have been discontinued. Sorry. I was going to tell you how wonderful it was, but I will not do so, since I don't want you to pine for it when it can't be had. I am giving you a picture in better light, though, so you can appreciate the pattern.

Just don't look at the yarn too closely so you won't get smitten by it.  

Next week all the school year things, like Tuesday class and Master Chorale and such, begin. I'm trying to enjoy some knitting while I can.

Yesterday was a work day. I've nearly finished one of the two online classes I have to do (leaving aside the one I was supposed to do for KSURF and haven't yet completed. FreshPlans continues to have affiliate sales every day, but the traffic is beginning to tail off a bit. We rode the crest of the "classroom themes" search wave, and now it's time to look at the incoming waves as they start, to guess which one will be the best one to catch next. Educational sites usually see traffic fall by half between August and September, but we're hoping to avoid that.

We have a large job coming up and a meeting for it on Tuesday, so I'm trying madly to get all the school-related stuff done and out of the way early in the week. We need more large jobs to come up behind it if we're to to reach the salaries we've determined for me and #1 daughter and get the boys' tuition bills paid.

But I'm also going to do the Holiday Grand Plan, beginning August 29th. I've skimped on that for the past couple of years, but I like what it does for my life when I do it. A clean and tidy house, observation of seasonal celebrations, and a good start to the new year, basically.

A theme I have coming up this term is global warming. It's a topic in my new textbook for the writing classes I teach, and my dept chair suggested doing more of a project with a shared topic, so I picked that. I have read quite a bit on the subject and have several good books about it to use as resources.

I'm a little worried about the controversial nature of the topic; I know that people can get nutty over it. However, it's very hard to find a subject worth writing about that nobody will get nutty over, so I just have to hope I don't have especially nutty classes this term.

Then I won a credit at oDesk, which we plan to use to hire our fave graphic artist to make a cool math reproducibles packet for FreshPlans. #1 daughter and I discussed the best theme to use for it, and she came up with the effects of global warming on sea creatures. We're leaning toward doing a seal/polar bear thing, since I have a couple of good stories about shape-shifting seals and polar bears to work with, though these are aquatic mammals and not precisely "sea creatures."

I tried to find a good crustacean story, and #2 daughter came up with The Crab Prince, a fairy tale of surpassing weirdness. There is also The Sea King's Daughter, a more cohesive story but one in which it's very hard to see any possible connection with global warming.

Something to think about...

  We had a meeting yesterday with The Computer Guy. At one point, #1 daughter exclaimed with girlish glee and complete sincerity, "I just love systems! When someone has a good system, it makes me happy!"

This is because she's a Square -- not in the sense of being unhip, but in the Psychogeometrics sense. This is a personality types system that uses shapes as the central metaphor. There are Circles, highly social people who are process oriented, Triangles, who like to be in charge and have things done their way, Squares, who really like rules and want things to be done correctly, and Squiggles, who are creative people who like lots of variety.

In searching for a link for you, I see that they've updated the system so that a Square is now called a Box and there is a Rectangle. There's also a paid 10-15 minute test, where it used to be merely a matter of looking at four shapes and picking one.

It seems to me that this has spoiled the chaste beauty of the system, which was excellent largely for its simplicity. We used it at the store. You'd ask people to pick a shape (or, okay, give them a two-page forced-choice test), and you'd get a personality type analysis that was just as useful as the Meyers-Briggs inventory, but far simpler.

In yesterday's meeting, we actually had one of each of the shapes in the room, which is the ideal arrangement. The Circle wasn't really involved in the meeting, but he joined in, because that's what Circles do.

There's a book on the subject, Psycho-geometrics: The Science Of Understanding People, And The Art Of Communicating With Them, but my favorite description of the types is this one, from Your Sinclair, which is apparently a magazine in the UK:

Your Sinclair is an extremely weird title for a magazine, but I have it on good authority that people there put baked beans into baked potatoes, which they call "jacket potatoes," so we mustn't be too astonished. Also, "Sinclair" seems to have been a brand of computer there. They put prawn salad in potatoes, too. And Gloria Hunniford is a talk show hostess or something.

Now that we're all up to speed, I'll continue on the question of systems.

On the way home from the meeting, I remarked that the comment about systems was a perfect example of Square-ness. The Computer Guy, a Triangle, had smiled at #1 daughter when she said that in an admiring but astonished way, and she had said, "Fibermom doesn't like systems." The Computer Guy muttered something about uniqueness, and indeed I am a Squiggle and therefore admittedly prefer to do things differently every time.

However, I also like to think about things in terms of systems: everything in a system affects everything else in that system. By thinking in terms of systems, you can gain a better understanding of the entire picture.

"But you like chaos," #1 daughter pointed out. It's true. When I think of ecosystems or economic systems, I like to think of the richness and complexity of the systems. #1 daughter prefers not to think of them that way.

So, for example, in the ecosystem of my office, the introduction of #1 daughter and #2 son as residents, and of #2 son coming in and joining their play all the time resulted in a complete change in the system and a great deal of chaos, as you can see above. You can't see the Rubik's Cube on my desk, which I think must have been spontaneously generated by the chaos, but you can see that it's a hard place to work.

Now that we have regretfully sent #2 son back to school, I plan to get the office back to the tide pool sort of system it was, rather than the deep sea sort of thing it has become.

I think I'm coming to oceanic metaphors because I won a credit for work at oDesk, for the purpose of making a snazzy math lesson. I plan, therefore, to hire Jay to jazz up a lesson plan. #1 daughter and I came up with the idea of using global warming and sea creatures as a theme for the math lesson. I therefore have a large portion of my brain doing background tasks on the subject of global warming and sea creatures.

I have to work today, to make up for having spent Thursday playing with my kids. It's wonderful that I had that option.

I hope, though, to reduce the chaos in my office to something more like mere complexity.

And yes, that is actual knitting up there at the top. I've reached the armscye on the second front section, and am doing some fancy stuff with short rows to make the collar band. I hope it will more or less match the other side. I'm thinking in an idle manner about what I might knit after this, and so I went and looked at Twist, which has lots of really charming patterns. Each one costs seven dollars. I guess this is the equivalent of buying a knitting book and making two things out of it, but it seems expensive for a single pattern. After all, Knitty has a fall issue up and lots of patterns in it for free. As is so often the case, I like the expensive patterns better, and of course Twist isn't full of ads. What do you think?

Yesterday we went and took a couple hundred dollars out of the bank, had doughnuts (plus ham and cheese croissants, fresh orange juice, handmade hot chocolate with real whipped cream.. pretty lush) for breakfast, and hit Target for our back to school supplies.

Notebooks and things were going for a song. There were composition books for fifty cents and spiral notebooks for fifteen. Perhaps people are moving away from paper and these were all the leftovers. We bought a lot of those, and replacements for such of #2 son's dorm gear as got destroyed last year, and then spent a small fortune on toiletries.

#1 son had hurt his eye, so he couldn't wear his contacts. He was therefore leaning in and peering at the labels while deciding between facewash with extracts of lemon grass or one with energizing bubbles. The rest of us jeered at him. We must have looked like a particularly horrible family to observers, making fun of our son's infirmity. But, really, he was making it funny.

He's a funny guy. His pizza rap is a gem.

We zoomed home to put the stuff away. I finished up my faculty website (for the moment) and we headed back out to spend the rest of our cash on the movies. Dinner for Shmucks with popcorn, Coke, and Raisinets. Then home, where I attempted to do some billable work without success, and we ordered in pizza.

If you're keeping close track, you'll have noticed that apart from mushrooms on the pizza we had no vegetables and chocolate covered raisins were the only fruit. No lean meat, whole grains, or nonfat dairy products, either.

It was fun, anyway, and we had some good talks.

#1 daughter then went out to see a meteor shower.

#2 son is going back to school tomorrow. He's an orientation leader, so he's the first of us to return to the autumn schedule. It's been wonderful to have him here. He has actually spent most of his time at home playing video games. Some hanging out with friends, a few games of Ultimate Frisbee with them or Scrabble with the family, but mostly it's been video games.

We're going out this morning for Back to School shopping. This was for many years a huge big deal at our house (four kids -- obviously it was) but not recently. In recent years, it's been a matter of scouring the internet for the cheapest textbooks, and even that comes to way too much money. This year, we're out for pencils, a laundry bag, and the experience. There may be a couple more things on that list, but that's most of it. Doughnuts, I think, are key.

He and #1 daughter have both been sleeping in my office. Video games have been played in here, too, and the TV is usually playing DVDs of "Always Sunny in Philadelphia," a program which has a soundtrack consisting largely of shouting and whining. With the temperatures in the triple digits, it's also very hot back here, and of course I can't open the blinds or turn on the lights till people get up sometime around noon.

I can't claim that this has been completely without effect on my work. At the very least, these are stressful working conditions.

This week, though, I've mostly been working on my own back to school stuff. I've set up a faculty web page (it's not very good, but you can look at it if you want) and am working to get it and my online courses together by the August 20th deadline. This is a lot of hours of unbillable work, frankly.

Still, it must be done. I heard someone give a talk on success once, and she said that successful people do their best on all their projects, not just the ones which will obviously provide good ROI. You never know, she said, and my experience certainly supports that claim.

I'm also writing about doctors today, probably after the Back to School Expotition.

#1 son is registered for a bunch of lit course this fall. #1 daughter may take Photoshop at the community college where I teach; it's being given at the same time I'm teaching a hybrid class, so we can carpool.

I'll be writing about doctors again today. I spend a fair percentage of my time writing about doctors, and I can't help but notice how many of them are on a second marriage.

Very few are single. In fact, I can't remember any single doctors. But a lot of them have been married for three years and have teenage children. I assume this means they were divorced and remarried.

I write about all kinds of people, and I haven't seen this with politicians, academics, musicians -- just with doctors. Are they too busy to be good husbands the first time around? Does the first wife support them through medical school and then get tossed away for a new trophy wife when they get successful enough to be written about? I don't know. It just seems odd.

I haven't done much housework. I've done a bunch of work, but not much housework at all. Sigh.

I cleaned the kitchen, though, and that's a start. Really. I'm trying to convince myself of this.

#1 daughter went back to the Deep South to pack up stuff and is on her way back even now. #2 son is leaving in a  week to be an orientation leader, a job that involves being paid to go rock climbing. #1 son is waiting to hear back from a new job he's fairly excited about, and will be taking 12 hours of lit classes in a couple of weeks. #2 daughter is shadowing a VP in her company as part of a Leadership Program. I have a new textbook, and should therefore be working on my fall classes, which begin in just about two weeks.

So, yeah, there's a bit of Back to School in the air.

I even went to the local school supply place and bought some supplies. 

I've been resisting this. First, I have to pay tuition and also #1 daughter's salary, so I try not to buy things. Second, this is the store that put the final nail in the coffin of the store I worked for. It's a long time ago and I'm over it, but we did have a bit of bitterness at the beginning, all of us, so there's a habit of not going there.

However, my husband inadvertently locked up my old supply of center-making materials.

He was concerned that someone would lock the file cabinet where I keep these things. he has been concerned about this for some time, and always makes a point of coming in and lecturing me on the subject. One day he came in to lecture me and I wasn't here, so he decided to examine the file cabinet minutely in order to judge the degree of danger of inadvertent locking.

In the course of this, he locked it. No one would ever have locked it if he hadn't done this, I'm sure, but there it is.

So I took the opportunity to do some research on the current trends in classroom decoratives.

At least I don't have to do bulletin boards.

I did make some cool centers, though. I wonder how horrified my students would be if I brought in cute little owl-themed centers.

Today I plan to clean house.

I haven't started yet even though I got up with my husband at 4:30 and therefore could in theory have a spic and span house by now. Instead I have been playing Every Word on my Kindle . It's one of those games that goes very fast so you keep thinking "just one more" and suddenly it's been an hour. The game is free, so presumably you could get a free Kindle for PC app and the free game and play it on your computer.

Then you might not get your house cleaned at all. You could take a How Clean is Your House? quiz to detemine whether or not you really need to clean, I guess, but I know that I do. There is, in addition to YA clutter everywhere, a general doggy smell. Plus, I've been reading The Big Necessity: The Unmentionable World of Human Waste and Why It Matters,  a book which makes you want to clean. This book also claims that some 40% of the world's people have no sanitary facilities at all, not even outhouses. Shocking, if true.

My husband won a new vacuum, and I have a box of stuff that promises to refresh your carpets and rid them of pet odors, so I plan to put the two together. And scrub the toilets.

My husband also won an 8 day, 7 night trip to Las Vegas with his pool league. You can watch him play on TV, I expect, if you watch that kind of stuff. He's leaving in a couple of weeks. He has new luggage for the occasion. I guess that this is the national tournament for the pool association. They have large prizes, everyone gets to play twice before being eliminated, and they use handicaps to keep it fun. The guys are very excited.